From 
enigmatic 
plot 
to 
disconcerting 
characters, 
normality is but a common thread 
in Katya Apekina’s debut novel, 
“The Deeper the Water the Uglier 
the Fish.” Coming from a mother 
who swallows her loved ones 
whole and a narcissistic father, two 
daughters are torn between the 
chaotic obsessions and depressions 
of their parents. After Edith and 
Mae’s mother, Marianne, attempts 
to hang herself they are taken 
under the wing of their father, 
Dennis — a former civil rights 
activist and glamorous author. The 
plot is a series of question marks 
and unsettling flashbacks that are 
gradually filled out by the tangle of 
narratives.
Turbulent 
and 
beautifully 
twisted, Apekina’s narrative ping-
pong 
game 
combines 
Edith’s 
present viewpoint with Mae’s 
retrospective 
future 
narration. 
Readers observe in discomfort 
the unraveling of each obsessively 
sinister relationship between parent 
and child. This charactorial tension 
is unsettling and glues your eyes to 
each passing word. Each character 
is layered with instabilities that 
compile and decompose. Alongside 
the instabilities of the other 
characters, they form a complex 
web of alluring destruction. The 
narrative is further peppered with 
psychiatric 
records, 
telephone 
conversations, letters and book 
reviews that provide backstage 
glances into the mental framework 

of each character.
Apekina 
employs 
a 
blend 
of 
perspective 
and 
shifting 
timeframes to propel the novel 
with stunning volatility. Edie’s 
chapters are dated with 1997, while 
much of the offhand excerpts are 

either dated from the ’60s or left 
completely undated. Many of the 
sideline excerpts are recited by 
witnesses like Dennis’s sister, Aunt 
Rose, his envious lover, Amanda, 
Edith’s new friend, Charlie, her 
recent boyfriend Markus and 
Cronus the cat. Each figure retells 
different pieces to this plot puzzle, 
and as the story unravels, so too 
does the mental stability of each 
character.
It’s almost easy to dismiss 
Marianne 
as 
a 
hallucinating, 
deranged 
women, 
but 
Edith’s 
determination 
to 
reclaim 
her 
mother’s name brings Marianne 
back into focus as a character of 
intrigue. At the same time there is 
ambiguity in the source of Edith’s 
hunger for her mother’s attention 
as she had always been the second-
place child in her mother’s eyes. 
Mae struggles to distance herself 
from 
Marianne’s 
possessive 
influence as she describes, “Yes, 
mom dragged me with her to every 
terrible place. I needed to get as 
far from her as I could. She was 

consuming me. That day she tried 
to hang herself from the rafter 
in the kitchen, I’d been lying on 
the bedroom floor. My mind was 
a radio tuned to her station and 
her misery paralyzed me.” Mae 
replaces her mother’s obsession 
with her own delusional infatuation 
with her father. Mae desires to fill 
his need for a damaged, unstable 
muse. As Marianne describes best 
Dennis “liked his birds with their 
wings broken.” Almost ironically, 
Mae slowly starts to embody her 
mother’s mannerisms and manic 
tendencies to become the not-so-
perfect muse for Dennis and is 
essentially consumed by insanity in 
the process.
Apekina 
asks 
an 
essential 
question: Whose voice gets to be 
heard? The famed father, a suicidal 
mother, two neglected daughters or 
the side characters who observe the 
chaos from a safe distance?
“The Deeper the Water the 
Uglier the Fish” exposes more 
than the inner workings of parent-
child relationships and the darker 
shades of mental illness, it digs into 
pressing themes of today’s political 
climate and the gendering of society. 
It provides a timely interpretation 
of the silencing and reinventing of 
voices through the power of men. 
Apekina perfectly plants seeds 
for respecting and believing the 
voices of women while leaving 
ambiguous gaps in the narrative for 
the reader’s interpretative delight. 
The story is left unresolved for a 
much-anticipated follow up novel, 
and it’s good timing: The world 
was far overdue for such a relevant, 
tantalizing and desirably addictive 
novel.

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GO BLUE

By Craig Stowe
©2018 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
10/19/18

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

10/19/18

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Friday, October 19, 2018

ACROSS
1 Trendy
8 No longer 
outstanding
14 Catch-22
15 “Am I the 
problem?”
16 Physician for 
Dickens’ Miss 
Havisham?
18 Morales of 
“Ozark”
19 Canada’s Buffy 
Sainte-Marie, by 
birth
20 Math functions
22 Fleur de __: sea 
salt
23 Clever remarks
24 Sedate
25 Station for 
exercisers on 
wheels?
29 Earth tone
32 Ancient 
colonnade
33 “Disgusting!”
34 Diamond figure
37 Play seriously
39 “... this night, 
being __ my 
head”: Shak.
40 Hideout
42 Soft touch
43 Expert guard 
dog?
47 Foil relative
48 Couple
49 Andean stew 
veggie
52 Rapper Ice 
Cube’s first name
54 Clothes to clean
55 Zipcar parent 
company
56 Cool cat’s 
affectionate 
friends?
59 Texas oil city
60 State
61 Waver
62 Computer input

DOWN
1 Stained glass 
settings
2 Slip
3 Type similar to 
Helvetica

4 Nail treatment
5 Has too much
6 One involved in 
a memorable 
“bubble”
7 Puts forth
8 Tease
9 Juan’s “that”
10 Selfies, e.g.
11 Ancient region 
ruled by Athens
12 Small portion 
explanation
13 Ones neglecting 
their duties
17 Score marks
21 Soul singer 
Robinson’s debut 
album
23 Material for 
Michelangelo’s 
“David”
25 Train bottom
26 Series-ending 
abbr.
27 Pal of Piglet
28 Stepped (up)
29 Words from a 
balcony
30 Unsportsmanlike 
conduct

31 Baseball, in old 
slang
35 Former Mideast 
gp.
36 Member of the 
fam
38 __ value
41 Control tower 
device
44 Mobile home?
45 Hurried
46 Islands VIP

49 Some Viking 
appliances
50 “Odyssey” 
sorceress
51 Plus
53 Kind of D.A.
54 Diminish slowly, 
with “off”
55 Líquido para café
57 “The Cocktail 
Party” monogram
58 Grasped

Classifieds

Call: #734-418-4115
Email: dailydisplay@gmail.com

On the extended voice

At the beginning of Oct., I saw 
an unusual concert at Canterbury 
House. The School of Music, 
Theatre & Dance student ensemble 
Front Porch performed short sets 
with four singer-songwriters after 
collaborating on arrangements of 
their music. The group’s unusual 
instrumentation of violin, bassoon, 
percussion and piano can produce 
a surprising variety of colors, 
and it was interesting to see the 
diversity 
of 
the 
songwriters’ 
styles reflected in the differences 
in arrangement. Music usually 
backed by a guitar or a piano was 
expanded into music with evolving 
textures, 
symphonic 
flourishes 
and new countermelodies and 
embellishments.
One of the choices that the 
singers had to make was whether 
to use a microphone or not — 
amplification is the exception in 
the idiom that Front Porch plays in, 
but a norm in a good deal of popular 
music. Evan Chambers, who is 
also a professor of composition at 
SMTD, chose to go without for his 
set and managed to project over 
the ensemble just fine. Another 
performer, Hannah McPhilimy, 
chose to use a microphone. The 
stylistic divide between their two 
sets was somewhat reflected in 
this decision. Professor Chambers, 
whose songs are rooted in the 
folk revival and Irish music, 
projected over the ensemble at 
their loudest and was expressive 
physically. He moved his entire 
body with the music and at times 
conducted 
himself 
with 
both 
hands. Amplification would have 
been inappropriate for the style, but 
mostly it was just unnecessary.
McPhilimy’s 
set 
was 
more 
intimate 
and 
personal 
than 
Chambers’s, and her choreography 
was similarly in miniature. The 
microphone on a stand imposes 
its 
own 
choreography, 
which 
is 
necessarily 
smaller 
than 
performers 
who 
go 
without. 
Her hands played a primary 
“acting” role, moving slowly, at 
times grasping the stand as if for 
support or holding onto a dancing 

