Running After the Cult of Beauty

Tara Isabella Burton’s novel of complicated sisterhood, escape, and the seductive power of art.

(Shutterstock)

Here in Avalon
by Tara Isabella Burton
Simon & Schuster, 320 pp., $28.99

THERE ARE FEW INTERPERSONAL DYNAMICS as potentially close, intense, and thorny as the one between two sisters. The dyad crops up frequently in art—sometimes in the service of horror (The Twa Sisters), sometimes of nihilism (Melancholia), sometimes of happy endings (Snow White and Rose Red). Sometimes the duo forms the two poles of a dream-parable, as in Christina Rosetti’s Goblin Market.

Tara Isabella Burton’s Here in Avalon—in the author’s words, a “love letter to cults”—is the latest entry in this tradition. The novel centers on two sisters, the daughters of an irresponsible bohemian mother, with each presenting a distorting mirror to the other’s fears and failures. Cecilia, the elder, is what is commonly called “a hot mess,” albeit of a special type. Here is how Burton introduces her:

She rarely washed her face; she never brushed her hair, which had once been pink, and which had once been orange, and which was now a brittle shade of blond. Her tights were usually ripped; her shirts smelled like sweat and cigarettes. She wore heels, invariably, even though she couldn’t walk in them, which meant that when Cecilia showed up anywhere, an hour late or else without notice altogether, you’d hear her tramping down the street before you saw her. Cecilia always sounded—Rose said—like a revolution.

God knows, if you met Cecilia, you wouldn’t think her an adult at all.

Ever since she gave up her place at Julliard to join a prospective lover at his rehab center for injured falcons (the two met on a forum for people who believe they were born in the wrong century, naturally), Cecilia has rarely stayed with one place, one lover, or one variety of spiritual awakening long enough to gather moss.

Rose, on the other hand, has responded to the instability of her upbringing (and, perhaps, that of her older sister) by becoming a model of the successful transition into upper-middle-class adulthood: She is paid well to write code for an app. (Several years after graduating near the top of her class with a double major in math and computer science, she should probably have a more advanced job than code monkey; this could be read either as a failure of verisimilitude or as a sign of Rose’s relatively low expectations for herself.) Her fiancé, Caleb, is the founder of a startup called OptiMyze—the incredibly stupid startup names are one of the book’s delights—whose mission is to help people achieve their goals via gamified nudges.

Cecilia is annoying. She’s annoying not because she’s flighty and irresponsible and unwashed, but because she is a seeker; which, depending on your reckoning, is either a rare soul who cannot be satisfied by anything less than unmediated encounter with ultimate beauty and truth, or someone who habitually spiritualizes their emotional problems and goes through life fruitlessly and destructively searching for a father in the form of a sustained passionate certainty we simply are not guaranteed in this life. As written by Burton, Cecilia is a bit of both. Every time she opens her presumably enormous eyes and does her too-achingly-sincere-for-small-talk routine, I sympathize with Rose a little more.

On the other hand, Burton makes real not only Rose’s frustration and bitterness towards her sister, but her admiration, her envy, her protectiveness, and her love. Seen through Rose’s eyes, Cecilia is lovable. The strains of that love come out in arguments with her fiancé, who exhorts her to take a harder line against her sister’s irresponsibility, the idea being “if fewer people enabled people like Cecilia, there would be fewer people like Cecilia in the world.” Rose’s practiced reply is that “there was nobody quite like Cecilia in the world.”

And for all of Rose’s reactive stability in the face of Cecilia’s lurching, the two are less different than they perhaps would like to think. There is something touching about their shared, profound insecurity in their sense of their own lives. Rose self-soothes by checking herself against an abstract idea of what a socially appropriate life looks like.

All she knew was that the feeling of serenity that came over her, when she looked at her well-ordered desk, or a well-crafted line of code, was part of the feeling of building a life: something clean and complete and self-contained. It was, Rose felt, what serious people did. . . .

Cecilia’s free-spiritedness does not make her less beholden to external validation; it just changes the type of feedback she needs. She wants a life that feels like art. Describing her new marriage, she writes to Rose that “Right away they knew it was the kind of love people write eight-part poems about.” She cannot value her life, see it as real or meaningful in its own internal workings, unless she can discern in it a shape worthy to be presented to a hypothetical audience.

At the novel’s opening, Cecilia has once again returned to the charmingly decrepit rent-controlled Upper West Side apartment they grew up in and informally inherited from their mother. This time, though, she is fleeing something more momentous than a burned-out love affair: a brief, disastrous failed marriage to a nebbish Englishman of unforeseen depths named Paul.

It is Paul who teams up with Rose to find Cecilia when she disappears. The older sister disappears because, after a determined (and, for a time, meticulously fulfilled) resolution to clean up her act, Cecilia begins behaving erratically again. She stays out all night and returns smeared with glitter. She fails to show up for the Thanksgiving dinner she has offered to host, and which Rose has compelled her friends to attend in spite of their skeptical objections. When confronted about the embarrassing fracas that resulted, Cecilia reluctantly says that she’s met some people. They’re not like any other people in the world. They’re special. Before she can really explain, Rose has, understandably, had enough. She kicks her out. (Of course, Rose’s name is the only one on the lease.)

