MY SISTER’S CONTINENT | Gina Frangello (Chiasmus)
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The novel takes the form of Kirby’s winding, angry reply to her former shrink, who’s using her as a case study in a book (“Hysteria in the New Millennium”). Speaking sometimes in the first person to the doctor, sometimes using the third person from Kendra’s point of view, Kirby drags the reader through the months that culminate with Kendra bingeing herself into the hospital, then disappearing for good. Childhood trauma has haunted the sisters for years, but while it’s not too hard to guess what it is, the hints go on and on for pages, dropped in improbably intricate yet vague conversations (many of which take place while doin’ it) and drawn out in some really purple passages that make the book not much fun to read. Then again, this is Kirby speaking throughout, and it’s not much fun being Kirby.
That Frangello brings all this to a close with a couple really nifty twists says a lot about her control of a narrative that exists mostly in shadow. She seems to know full well it’s a weird and brutal world out there–too bad her novel, rooted in theory, seems such a bloodless thing. –Patrick Daily
There’s a powerful saga of family and growing up female here, but it’s squashed under flabby sentences and poor structure. Racinda is the strongest of seven (seven!) narrators, but when another character describes the way Ruth tells stories–“They merged into one long, intricate knot in your shoelaces or hair, one elaborate thing I stopped following”–Merrick might as well be speaking of many of her own chapters. She has a habit of hinting that something very bad and significant is going to happen (“It was that night that tipped them off to all the stuff that was wrong with her”), only to repeatedly undercut the tension with haphazardly overwrought prose. Merrick’s said that her “director’s cut” of Girly was 700 pages long, but the 500-plus-page final version could still use a rigorous edit. Girly can’t be mistaken for chick lit–in that, Merrick has succeeded–but neither is it the Big Epic Novel it strives to be. –Susannah J. Felts
It’s ironic that Ali Smith has chosen to set her sixth book and first full-length novel within the confines of a family; earlier this year she notoriously accused women writers of being too “domestic.” Here each family member takes turns telling the story with a nuanced shift in third-person narrative. Each voice feels startlingly true. Twelve-year-old Astrid is remarkably authentic, her narration a string of almost-revelations that end with a wry “whatever,” as is the way she lays claim to the language of her professor stepfather, words like preternaturally and id est. Some of the time she even uses them correctly.
