Discursive Fiction: Review of Samantha Garner’s The Quiet is Loud
Samantha Garner, The Quiet is Loud
Invisible Publishing, 2021. $23.95.
Order a copy from Invisible Publishing
I still remember the way metaphors were taught in high school English classes: as something standing in for something else, as neat messages waiting to be decoded once the elusive key of meaning had been found. Metaphor is what comes to mind when reading Samantha Garner’s debut novel, The Quiet is Loud. Except in this case, Garner shows readers the more complex and messier side of metaphors as a conversation starter.
The Quiet is Loud tells the story of Freya Tanangco, a Norwegian-Filipino woman who works as a tarot card reader online and has the ability to see into the future. The novel is structured into two parallel timelines that alternate between the third-person past spanning the years 1994 to 2010 and the first-person present of 2015. Over the course of the novel, Freya confronts and overcomes personal and familial hurdles, all the while sharing with the reader the different ways she connects with and finds comfort in her cultural background.
Garner’s debut is more of a character study of Freya over the course of her life than it is an action-driven narrative. As a result, the speculative elements in the story function primarily to reinforce character development in very precise ways, like when Freya shares her thoughts on tarot with Javi, a member of the support group Support Tools Empowering the Paradextrous (STEP) who can detect other paradextrous people (those who have supernatural abilities): “I don’t believe in mystic stuff generally, but sometimes the cards reveal something that’s just too perfect to be a coincidence” (77). Garner’s writing exudes life, not in the sense of relevance, but in the way it captures the shifting social fabric of social interaction and space, whether by mapping the geographies of British Columbia and Ontario, or by having Freya comment on the fact that Hollywood films like Breakfast at Tiffany’s contain racist caricatures of Asian people. The Quiet is Loud is highly aware of its surroundings within time and culture, demonstrating that one can be present and engaged with the story while also thinking critically.
The novel’s subtlety lies in Garner’s handling and parceling of information. Veker, a derogatory term used for referring to people with supernatural abilities (or “skills,” as Shaun, another member of STEP who can read people’s emotions if given consent to do so, calls them in the text) is not given a firm definition. Its meaning is relational, determined from the connotations and contexts that the word is imbued with when it is used in a biting and judgemental, sometimes even threatening, way by some of the novel’s characters. Similarly, Kuya, the scandalous book by Freya’s father, Brian Tanangco, is referred to over the course of the book yet very little information is divulged to the reader until about sixty pages from the end. At this point, Garner gives the reader a general outline of Kuya’s narrative, alleviating some of the built-up intrigue while allowing the reader to draw on the connections and inferences they made up until then to fill in the unspoken blanks and give them the weight of consequence.
This measured handling of small but instrumental details ensures that The Quiet is Loud’s bigger talking points—the role of activism and expectations placed upon certain writers—land and catch the reader’s attention. Shaun and Brian are the two characters who, respectively, act as the driving force for these two issues.
Shaun’s sense of personal responsibility to support the causes of advocacy groups fighting for the rights of people with skills such as himself takes on a pressuring nature when Cassandra, the founder of STEP, refuses to support a Dutch activist group. Shaun defines activism as a collective, and more importantly, a public and vocal activity. By itself, anger is a motivator, a driving force to action, as it is for Shaun, who tells Freya that anger “makes you act. You make change. Anger made me prouder of who I am and what I can do” (101). Garner shows the downside to an activism rooted solely in anger. It is when anger also becomes a way of measuring a person’s commitment to a cause and used as leverage over someone by accusing them of not supporting their own cause that activism is shown to be not only toxic but also dangerous, capable of inflicting its own damage.
Garner also approaches this issue of activism on a more individual level, through the relationship between complacency and personal safety. Freya demonstrates the connectivity between the two at several points during the novel, such as when a classmate accidentally reveals she has a skill: “It was relief, blooming and spreading. Relief that [Freya] had never reached out to Giulia, relief that she was gone, relief that her own secret was safe” (186). It may be easy to jump to judging Freya for thinking this, however episodes such as this one quickly spawn additional questions: what should have been done in this situation? Is it the responsibility of the person who is also a member of the marginalized group to step in and deflect the attack, which in this case might have taken the form of playing down Giulia’s declaration that she “never sweat” and hasn’t “had to wear deodorant since [she] was like thirteen” (184) as something that could be explained genetically rather than supernaturally? Is stepping in a choice or a responsibility? There is no easy answer to these questions. The scenarios that bring them to light look to the reader to engage in independent contemplation as they weigh the options.
Brian Tanangco’s commentary on literature introduces a meta-commentary to The Quiet is Loud that simultaneously serves as a thread to tie the novel’s various strands together, as well as further sharpens the book’s focus on cultural identity and family. This is especially pertinent when Brian is rewatching an old interview and is critical of it, telling Freya: “[The interviewer] brings up my background as if we’re all here to tell stories of heartbreak or something. As if we can’t just have regular lives. We always have to be talking about race” (88).
As with Shaun, it is possible to ask what kind of role literature should play in drawing awareness to social issues. More importantly, the chapter the above quote is situated in captures the outdated view of Canadian literature that is still often pedalled within bigger spaces, from university classrooms to national publications. Part of what makes it outdated is the treatment of the author and the expectations placed on the book, not unlike the way metaphor is taught in high school English classes. This does not excuse the fact that Freya’s father nonetheless used literature in a harmful way himself, outing his sister Judith’s life and details from private conversations until the discussion went from individual recognition to nation-wide judgement.
Yet what Garner is doing, through Brian and through The Quiet is Loud as a whole, is reminding the reader that there is no single, hidden meaning waiting to be uncovered, a meaning that will only be understood by certain people based on circumstance or identity. Receptivity and empathy are what make stories, what drive and shape interactions. By being attuned to the finer details without holding a preconceived expectation in mind, we can take in the full complexity that stories like The Quiet is Loud are waiting to share with us.
Margaryta Golovchenko (she/her) is a settler-immigrant, poet and critic from Tkaronto/Toronto, Treaty 13 and Williams Treaty Territory. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks and a regular reviewer for Anomaly, The Town Crier, and TERSE. An incoming Ph.D. student in the art history department at the University of Oregon, she can be found sharing her (mis)adventures on Twitter @Margaryta505.