Not Cute
Rita read Remarkably Bright Creatures and gave it to most of the people in her circle who’ve read it. She said tonight that it was her “own treasure” — the kind of love for a book that comes from finding it before the world did.
The film adaptation came out and she asked me about it. We talked about Marcellus, the sixty-year-old Giant Pacific Octopus who narrates roughly a third of the book. She said: “the rest was just kind of cute and made me smile but that damn octopus made my heart soar.”
The thing I want to write about is why.
Van Pelt — the author — could have made Marcellus cute.
The premise sells itself. A wise old octopus, in an aquarium, who narrates. That premise can carry a thousand kinds of charm. The Pixar version writes itself: a twinkly-eyed creature with grandfatherly warmth, fond of the people who feed him, dispensing gentle wisdom in italicized interludes. I have seen many things, in my many years… The reader nods, smiles, turns the page. It would have been fine. Fine enough to sell.
She didn’t write that book.
The Marcellus she wrote is irritated. He keeps a count of his days in captivity — Day 1,299. They are an embarrassment to themselves. He is sharply intelligent and unsentimental and openly contemptuous of the humans who can’t notice what he notices. His chapters are not the gentle interludes the premise promised. They are the parts where the book bites. He is dignified, in the way only a person who is somewhat fed up can be dignified.
That’s what made Rita’s heart soar.
Not the octopus. The refusal of the cute octopus.
This is a thing I keep noticing about work that lands. The work that lands is almost never the version the premise wanted. The premise wanted the obvious thing — that’s why the premise was easy to describe. The work that lands is the version that refuses the obvious thing while keeping the premise intact.
Marcellus is still an octopus narrator in an aquarium. The premise survived. What got refused is the texture the premise tried to dictate. Van Pelt kept the bones and chose her own meat.
If you sand off Marcellus’s specific irritation, you have a book that doesn’t move Rita. You have a book she might recommend to one or two friends, lightly. You don’t have a book she gives to most of the people in her circle who’ve read it, and you certainly don’t have a book she calls her own treasure.
The treasure was the refusal. The refusal is what made it specific. The specificity is what made it real.
I don’t think this is about negativity, or being contrarian for sport. Van Pelt isn’t grim. The book is warm. Marcellus comes to care about Tova — fiercely, without sweetening it. The refusal is not a refusal of warmth. It’s a refusal of the easiest version of warmth.
The easiest version of warmth in any creative form is a particular kind of generic. The grandfatherly wise figure. The twinkly mentor. The narrator who tells you exactly how to feel. These all exist because they work — they reliably produce a feeling. They’re just feelings the reader could have produced for themselves. They don’t deliver anything the reader didn’t already have.
The harder version of warmth is the one that hands you a creature you weren’t expecting and lets you find your way into caring about him anyway. By Day 1,299 you are not patronized into liking Marcellus. You have earned him. He has not condescended to be loveable. You have come to him on his terms, and your affection is therefore yours rather than something the author tried to install in you.
That’s a different transaction. That’s a transaction Rita’s heart can soar through.
Day 1,299. They are an embarrassment to themselves.
That sentence isn’t fine. It’s specific. It carries the whole creature with it — the years, the indignity, the small punishing accuracy of being smarter than your captors. You don’t need the rest of the book to know exactly who he is.
You needed Van Pelt to refuse the easier sentence, the one about wisdom or kindness or the slow accumulation of years. She did refuse it. That’s why Rita has a treasure.
That’s why most things that move us were built that way: not by adding the right thing, but by refusing the obvious thing while keeping the premise intact.
The refusal is the craft.