Recent Reviews
I'll Stay by Karen Day
Full Disclosure: Karen Day is a dear friend and I read several versions of this novel before publication.
Karen Day‘s compelling and psychologically nuanced novel explores the complex dynamic of two college friends Lee Sumner and Clare Michaels. Clare and Lee, along with their sorority sisters Sara and Ducky, travel from Indiana University to Florida for their spring break. Due to adolescent groupthink and poor decision-making, they change their plans to include a stay in Daytona Beach. They arrive in the middle of the night at the dingy, dilapidated rented home of one of Sara’s childhood friends where a party is in progress. With no room to sleep, Lee and Clare stay a few blocks away with a friend of the friend and a horrific event happens. Lee sacrifices herself to let Clare escape.
Set in the 1980’s, this novel takes place decades before the #MeToo Movement and the crime goes unreported. The girls head back to their sorority and each deal differently with the aftermath of the experience. Lee’s state of shock diminishes her drive to become a documentary filmmaker and she sputters through a series of menial jobs and ramshackle rentals. Clare’s guilt about her split-second decision to jump out the window and escape at Lee’s direction undermines her self-identity as a reliable caretaker. Exacerbating Clare’s guilt is her decision not to tell anyone that Lee had said, “Let her go, I’ll Stay.” Clare feels ashamed. “But how could they forgive me when they didn’t even know what I had done.”
Clare and Lee had met during the first exciting year of college. While Lee is intellectually gifted, her family offers Lee few emotional or financial resources. Lee is thrilled to meet Clare whose empathy and care comforts her. Clare is entranced by Lee’s enthusiasm and curiosity and feels rewarded for being a good listener. However, over the course of college, Clare feels weighted down by the drama of Lee’s dysfunctional family and Lee’s related need for Clare’s reassurance and support. Clare says, “….I felt her intensity sucking in the life out of everything.” But in fact, Clare’s resentment derives more from a lifetime of taking care of her mother - the famous author of the bestseller, Listen, Before You Go. Clare feels confused about whether or not Phoebe, the protagonist in her mother’s novel, is based on her or not. Had Clare’s mother prescribed who she should be and how should act? No wonder Clare sometimes feels hollow.
Simultaneously, Lee has transferred her fear of emotional abandonment onto Clare. After the Florida trip, college graduation and marriage to her college boyfriend, Clare, too, feels stuck in her own life. Her guilt about leaving Lee at that dreary house in Florida compels her to routinely visit Lee in New York City and call her every day.
One of the indicators of a successful novel is if the reader witnesses change, growth and connection to the characters. Karen Day’s I’ll Stay achieves this goal. Though the opening chapters are gripping and set the novel’s tone, the later chapters equally captivated me. That is where Day unravels the family dynamics and psychological interiors of both Clare and Lee and their transference and countertransference with one another. Day shows her readers the powerful unconscious forces inside Lee and Clare that shaped the choices they made before and after the Florida trip. She captures the ways in which people seek to replace and replicate unhealthy and healthy family dynamics in friendships and relationships especially in early adulthood. With a light touch, Day shows the benefits of working with a therapist to unpack and understand feelings and experiences especially if trauma is involved.
At the novel’s end, Clare and Lee are ten years out of college and have begun to examine not only what happened on that fateful night in Florida but also the factors that had been propelling them in their pre-college lives. It seems that Clare and Lee will be able to move on with their lives with greater understanding, insight, and hope for their futures. Though they will each carry this trauma with them, it will not define who they are.
The Girls by Emma Cline
When my daughter, Rebecca, recommended The Girls by Emma Cline, I hesitated. Since I grew up in Northern California and knew of the horrific Manson killings, I felt reluctant to visit a fictionalized account of that gruesome time. She persisted, “Mom you will like it, there is minimal violence. The book focuses on the psychology of the people involved.” She was right and I am pleased I read it.
The Girls is an impressive novel by a woman who knows both the terrain of 1960’s northern California and the emotional vulnerability of young girls. Cline seeks to understand how a group of teenage girls could follow a charismatic, insane man and eventually kill for him. The novel’s power derives from its unique structure: the narration rotates between the protagonist Evie Boyd’s present middle-aged voice and her past teenage voice that describes how she came to join one of the most famous and viscous cults to emerge from that decade. With the benefit of time and perspective, middle-aged Evie offers insight and understanding about the choices she made as a lonely, insecure teen.
