Colleen is watching the old safety and training videos her aunt Madeleine had made years before. In one, a man puts his head into an alligator’s mouth. The alligator snaps down on his head, twitching him back and forth as though he were spineless. Colleen assumes the man died. But no, her aunt tells her; he lived.
This first chapter sets the tone of Alligator perfectly; everyone in this novel has his or her own alligator. Colleen is trapped by rage, her mother by grief. In fact, all the characters in this Newfoundland town are yearning for something, for more, and they are all trapped by one thing or another. Moore conveys such rawness; she makes us, too, want more for her characters.
That was where she became who she was, Madeleine thinks, in that solitude. Everyone becomes who they are in a stark landscape of undiluted solitude and bad weather. It’s possible to go through life without becomin who you are, but it is better, in the long run, to come across yourself in an insanely ordered forest where nothing has been left to chance. She wishes every twenty-one-year-old girl a Black Forest of her own.
Or this:
At the Salvation Army that day in January he had filtered through a carboard box of junk for a lid to the sugar bown, he knew it should have a lid, and was surprised by how much he wanted a lid. He did not want to be someone without the lids to things. He wanted whole sets of whatever he had, or nothing at all.
He wanted, when he went to the pain store, to get the trim they suggested went with the burnt sand colour he had chosen. he wanted, when he looked into the eyes of the idiot they had workin there, who said he coudln’t mix that colour but he could mix one pretty damn close, to grab him by the front of the shirt and shout in his face that he didn’t want close.
This is the best book I’ve read in a long, long time.