Juvenile rage grows into sisterly enmity
By Joanna Smith Rakoff |
May 9, 2010, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
FRICTION between sisters has served as a plot staple since the dawn of the novel -- from "Sense and Sensibility" to "Housekeeping" -- if not the inception of the written word.
Handled properly, it provides a near-perfect occasion for exploring the societal and familial expectations placed on young women, as Heather Clay does in her introspective first novel, "Losing Charlotte."
Reared on a Kentucky horse farm, the Bolling sisters are so different they might as well be representatives of the ID and the ego. In adolescence, Charlotte views her parents' moneyed milieu as "phony and meaningless" and sneaks off at night with the farm manager's son.
As an adult, she moves to -- where else? -- New York to lead a generically bohemian life, dabbling in the theater, picking up odd jobs with caterers, listening to obscure bands in seedy bars.
Even after marrying a staid money manager, she clings to a few old habits, like refusing to wear "anything under her clothes in the summer" -- even while pregnant with twins.
Her younger sister, Knox, has spent her life attempting to be everything Charlotte isn't. At 31, she lives in a cabin on the farm; when not working as a teacher, she morosely dates her dad's breeder.
But most of Knox's energy is consumed with her loathing for Charlotte, who has forsaken the family home Knox loves "for its steady rhythms."
Then Charlotte dies in childbirth, as you knew she would.
If the title and the jacket copy weren't spoilers enough, the first half of the novel is filled with heavy-handed foreshadowing ("I shouldn't be worried, right?").
Care of twins
Knox temporarily moves in with Charlotte's widower, Bruce, and helps take care of the twins.
But her real project seems to be puzzling out Bruce's -- and the world's -- attraction to Charlotte. "Why ... did you love her so much?" she asks, lost in her own drama and failing to realize this might not be the ideal question for someone whose wife is barely cold in the ground.
Clay beautifully portrays the awkward dynamic of family gatherings, and she's hilariously adept at nailing certain New York types: the aging frat boy ("Check out that waitress ... That girl is not to be believed"), the catty aspiring actor ("I am from Topeka. I am absolutely serious").
But too often the novel devolves into tedium, in part because its flashbacks diminish the narrative momentum, in part because it's largely seen from Knox's dour point of view.
The problem is less that Knox is a pill -- plenty of literature's most interesting characters are equally unpleasant -- and more that Clay fills her head with pop-psych self-analysis ("She was always trying to get back to something, something that seemed to reside in a past just beyond her reach").
Such overblown descriptions as "Images tumbled violently against one another in Knox's mind like rocks in a stream" also make it clear that this girl is seriously tortured.
In the sections devoted to Bruce, Clay's language and narrative style grow so much more bold and confident they seem fugitives from another novel. Ultimately, though, this is Knox's book: a tale of a person in thrall to her juvenile rage.
Interesting in theory, such a psychological study, as rendered in "Losing Charlotte," results in a narrative that too closely resembles its heroine's view of herself: "sad, stunted." Then again, that may be Clay's point.
In her dark take on sisterhood -- a world away from Jane Austen -- everybody loses. Knox and Charlotte "love and hate each other so nakedly, and so simultaneously, that the mere existence of the other could serve as an intolerable, maddening offense."
Handled properly, it provides a near-perfect occasion for exploring the societal and familial expectations placed on young women, as Heather Clay does in her introspective first novel, "Losing Charlotte."
Reared on a Kentucky horse farm, the Bolling sisters are so different they might as well be representatives of the ID and the ego. In adolescence, Charlotte views her parents' moneyed milieu as "phony and meaningless" and sneaks off at night with the farm manager's son.
As an adult, she moves to -- where else? -- New York to lead a generically bohemian life, dabbling in the theater, picking up odd jobs with caterers, listening to obscure bands in seedy bars.
Even after marrying a staid money manager, she clings to a few old habits, like refusing to wear "anything under her clothes in the summer" -- even while pregnant with twins.
Her younger sister, Knox, has spent her life attempting to be everything Charlotte isn't. At 31, she lives in a cabin on the farm; when not working as a teacher, she morosely dates her dad's breeder.
But most of Knox's energy is consumed with her loathing for Charlotte, who has forsaken the family home Knox loves "for its steady rhythms."
Then Charlotte dies in childbirth, as you knew she would.
If the title and the jacket copy weren't spoilers enough, the first half of the novel is filled with heavy-handed foreshadowing ("I shouldn't be worried, right?").
Care of twins
Knox temporarily moves in with Charlotte's widower, Bruce, and helps take care of the twins.
But her real project seems to be puzzling out Bruce's -- and the world's -- attraction to Charlotte. "Why ... did you love her so much?" she asks, lost in her own drama and failing to realize this might not be the ideal question for someone whose wife is barely cold in the ground.
Clay beautifully portrays the awkward dynamic of family gatherings, and she's hilariously adept at nailing certain New York types: the aging frat boy ("Check out that waitress ... That girl is not to be believed"), the catty aspiring actor ("I am from Topeka. I am absolutely serious").
But too often the novel devolves into tedium, in part because its flashbacks diminish the narrative momentum, in part because it's largely seen from Knox's dour point of view.
The problem is less that Knox is a pill -- plenty of literature's most interesting characters are equally unpleasant -- and more that Clay fills her head with pop-psych self-analysis ("She was always trying to get back to something, something that seemed to reside in a past just beyond her reach").
Such overblown descriptions as "Images tumbled violently against one another in Knox's mind like rocks in a stream" also make it clear that this girl is seriously tortured.
In the sections devoted to Bruce, Clay's language and narrative style grow so much more bold and confident they seem fugitives from another novel. Ultimately, though, this is Knox's book: a tale of a person in thrall to her juvenile rage.
Interesting in theory, such a psychological study, as rendered in "Losing Charlotte," results in a narrative that too closely resembles its heroine's view of herself: "sad, stunted." Then again, that may be Clay's point.
In her dark take on sisterhood -- a world away from Jane Austen -- everybody loses. Knox and Charlotte "love and hate each other so nakedly, and so simultaneously, that the mere existence of the other could serve as an intolerable, maddening offense."
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