Thoughts on Gabriel Tallent's narrative style in My Absolute Darling

Gabriel Tallent keeps my interest and attention so far - about half-way in - in his disturbing yet strangely alluring debut novel, My Absolute Darling. You can't help but root for the troubled young teen, Turtle (aka Julia to the world at large and Kibble to her father) who's being raised by a charming, handsome, dad who is brutally abusive, sickly seductive(the title of the book is one of his creepy terms of endearment for his daughter), and a paranoid survivalist, really one of the most unpleasant characters I've encountered in reading. As the story moves along Turtle becomes friends w/ two boys about her age - they're on a wilderness hike when she encounters them, stalks them, recognizes they're in way beyond their abilities, and pretty much saves their lives by helping them set up a wilderness camp site during a sudden, cold rainstorm. Can't help but compare her and the guys to the current Netflix series Stranger Things: Turtle is uncommunicative, with almost supernatural survival abilities (supposedly trained and prepared by her paranoid Dad, but her abilities go beyond any training: walking 30 miles in the California woods, barefoot?), and the guys are kind of goofy yet intelligent (I recognize that Mendocino County has many highly educated societal dropouts and that the kids have names like Rilke, but even so it's hard to accept two 9th-grade boys quoting Marcus Aurelius to  one another and dropping references to Lawrence, Woolf, et al. - who's speaking here? Tallent? of his characters?) and they're fascinated with Turtle but unsure how to approach her. Tallent's writing is always clear and powerful and he knows how to build a plot, a few arch coincidences aside (the boy Turtle happens to meet in the middle of the forest turns out to be the daughter of Turtle's godmother?), yet his style poses some intriguing inquiries into narrative. On one level the narrator is clearly the author, seeing things that none of the characters could possibly see: so many plants, weeds, trees, leaves all  ID'd by name - I thought for a moment I was reading a field guide of a treatise by a botanist. On another level, GT's detailed knowledge of certain ephemera is well integrated into the plot: GT knows a scary amount about guns and knives and has an Eagle Scout knowledge for wilderness survival, and these branches of knowledge make sense as part of the characterization of the strange central character, Turtle, trained in these arts, threatened, inspired by, and bound to her disturbing, demented father.

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