Sophie's wedding dress hung in the bedroom closet. It was a white, enormous thing, voluminous under plastic, and he saw it every morning while he was getting dressed for work. He stared at it while he put on his tie. It hung still and heavy, a presence, a ghost.
Emily St. John Mandel's novel The Singer's Gun is not your ordinary mystery thriller. Yes, the crime family is here, but it's a literal family. Petty criminal parents with their "adopted" child Aria, who becomes a criminal mastermind, and the parents' own son Anton, who seeks an escape from crime, but finds this escape through a fraud of his own creation. Anton could have attended college but chose not to, yet desires the fruits of the labor of the college graduate. Anton's personal life reflects this tension between desire and dedication, between what he wants and what he is willing to sacrifice to achieve the goal.
Anton's engagement to Sophie, an accomplished cellist whose performance we only hear as she practices behind a closed door, survives a series of invitations and cancellations, until the wedding dress itself bears an atmosphere of oppression and gloom. The dress foreshadows what any reader might guess will happen should these two be married. The "white, enormous thing" hangs in the closet as a "ghost," shadowy, fragile, insubstantial remnant of what love may have once existed. It is, in other words, a future remembrance of the end.
Worse yet, the dress is "still" and kept "under plastic," images that together with the image of the ghost, recall death and even autopsy. This "voluminous" symbol of the couple's dead love, normally a reminder of the joy of union, instead recalls the body bag. Anton lives with the dead thing in his room but pretends that nothing has changed. Whether body bag, ghost, or dead thing itself, Anton simply stares and "put on his tie."
St. John Mandel, Emily. The Singer's Gun. Cave Creek, AZ: Unbridled Books, 2010.
