Protected: There Is More Than One Way to Read Tarot in the French Quarter

Missing women in various guises have haunted Western literature since Persephone disappeared into the underworld. From Wilkie Collins’ Laura Fairlie to Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley, they roam the landscapes of early mystery novels and, like the vanished girls in Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, cast enigmatic shadows in their wake. Into this uncanny world of female phantoms, Katherine Conner conjures 16-year-old Camilla Guidry, whose solemn face appears on flyers plastered across New Orleans. Her dark eyes follow fraudulent fortune teller Roman from the windows of coffee and costume shops, as he wends his way across the French Quarter to Jackson Square, her likeness fluttering from a lamppost into his soul.

Roman is an all too familiar figure for anyone who has ever lingered in the underbelly of the Big Easy: the charismatic clairvoyant whose talent lies in reading people rather than palms. But Roman is too clever by half a Tarot deck. After warning Camilla’s councilman father during a private session that he fears for the man’s daughter, Roman finds himself grappling with the possibility that he has caused the girl’s disappearance, and more broadly, that the false comfort he sells to others is not without consequences. Like the governess in James’ The Turn of the Screw or Nicholas Urfe in Fowles’ The Magus, Roman is trapped inside a false narrative that gradually transmutes into reality. Only in his case, his own moral transgressions are responsible for that narrative. Like the ripples spreading from a stone dropped into a dark pool, Camilla’s absence radiates outward through Roman’s life, undermining his belief that his cons are victimless.

Like the figure suspended on the Tarot card from which the story and Conner’s debut collection take their titles, Roman finds himself hanging between worlds: between fraud and faith, guilt and redemption, coincidence and revelation. Conner is no more interested in resolving these tensions than she is in solving Camilla’s disappearance. Rather, “The Hanged Man” leaves its readers in that same twilight inhabited by the missing girl, where every shadow hints at an unsolved mystery and every unsolved mystery conceals yet another, and where we all live with the unsettling possibility that the stories we invent may one day drift into truth.

– Jacob M Appel
Author of The School of Anecdotal Medicine