Spoilers!
As some people grow up, it’s a becoming — discovering who they are as people — and for others, maturation is more of an unbecoming. They never quite pinpoint who they are, and thus, flit from moment to moment, identity to identity. Rebecca Scherm’s 2015 book, Unbecoming, is a bleak coming-of-age story, where the main characters unravel once the age has come. Paternal protectiveness, if one’s lucky to have protective parents, only extends so far, and like Wile E. Coyote, once the road has run out and the child, now-adult is left dangling over the edge, they sink to a bottom that seemed inconceivable moments before. And yet, for some, even that bottom is not enough of a bottom to bottom them out.
Grace, with the alias of Julie in Paris, originally from the claustrophobically small town of Garland, Tennessee, spends her days fixing broken things. She meticulously and patiently restores antiques to their former glory. The irony is thick: she does this while she, herself, cannot seem to be fixed and returned to the nostalgic glory days before the age of adulthood gave her whiplash. In addition to knowing she’s using an alias, all we learn in the beginning is that Grace and three men, Riley, Alls, and Greg, seemingly robbed a historic house in Garland. Greg flipped on the other two, who served three years in prison for the crime before being paroled. The question then is, what was Grace’s involvement, and how did she end up in Paris? Grace carries a lot of guilt with her, so it seems, and also frustration at her lot in life. After all, as I believe her colleague, Hanna, who also comes from a complicated past as a former prisoner, notes, “the rich and famous can put prison on their resumes.” Grace’s resume, inasmuch as it exists, is an entire fabrication built upon exaggerations.
Early on, it’s also established that Grace was left adrift and alone by her parents, who went through a topsy-turvy marriage before rekindling their romance and having twins they doted on far more than they ever did Grace. Grace drifted then to the Grahams, a well-to-do family, and their son, Riley. Despite Mrs. Graham taking Grace in as the daughter-she-never-had, Grace and Riley were an item. Becoming an “item” with Riley meant becoming friends with his friends, Alls and Greg. Unlike Riley and Greg, Alls was more akin to Grace, coming from a broken home with disappointing parents (his father is an alcoholic and his mother left them). Alls, like Grace then, is sort of glomming onto the Grahams, and both wish they were Riley — which also means they are willing to do anything to ensure Riley’s happiness. That won’t save them from doing the one thing that would destroy him, however.
Despite having the promise of his painting prowess and his family’s name and money, Riley is rather content painting rather boring buildings around Garland, much to Grace’s chagrin. This is where that Garland, and really, Riley, claustrophobia comes in for Grace. He and the town are all Grace has known, and she seems rather done with it once she realizes a world exists beyond them, mainly, the allure of Alls and antiques. While she ostensibly loves Riley, and they even surreptitiously marry when she’s 18, Grace lusts after Alls, and in perhaps equal measure, lusts for a life of daring and adventure that isn’t so … Garland-y. That sense of, or yearning for, daring and adventure is the toxin (or freedom, depending on your vantage point!) that bubbles within Grace’s subconscious. It starts as a little bit of stealing here and there, including stealing from Mrs. Graham, who actually calls her on it, until it grows, inevitability, to stealing from the historic house. What’s fascinating about Scherm’s book is we know that the big crime is going to happen, but how does she get these characters who seem to have life figured out there? That’s the “unbecoming.” To steal, to ruin their lives, they need to unbecome who they thought they were and were going to be.
As lame as I found Riley — not just for his lack of ambition, but also, he didn’t seem like a good fit for Grace in terms of truly understanding her! — there’s also something to be said for Grace trying to “fix” him or his viewpoint on art. That’s a fool’s errand. If you’re in a relationship already hoping to mold the person into your vision of them, that relationship is doomed. So it is with Grace. Coupled with the fact of her inexplicable lust for Alls (well, perhaps she wants to steal yet another thing she’s not supposed to have!), Grace decides to “flee” to college in New York to distance herself from her lust. That’s where Riley particularly became so clearly unfit for Grace because I think he resented how (in his eyes) hoity-toity she was becoming as she learned more about antiques and art.