partner. The acoustic effect of the 
amplification was to make quiet 
sounds louder — an audience 
member could hear her inhale and 
sing softly.
Microphones include everything 
by default. Audio engineers have 
to set up special filters to remove 
plosives 
and 
sibilance 
from 
recording — little P and S sounds, 
respectively, that are magnified by 
the closeness of the microphone 
— and even with these filters, a 
microphone close on whatever it is 
recording will miss very little. This 
radical inclusiveness means that 
amplified performance and close-
miked recording includes a lot of 
details, of the kind only otherwise 
heard when the singer is very 
close. Tony Bennett said of Frank 
Sinatra that he “perfected the art 
of intimacy.” Sinatra’s recordings 
have a certain subtlety and detail — 
you can hear him ease in and trail 
off his phrases, even as a big band 
with trombones and saxophones 
plays behind him. His voice isn’t 
on stage. You, the listener, are not 
in the audience; he is across the 
table from you or walking up to you 
at a bar. Billie Holiday’s live shows 
from the ’40s and ’50s are similar 
— she rarely sings loudly, but can be 
clearly heard over the band.
Compare this style with St. 
Vincent’s 2007 “What Me Worry,” 
a pastiche of the midcentury 
crooning style (specifically echoing 
Holiday’s distinctive vocal timbre). 
Her voice is completely dry, and 
the sibilance is louder, sharper. The 
space between her voice and the 
listener has been collapsed from 
that of the crooners to a painfully 
small scale. The voice is in a totally 
different sonic world than the 
band, which is perhaps playing 
on TV in the background. This 
song is unusual in so specifically 
harkening back to the Crooners, 
and the microscopic vocal detail 
it offers the listener feels very out 
of place. Throughout the second 
half of the 20th century, with the 
radical improvement in recording 
capabilities, artists have used 
the 
microphone’s 
maximizing 
capabilities to extend the depth of 
their closeness to a surreal degree. 
The music of of FKA Twigs often 
contains vocal sounds that are 

somewhere between whispering 
and hissing. The singer-songwriter 
Liz Harris, professionally known 
as Grouper, makes music that 
almost puts the listener inside her 
voice. “Way They Crept,” from the 
2005 album of the same time, turns 
her voice into an enveloping drone.
Extending 
voices 
with 
amplification works both ways 
— both intimacy and a kind of 
outsized violence are possible. The 
use of microphones in performance 
and recording allows for the 
transformation from small sounds 
to loud, aggressive ones. So-called 
“mumble rap” employs a technique 
something like this. The clipping 
vocals of Lil Pump, literally created 
by pushing a digital system past its 
limits and recording the results, 
make the transformation of human 
to machine almost uncomfortably 
visceral. On “D Rose,” it doesn’t 
sound like he’s delivering his lines 
particularly loudly, but it’s intended 
to be played loudly — mumbling, 
paradoxically, over loud parties 
or festival audiences. His voice 
resembles the cartoonishly large 
jacket he wears in a recent music 
video with Kanye West, in that 
his actual body is dwarfed by its 
representation. This drastic degree 
of separation is only convincing in 
the electronic landscape that Lil 
Pump and his listeners live in. The 
recordings of the Crooners (and 
even, to an extent, St. Vincent’s 
pastiche of them) are, at least, 
simulations of live performance. 
The voices of mumble rappers 
are placed in juxtaposition with 
synthesizers, and audiences barely 
blink when, for example, Lil Uzi 
Vert’s voice is autotuned so far that 
the result is more mechanical than 
human.
But really, to emphasize the 
outsize 
artificiality 
of 
certain 
genres more than others is to 
distract from the fact that all 
recording is artificial. In a way, 
music that doesn’t use elaborate 
measures to obscure the means 
of its production is more honest 
about the nature of recorded music. 
The most captivating part of Lil 
Pump’s self-titled album is how 
much digital noise covers it. The 
computer it was made on enters the 
frame in a way it wouldn’t have if the 

EMILY YANG
For the Daily

MUSIC NOTEBOOK

“The Deeper 
the Water the 
Uglier the Fish”

Katya Apekina

Two Dollar Radio

recording was left clean. In another 
direction, a lot of indie music has 
embraced a “lo-fi” aesthetic, which 
leaves in artifacts like fret sliding 
noises, sharp inhales and even 
sometimes the sound of moving 
objects around in the background. 
“Renee” by the Florida duo SALES 
has an almost messy guitar part, 
and there’s a thick layer of tape 
noise over the track that sounds 
like crickets from an open window. 