This is the distilled problem at the heart of the sisters’ dynamic. Cecilia is being a selfish asshole and could probably use nothing so much as a good hard slap. But Rose’s long-suffering normalcy is ugly and twisted in its own way. By never asking Cecilia to pull some of her weight, never putting her on the lease (a circumstantial outcome of refusing to ask for her help when their mother became ill), Rose has maintained a position of power over Cecilia. She has cut her out and cut her off from the opportunity to make real choices within the matrix of normal constraints: the needs and desires of others; the pressure to keep up with the rent on the family apartment. Small wonder that Cecilia has lived her adult life desperately flailing for a choice that felt real.

When Cecilia does, in fact, vanish—leaving all her possessions, phone, and money at the apartment—Rose is stricken by grief and remorse. She and Paul set out to find her, their only clue a few wisps of paper Cecilia tried to burn, and the name of the group she’s taken up with: The Avalon.

---

THE AVALON’S ALLURE AND MENACE is most vivid in the first section of the book, where the two sisters’ drama plays out against the background of a mystery: a red boat that only comes at night, women in red silk who appear in bars to comfort you exactly when you need them, and rumors, relayed unheeded by Tompkins Square Park vagrants: “THEY’RE TAKING PEOPLE ALL OVER THIS CITY,” a goth girl shouts into a megaphone.

The girl started in surprise when Cecilia approached. Evidently Cecilia was the only person who had stopped for her that day.

“Nobody believes me,” the girl said. “But you have to understand—they’re still out there.”

Cecilia’s smile was kind. “Who’s out there?”

“The fairies. They—” She caught her breath. “They—”

“Jesus Christ.” Caleb rolled his eyes.

When, later, Rose finally penetrates the Avalon (at the cost of her job and engagement), they turn out to be something else: a traveling cabaret troupe who have forsaken their former lives for a kind of burlesque monasticism under the benevolent tyranny of a woman known only as “Morgan.” Their mission is to provide the city’s lost, lonely, and grieving with at least one night of intoxicating, enchanting loveliness—and to provide a few chosen souls with a protected retreat from the world entirely.

Here in Avalon is not the first attempt to use the enchantments of the hollow hills as a metaphor for the power of art. How compelling you find the metaphor will probably determine whether the conceit of the Avalon works for you. Morgan is supposed to write songs that cannot be forgotten but cannot be recaptured, and which heroin users prefer to actual heroin: “Then I started using, again,” the Tompkins Square Park goth girl tells Rose, “because it was the next best thing, you know, to that music.”

Your buy-in will likely also depend on how attractive it sounds to you to become a beneficiary of the Avalon’s favor. If I boarded a midnight boat and some blonde in a flapper dress ran up to me and cried something like Darling! We’ve been waiting for you! I would probably start looking around for a big, sharp stick. But these things surely vary widely.

Burton is aware of the fragility of these types of exchanges, and of the necessity of buy-in to them, for both the characters and the reader; the mutual need behind the Avalon and the way it is reflected in the experience of the book is one of the novel’s finer touches.

“‘You’ve given us your attention,” Morgan said. ‘A few hours of a finite life. Whatever we give you, here—is simply our attempt to repay your generosity to us.” (Observed in the free indirect narration: “You could almost believe she meant it.”) Later, when Rose has joined the Avalon, another character echoes the sentiment.

“But of course,” Cassidy said, when Rose remarked on the Avalon’s renewed enthusiasm. “That’s always the way. Or haven’t you figured it out by now?”

“Figured what out?”

“We need them,” he said. “As much as they need us.”

If you do not have the requisite buy-in, or are not willing to assume the necessary openness, the Avalon remains charming: quixotic, generous, secret, pure of heart. (Perhaps a little dangerous in the way intense, idealistic, self-selecting intentional communities tend to be dangerous.) They make the night skyline a bit brighter, the ecosystem of New York a bit more lush. But do they provide the basis for another kind of life?

“Another life is possible,” is one of the Avalon’s mottoes. If Cecilia is a bride without a head, Rose, it becomes clear, is a wolf chewing off her own foot—seeking the Avalon for its own sake, seeking a reason to blow up her tidy, empty life, as well as looking for her sister. And fair enough—Rose’s New York is awful. It’s all clean, curved Apple Store surfaces: barre classes and app launches and fusion cocktail bars and green juices and influencers and podcasts. But much of that awfulness is ordinary rather than existential. Caleb, Rose’s fiance, is a condescending prig. He treats Cecilia’s (frankly, pretty minor) messiness as if she were a cat fouling his butter-white sofa—God forbid he ever find himself responsible for someone with real problems. Some ailments can be caught from the ambient miasma of contemporary alienation; but surely there are people within this life, within this world, even people with boring office jobs and no extraordinary artistic faculty, who manage to live in a better way than this.

The novel sides, in the end, with the bond between the sisters, against the Avalon’s aesthetic cloister—with Rose and Cecilia faced with the task of working it out, one way or another, in the ordinary, alienated world. Against this task, the absence of anyone they can look to with respect or seek guidance from, anyone who might embody the possibility of a good life in New York, is even more striking. But perhaps that precise lack is what makes you vulnerable to the Avalon’s seductions in the first place—and open to its beauties.