One night, when Alls is in New York for a fencing tournament, he hangs out with Grace, who is wary at first lest she give in to her lust. Even so, they hang out, and her desire is an electric undercurrent between them. After they split from Grace’s college roommates, they have sex back at the dorm. It happened. They both essentially agree to “mutually assured destruction” that they will never tell Riley. That is the seed from which sprouts the branches of their undoing. Grace quits college and returns to Garland. Alls can’t keep up his expenses, either. Both are working menial jobs back in Garland. Greg is cut off from his rich parents. And Riley makes a dumb investment in a new car, losing the monies he did make from his paintings. As they all unravel, that’s when Grace starts gaslighting Riley into stealing from the historic house. She pushes it enough to where he probably thinks of it as his idea at the end — and his way to “win” Grace back, as he clearly detects a undefinable rift between them when she returns from NYC. Their relationship is not healthy, though. It’s one of codependency manifest from their youth. In a bit of reflection before the affair with Alls, Grace realizes she’s been camouflaged by Riley, “greedy for the disguise.” But then sometimes, massaging his ego and maintaining their relationship felt like the “scaffolding” holding it all up. “She’d been the creeping ivy that needed a brick wall to grow along at first, but now the brick would crumble without it.” Oof. Again, though, that was the danger (or again, freedom!) of learning about the wider world: Grace didn’t need the brick anymore.
Back in Paris, we learn more about what happened between the break-in and the present Paris events with Grace. She was destitute, really, bouncing around, including being raped once. At her antiques restoration job, her boss is taking out real, pricey jewels from watches and necklaces and having Grace replace them with fake imitations. Grace thought she’d left behind her stealing, subterfuge ways, and yet, here she was complicit in such things again. All the while, she is paranoid about Riley and Alls being released from prison, certain they will seek her out for … revenge? Perhaps.
Somehow, through Grace’s insistence, Riley, Alls, and Greg convince themselves stealing from the historic house is not only acceptable — nobody cares about all antiquities inside, and to steal them is hurting nobody! — but also their lottery ticket out of their bad luck as of late. I think the clarifying moment comes for Grace when she realizes that, even if he had a million dollars, Riley would invest it into an ice cream shop in Garland. Riley in that way becomes a dead end, a nonstarter. The subterfuge on top of the subterfuge is that Grace and Alls start conspiring to leave Riley and Garland behind for Europe. But Grace is so broken, so blinded by all of her lies and rationalizing, that she perpetrates subterfuge against Alls, too, taking the original painting from the historic house that Alls originally stole. Then, she absconds to Prague on the guise of an education program (that Riley paid for!). Everything falls apart thereafter with Riley, Alls, and Greg. Grace tries to sell the painting to Germans in Berlin, but one of the henchman comes back for her and the money and nearly scalps her. Despite it all, despite everything that’s happened, Grace has still not bottomed out, has still not tried to forestall her unbecoming.
When Alls bails on parole, through luck and circumstance, he finds Grace in Paris, and more or less forces her to help him steal from her boss. The boss, who is a thief herself, obviously isn’t going to report it to her boss. Shakily at first, they rekindle their lust, which ultimately reshapes into love — a love largely built around the danger and thrill they get from stealing. So much so, that after the ultimate theft from the boss (breaking into her safe), Grace sets it up so Hanna will be blamed for it. That said, there was a rather romantic, I suppose, explanation from Alls. He explains to Grace that he’s been in love with her since they first met and spent years trying to understand her. He says it was difficult trying to get to know someone “who refuses to be known.” When she came back from New York, he stupidly thought she came back for him, but he was wrong. She did her deflecting. He explains it this way: “When I don’t want to be looked at, I look down, close up, and shut up. Not you. I watched you do it for years — the second anybody crept too close, your motion sensor would trip, and you’d laugh, you’d smile, you’d nice up so fast and so bright that you’d bleach out every shadow, every detail. You’d have everyone in the room staring at you and they couldn’t see a goddamn thing. You came back and blinded me. And I fell for it again and again, just standing there blinking in the dark, because I couldn’t stop staring, trying to see.” Nobody knows the real Grace. Not Riley, who knew her the longest. Not Alls. And most central to her unbecoming, not Grace either.
The book ends with Riley starting that ice cream shop back in Garland (oof), and Grace and Alls gallivanting around Europe stealing from unsuspecting “marks.” That’s what I think sets Scherm’s book apart from others in the genre. There was no climactic showdown with Riley. There was no dramatic comeuppance for Grace’s malfeasance. While yes, she wasn’t initially living high on the hog in Europe, she got away with what she did. She got away with being who she was. And instead of trying to rectify it all, or make amends, she delves even deeper into that world and lifestyle with Alls. In that way, you could say she “came of age” once she fully unbecame.
Dialogue is so difficult to write, and as a reader, you know the difference between good dialogue and bad dialogue (and good dialogue and great dialogue) by the way it reads on the page and resonates with you. There actually aren’t a lot of moments of dialogue in Scherm’s book, as it’s more introspective and cerebral on Grace’s part, but when there is dialogue, it’s damn good and some of my favorite parts of the book. But it does really come back to the cerebral, too, how we shape the contours of our identities, our relationships, and importantly, how we rationalize to ourselves the nature of both relative to expectation. Scherm’s book is a must-read; it’s one of those books that snuck up and wowed me.
Milam's Musings 