Evie’s parents' divorce when she is fifteen. Her father leaves her mother to live with a younger woman. Evie’s mom’s devastation permeates what is left of their little family. Evie is already a bit of an outcast at school and her peer group is cruel. With her parents’ focus on their own lives, their attention toward Evie fades. Evie says, “The hidden world that adolescents inhabit, surfacing from time to time only when forced, training their parents to expect their absence. I was already disappeared.” When Evie meets Suzanne, a 19-year-old cult member who becomes a mother-figure to Evie, Evie begins to feel loved, seen, and known. “Girls are the only ones who can really give each other close attention, the kind we equate with being loved.” Little by little, Evie spends more and more time at this remote ranch of runaway teenagers while telling her distracted parents that she is at a friend’s house. “I was starting to fill in all the blank space in myself with the certainties of the ranch.”
The novel follows these lost young people of the 60’s who crave attention from those who understand their profound sense of alienation. Suzanne introduces Evie to Russell, the cult leader, and Evie feels attractive and desired. However, underneath his gentle hippie demeanor, Russell is an abusive, sexual predator. Cline captures the breakdown of the social order in one community during the 60’s when old norms are shattered and replaced by chaos.
What amazes me about Cline‘s book is that she did not grow up during this time. She makes no judgments; she simply describes the emotional snowball effect of Russell and Suzanne’s influence on this group of vulnerable young women. She does not dwell on the specific gruesome climax when the girls follow Russell’s orders to kill. Rather she helps her readers better understand how a group of girls could become brainwashed enough to abandon normative behavior and behave with such depravity. Cline’s pensive prose and impressive insight give us a plausible version of the troubled lives of her characters. Evie joins the group almost by accident and yet, as she tells us later, it destroyed her life. An impressive first novel by Emma Cline.
Homegoing by Yaa Gysai
Yaa Gyasi’s powerful and painful novel begins in Ghana in the late 1700’s where we meet two half-sisters, Effia and Esi. James Collins, the British governor of the western African “Gold Coast,” marries Effia. Effia moves into the large white castle with Collins and he treats her well. However, Collins reigns over the castle’s dungeon where unbeknownst to Effia, her half-sister Esi waits to be sold into American slavery. The novel’s harrowing narrative rotates between the travails of Effia’s descendants in Africa and Esi’s descendants in America. Both Effia and Esi’s children must contend with new versions of subjugation.
Each generation finds themselves captive to some trauma at the hand of white men. Over time, Esi’s progeny experience captivity in the dungeon, the horror of the ship ride to America, the barbarity of rape and slavery, freed slaves sent back to plantations, indentured servitude, Jim Crow laws of the South, and the drug trade and prejudice in the North. Effia’s progeny in Africa experience fierce battles between the Ashanti and Fanti tribes as they fight for the right to align with European countries to profit from the slave trade. There are tribal wars, sexual violence, machete battles, Colonialism, fires, madness, banishment, and isolation. On both continents, old oppressions end and new ones take their place.
Like a richly textured painting, Homegoing is layered with generations of pain and suffering. It is as if the layers of tragedy are seemingly transferred consciously and unconsciously from one generation to the next. It becomes clear that the dominant survival task of each generation is to navigate the oppression they experience while hoping for a better life for their children. Overcoming racism and/or oppressive tribal customs is a daily task of the characters we meet.
The novel’s structure is as effective as it is impressive. Gyasi does not follow each person from birth to death but instead allows each son or daughter to pick up the narrative from his or her perspective as they connect their own decisions to the hard choices made by their parents. Each individual must navigate oppressive institutional racism along the way.
In beautiful language, Gyasi conveys how, even centuries later, Effia’s seventh great-granddaughter living in the present carries the burden of all the suffering that came before. Marjorie says, “She feared that the nightmares would come for her too, that she too would be chosen by the ancestors to hear their family stories.” In spite of all the horror, the characters exhibit a deep spirituality and psychological awareness about their plight. Even with incremental improvements in the lives of each generation, Gyasi says, “No one forgets that they were once captive, even if they are now free.”
In the final pages of "Homegoing", Esi’s seventh great-grandson Marcus Clifton, a Ph. D. candidate at Stanford University, wonders, “How could he explain it to (his girlfriend) Marjorie that what he wanted to capture with his project was the feeling of time, of having been a part of something that stretched so far back, was so impossibly large, that it was easy to forget that she, and he, and everyone else, existed in it - not apart from it, but inside of it.” I believe that this desire is what Gyasi sought to achieve in her novel. She has achieved her goal and so much more.
