MAINE (2011)
By
J. Courtney Sullivan
Knopf
978-030759126
*
* * *
There are two types of fiction
writers, those who extrapolate from real-life experience, and those who reside
entirely in their imaginations. For her sake, I hope that J. Courtney Sullivan
is from the second school because if her family is anything at all like the
Kelleher clan at the heart of her newest novel, Maine, she will spend every royalty nickel she makes on therapy. To
call the Kellehers dysfunctional is akin to calling Rush Limbaugh
insensitive—correct, but light years short of ultimate truth. It gives away
nothing to say that among the book’s pleasures is its devastating critique of blind
faith and bourgeois ethics.
I picked up this book because I was
headed to Maine for a vacation and know well the Cape Neddick/Ogunquit region
where much of the book is set. It is a beautiful area, the perfect backdrop for
hell masquerading as heaven. Sullivan’s sprawling novel spans four generations
of a Boston Irish Catholic family. That’s a lot of time and, initially, the
sheer number of characters seems daunting, but it eventually centers on four
women: 83-year-old family matriarch, Alice; her eldest daughter Kathleen;
Kathleen’s daughter, Maggie; and Alice’s (overly) dutiful daughter-in-law Ann Marie.
Everything revolves around Alice, a self-absorbed, vain (and still striking)
woman who wears her piety like a too-revealing summer dress. She is a complex
character, but also so thoroughly calculating that hardly a page goes by in
which you don’t wish you could personally strangle the old bat (even after her
dark secret is revealed). But she has plenty of obnoxious competition--the
Kellehers are a collection of substance abusers, recovering addicts, ne’er do
wells, liars, egoists, social climbers, dreamers, and other malcontents. When he lived, Alice’s husband, Daniel,
kept the lid on the poison jar; now that he's gone, not even the cold Maine waters can absorb
Kelleher toxicity. The central role of the Catholic Church notwithstanding,
Daniel is the only thing resembling a saint in this novel.
Right after World War II, Daniel he
won a bet in which the payoff was a hunk of oceanside real estate along what
was then an undeveloped slice of southern Maine coastline. Now the
unpretentious cottage he built and where Alice holds court is reachable only
through the clamor of Route 1 and even that oasis stands cheek-by-jowl with a
Yuppie McMansion thrown up by their lawyer son Patrick and his obsequious wife
Ann Marie. Ann Marie grew up working-class disrespectful—think gangsters
without money. The family beach house is part of her relentless drive to live
in a happy bubble, as is her refusal to see that her own son is the
white-collar analog to her thug/brother, her fruitless currying of Alice’s
favor, and her obsessive building of fantasy dollhouses that are like the beach
house but without the Kellehers. (Well, that’s a start!) We soon get the point
that the only way to stay sane is to stay as far removed from Alice as
possible. Middle daughter Clare manages this, but not the eldest, Kathleen,
though lord knows she’s tried. She divorced her philandering husband decades
earlier, but that’s a mortal sin in the eyes of Alice, partly because of her
putative faith and partly because Alice is partial to any slime ball who flatters
her. Kathleen got drunk, got sober, met a Baby Boomer dreamer named Arlo, and
moved to California to take up yoga and organic worm farming. (Yep!)
Unfortunately, her own daughter, Maggie, forces her to end her self-imposed
exile when she shows up at the beach with a muffin in the oven, but without her
pathetic boyfriend, Gabe (whom Alice thought was wonderful). Predictably, Kathleen rushes off to
Maine to confront Maggie and, just as predictably, family sparks fly. (Maggie
is a character over whom debates will rage. For the record, I found her as cloying
as Gen Xers can be when they seek to shift the blame for all their troubles to anyone in the world except themselves.)
As a family drama, Maine is first rate. Sullivan has a
great ear for dialogue and she also has a gift for observing small details that
make ordinary things seem extraordinary. The novel is certainly open to the
charge of being cluttered, as if Sullivan became so enamored of things she’s
contemplated that she felt the need to force fit them into the plot. You will
find echoes of the Catholic Church sex scandals, the Bulger family, Boston
politics, and the devastating 1942 Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire in which 492
people died. (And one suspects she’s eliding the 2003 Warwick, Rhode Island fire
with some of that.) The book also feels claustrophobic when it moves to Boston
or New York, as if it needs the Maine air to breathe. Okay, sure, but this is still
a crisp novel, a proverbial page-turner that’s filled with memorable
characters, skin-squirming situations, and quotable lines. It topped my summer
reading list, but this Smith College graduate’s second novel makes for
compelling reading in any season.
Footnote: I was mightily amused to
read some of the comments left on Good Reads. Quite a few people hated the book
because they didn’t “like” some of the characters. Duh! That’s the whole damn
point. Sullivan hit the self-absorbed middle class with a right hook and Irish
Catholicism with a left cross. If you don’t get that, maybe you should build dollhouses!
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment