Despite a flawed ending, this deeply felt tale delivers a vivid and unflinching look at postpartum depression, marriage,...
A woman of the early 20th century struggles for self-determination in the face of unexpected love, unimaginable loss, and the stigma of a little-understood mental illness.
In this historical novel by nonfiction author Notbohm (The Autism Trail Guide, 2014, etc.), 26-year-old Annie Rushton leaves home after her abusive mother’s death in 1911, seven years after her own violent episode of postpartum psychosis. That incident culminated in a shattering divorce and the loss of Annie’s parental rights to her then-infant daughter. (“The law is meted out by men,” says a not-unsympathetic judge.) Annie joins her older brother on his homestead in Montana with hopes for a fresh start and soon marries dynamic salesman-turned-farmer Adam Fielding. Their heated passion for each other and their drive for economic success bond them; their mutual desire for a child eventually frays that link. After each miscarriage and after the death of an infant daughter, Annie loses herself to long bouts of severe depression and psychosis. Although there is no divorce, the marriage essentially ends when, during her last pregnancy, Annie is court-ordered to be committed to a mental asylum. Notbohm’s character-driven narrative, spanning more than two decades, is both graceful and unflinching. Annie’s haunting and revelatory dreams, a recurring device, deepen readers’ insights into her psyche. The fecundity of the land (“flat and fertile, ringed by cottonwoods and the opaque Milk River, with its curious lightened-tea tint”) provides a stark contrast to Annie’s brutal miscarriages with their “slaughterhouse” smell. In the descriptions of the disintegration of the marriage, Adam’s emotional unraveling is given authentic weight, as is the societal condemnation Annie faces and the male-dominated legal and medical view of postpartum depression as a moral failing or “madness.” The author doesn’t sugarcoat Annie’s episodes of near catatonia and manic rage or her subsequent road to self-determination, a complex journey of grief, fulfillment, betrayal, and forgiveness. The one defect is the story’s ending: a too-pat catharsis wrapped in self-conscious, poetic sentiment. The book’s title, inspired by Thoreau and the constellation Pegasus, refers to the quilt Annie designs for Adam as a groom’s gift, a recurring, bittersweet symbol of intimate memories, hopes for the future, and, ultimately, absolution.
Despite a flawed ending, this deeply felt tale delivers a vivid and unflinching look at postpartum depression, marriage, love, and death in the early 1900s.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-335-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Humane and humorous. Rushdie is in top form, serving up a fine piece of literary satire.
A modern Don Quixote lands in Trumpian America and finds plenty of windmills to tilt at.
Mix Rushdie’s last novel, The Golden House (2017), with his 1990 fable, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and you get something approaching this delightful confection. An aging salesman loses his job as a pharmaceutical rep, fired, with regret, by his cousin and employer. The old man, who bears the name Ismail Smile, Smile itself being an Americanization of Ismail, is “a brown man in America longing for a brown woman.” He is a dreamer—and not without ambition. Borrowing from both opera and dim memories of Cervantes, he decides to call himself Quichotte, though fake news, the din of television, and “the Age of Anything-Can-Happen” and not dusty medieval romances have made him a little dotty. His Dulcinea, Salma R, exists on the other side of the TV screen, so off Quichotte quests in a well-worn Chevy, having acquired as if by magic a patient son named Sancho, who observes that Dad does everything just like it’s done on the tube and in stories: “So if the old Cruze is our Pequod then I guess Miss Salma R is the big fish and he, ‘Daddy,’ is my Ahab." By this point, Rushdie has complicated the yarn by attributing it to a hack writer, another Indian immigrant, named Sam DuChamp (read Sam the Sham), who has mixed into the Quixote story lashings of Moby-Dick, Ismail for Ishmael, and the Pinocchio of both Collodi and Disney (“You can call me Jiminy if you want,” says an Italian-speaking cricket to Sancho along the way), to say nothing of the America of Fentanyl, hypercapitalism, and pop culture and the yearning for fame. It’s a splendid mess that, in the end, becomes a meditation on storytelling, memory, truth, and other hallmarks of a disappearing civilization: “What vanishes when everything vanishes," Rushdie writes, achingly, “not only everything, but the memory of everything.”
Humane and humorous. Rushdie is in top form, serving up a fine piece of literary satire.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13298-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A near-anthropological study of male insecurity.
Wayne’s latest foray into the dark minds of lonely young men follows the rise and fall of a friendship between two aspiring fiction writers on opposite sides of a vast cultural divide.
In 1996, our unnamed protagonist is living a cushy New York City life: He's a first-year student in Columbia’s MFA program in fiction (the exorbitant bill footed by his father) who’s illegally subletting his great-aunt’s rent-controlled East Village apartment (for which his father also foots the bill). And it is in this state—acutely aware of his unearned advantages, questioning his literary potential, and deeply alone—that he meets Billy. Billy is an anomaly in the program: a community college grad from small-town Illinois, staggeringly talented, and very broke. But shared unease is as strong a foundation for friendship as any, and soon, our protagonist invites Billy to take over his spare room, a mutually beneficial if precarious arrangement. They are the very clear products of two different Americas, one the paragon of working-class hardscrabble masculinity, the other an exemplar of the emasculating properties of parental wealth—mirror images, each in possession of what the other lacks. “He would always have to struggle to stay financially afloat,” our protagonist realizes, “and I would always be fine, all because my father was a professional and his was a layabout. I had an abundance of resources; here was a concrete means for me to share it.” And he means it, when he thinks it, and for a while, the affection between them is enough to (mostly) paper over the awkward imbalance of the setup. Wayne (Loner, 2016) captures the nuances of this dynamic—a musky cocktail of intimacy and rage and unspoken mutual resentment—with draftsmanlike precision, and when the breaking point comes, as, of course, it does, it leaves one feeling vaguely ill, in the best way possible.
A near-anthropological study of male insecurity.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63557-400-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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