ecause The Necessary Beggar is almost a very bad book which is almost a very good book, though in fact it is a very good book which never quite becomes a very bad book, it might be an idea to say something that might reassure readers of Susan Palwick's only other novel, Flying in Place (1992). They should perhaps know that although each book is told via a frame story which in each case signals a positive outcome to all the backstory travails each contains, and though each book centers on an extremely smart adolescent girl passing through maelstroms generated by the actions of others who is saved in the end by a ghost to whom she is related, and though rickety contrivances of Doing Good bring both tales to tearfully wholesome closures, The Necessary Beggar is not in fact a pale shadow of its predecessor. Its badnesses may subtly detract from memories of Flying in Place, because they are kind of the same badnesses; but its goodness is unprecedented.
At an extremely dodgy time for the great democracy that bestrides our beloved Americas, The Necessary Beggar is a very good book about becoming a citizen of the United States. But becoming American is going to be a long haul for Timbor, the main narrator of the tale, his two surviving sons and wives, and his four grandchildren, who have arrived at a refugee camp in the desert near Reno at a pretty bad time, for it is only 2009, hardly long enough for the country to have recovered from its response to the tragedy of 2001. Timbor's own first-person frame narrative (which is dated 13 years later) tells us that Nevada's beggars are now being put into camps, but also assures us that his family is no longer in exile, and that a marriage between his beloved evolué granddaughter Zamatryna and a football quarterback named Jerry with a sweet heart is in store. But the frame narrative also tells us immediately that the road to assimilation must have been unusually arduous, because Timbor and his family are not in fact human. They are exiles from another dimension, having been exiled from their native city of Lémabantunk in the land of Gandiffri because one of Timbor's sons (the third son, the son who kills himself soon after they all reach America through a dimensional gate) has killed a Mendicant.
Not every citizen of Lémabantunk becomes a Mendicant for a year, but those who do are central to the Gandiffrian ethos, for in this land it is blessed to give. In order to dramatize this ethos, Mendicants are not allowed to work, for they honour the Elements (air, fire, earth, water), they give themselves to the elements, and they are given in return. One final duty allotted to some Mendicants is to be asked by those about to be married to perform the Blessing of the Necessary Beggar, always in the same words:
"For what you have given me, your errors and those of all your kin are forgiven. For charity heals shortcoming, and kindness heals carelessness, and hearts heal hurt."
So why did Darroti (Timbo's son) kill a holy Mendicant? Why did he kill her before she even had a chance to become a Necessary Beggar?
A finer tale lurks within
The frame narrative of 2022 suggests to us (we are, after all, reading a novel) that these questions will be answered; and indeed, in due course, we are given the true story. Palwick's holding this revelation back is one of the almost very bad bits of The Necessary Beggar, because most of us will surely have guessed—long before the ghost of Timbor's sweet but feckless son tells us all in an exceedingly extended monologue—that he could not have cut her throat; that indeed young Darroti and high-born Mendicant-for-a-year Gallicina had been lovers for yonks; that her death was caused by a melodramatic misunderstanding; and that—because Gandiffrian families stick together and therefore share any punishment any one of them might incur—this plot device has driven nine innocents through a fantasy Dimension Gate into an unknown place of exile, which as I've already said turns out to be Reno.
It is somehow a bit control-freaky to withhold melodramatic revelations, especially those obvious ones that the author ought to get shot of real fast, and the almost very bad parts of Palwick's otherwise intensive tale are almost always tied to some over-deferred manipulation of Story. Timbor and his family exit a land where (overcomplicatedly) ghosts may exist in any live entity (hence the Gandiffrian habit of thanking food before they eat someone) but are incapable of communicating with those still alive, into a land where ghosts, though generally not believed in, can in fact communicate with us. But it takes them an unconscionable amount of time to realize this, and to understand that Darroti, who commits suicide soon after he arrives in America, has been investing their dreams with all sorts of extremely useful plot information; likewise with the otherwise really sharp Zamatryna, who for plot-release-mechanism reasons takes almost the entire novel to work out what the Gallicina-haunted beetle she has brought from home and retained for years is trying to tell her. So it takes all too long for the story to hoist itself out of the desert of exile into epithalamion country.
Stripped of its writing-workshop pulse-release prescription revelations, though, a finer tale does lurk within, and is told. And any reader willing to ignore a certain nudhzing neatness in the way the book always seems to know exactly what it means will soon be able to cast off any sense that Palwick is all-too-obviously armor-plating Zenna Henderson's People stories for the immedicable badlands of tomorrow, and to focus on her delicately and exactly knowing portrayal of Zamatryna, who grows up to understand that—despite the deep remoteness of her original home—she is like any other 21st-century immigrant in a troubled America, that as she tells her good-hearted Jerry: "I'm an American now. That's my job." This supremely difficult job is one that more and more of us face in these times; it is the task of undertaking any one of the great internal migrations of the 21st century that fall to our lot, it is the task of abandoning (despite slings and arrows) our exilic hyper-awareness of the desertedness of any world not ours from infancy, it is the task of making believe we have come home. "Lies are the province of the living," as the ghost Darroti realizes after his live father tells him that to do Being American is indistinguishable from being an American.
The most profound passages in The Necessary Beggar may occur whenever Palwick mentions clowns. The home that a kindly American woman (oppressed for a while by a fundamentalist husband, till our favorite ghost pretends he is Jesus and give him peace) lets Timbor et al. inhabit for a decade is festooned with clown toys, clown masks, clown icons, for her mother had loved clowns. For Timbor, and for Zamatryna, these clowns are emblematic; they represent the true nature of the presentation of the Recovering Self in everyday life; they are what it means to be authentic in America (which is us), as Timbor tells us:
And so at night I talked to the clown to keep the dreams at bay, although I always entered them at last. "Clown," I would say to him, but not aloud, "this is hard work, this being merry when all you want to do is weep. Clown, this feels like death ... I must put on my floppy shoes and my rubber nose, and cheer the children.
Cheer the children. Cheer the children.