One of my favorite songs, “Blue 
Mountain Road,” from Florist’s 
second album, layers barely audible 
backing vocals with an unaltered 
guitar part. The vocalist, Emily 
Sprague, sings at a volume that 
would be appropriate if she were 
trying not to be heard downstairs 
first thing in the morning, and her 
voice is hard-panned, giving the 
impression of singing directly into 
her listeners’ ears. Listening to this 

music is a reminder of the event 
of its making. It tells the listener 
that the music was made at a 
specific time, with specific people. 
Listening to lo-fi music is often 
both a musical experience and a 
sort of bridge through time. Maybe 
that’s what all recording is.

BOOKS THAT BUILT US

KEVIN HENKES

This is part of a 2-part series 
Read more at MichiganDaily.
com

‘Purple Plastic Purse’

I must have read “Lilly’s Purple 
Plastic Purse” upwards of 50 times 
as a kid. I loved it. I still do.
I think I gravitated to the book 
because I myself was a little like 
Lilly. I too was a precocious, strong-
willed, teacher’s pet with a burning 
love for red cowboy boots. I was 
so taken by the spunky character 
and her eponymous story that I 
managed to get my little hands on 
a purple plastic purse of my very 
own. Like Lilly, I adored that purse 
tremendously.
For those of you who have 
never read the picture book, or 
have forgotten its contents, the 
story is, at its heart, a simple 
redemption tale. We learn early 
on that Lilly is completely smitten 
with her teacher, Mr. Slinger. She 
loved that he wore his glasses on 
a chain around his neck, greeted 
his students by saying “howdy” 
and baked them curly, crunchy, 
cheesy snacks for before recess. 
She’s so taken by him that she 
proclaims that she too wants to be 
a teacher, and even pretends to be 
him at home, while giving her baby 
brother Julien a “lesson.”
However, things go awry when 

Lilly comes to school one Monday 
with the spoils of a shopping trip 
with grandma. She brings in 
her new “movie star sunglasses 
complete with glittery diamonds, 
and a chain like Mr. Slinger,” as 
well as “three shiny quarters” and, 
best of all, a “purple plastic purse 
that played a jaunty tune when 
opened.”
Like most little kids with a new 
toy, she just can’t wait to show it 
off. Only, Mr. Slinger has kindly 
asked her on multiple occasions 
to hold off and wait till recess or 
sharing time. But Lily just can’t 
help it, and in an outburst invites 
all her classmates to take a look. An 
unamused Mr. Slinger confiscates 
the purse.
Feeling hurt and betrayed, Lilly 
scrawls a hateful drawing of her 
teacher where she haughtily writes 
“P.S. I do not want to be a teacher 
when I grow up.” She tucks this 
note into his bag.
On her walk home from school, 
she discovers special snacks and 
a kind note from Mr. Slinger in 
her newly returned purse. She, of 
course, feels awful and banishes 
herself to the time-out chair when 
she gets home.
The very next morning she 
arrives extra early with an apology, 
baked-goods, a kind drawing and 
story of Mr. Slinger. Naturally, he 

forgives her and they proceed to 
have an amazing day. All is well.
My rehashing of the book does 
little to convey its magic. A lot of 
what makes “Lily’s Plastic Purse”— 
and all of Kevin Henkes books for 
that matter — so special lives in 
the illustrations. They’re skilled, 
playful and spirited. They add 
immense heart to the story.
But ultimately, the reason this 
book has stayed with me has little 
to do with its overall endearing 
message of forgiveness, but rather 
the specific content of Mr. Slinger’s 
note to Lily.
In it he writes: “Today was a 
difficult day. Tomorrow will be 
better.”
As far as writing goes, the 
phrase is hardly groundbreaking. 
And yet the phrase reverberates 
through my head when I’m feeling 
down on my luck.
I keep these words tucked in 
my pocket. Over the years they’ve 
become a personal mantra. When 
all has gone wrong and I catch 
myself crying at the end of a bad 
day I’ll whisper to myself Mr. 
Slingers’s words: “Today was a 
difficult day. Tomorrow will be 
better.” Invariably, those nine 
simple words provide me some 
relief. Even the toughest days come 
to an end, and tomorrow provides 
the opportunity of a fresh start.

TESS TOBIN
Daily Arts Writer

‘Fish’ is beautiful debut

TESSA ROSE
Daily Arts Writer

BOOK REVIEW

5A — Friday, October 19, 2018
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com