MADNESS WITH GRIEF

In this novel, a young woman wrestles with the death of her older brother and gets lost in a shapeless ennui.

Eleanor Lihte encounters tragedy as a young girl—her older brother, Jamie, dies in a car accident when he is only 18 years old. As a result, her own life becomes entrapped in a state of permanent shiftlessness—she is overcome by boredom and an aching loneliness. Her family manages the tragedy through a studied silence and, in the case of her mother, a cruel incomprehension and lack of empathy for Eleanor’s own suffering: “You’ve always been such a sweet girl. I don’t understand why things have been so hard for you.” When Eleanor is not working as a lifeguard, an uninspiring job—she and her peers are “more like seminude janitors than heroes”—she spends her time sewing and crying. She finally musters enough energy to move from California to Arizona in order to study to become a teacher, but she continues to find the purpose of existence bewildering and to feel that her life is a failure. Nevertheless, Eleanor is reluctant to return to her “tiny homeland, the world of limited possibilities she knew,” and seeks out counsel from various figures, including a born-again spiritual guru, a psychic, and, finally, a therapist.

Toy intelligently conveys Eleanor’s emotional desolation and her benumbed inability to feel pleasure. But the author’s writing sometimes strains too laboriously for lyrical heights and instead achieves a curious eccentricity: “One Sunday sitting at her roommate’s kitchen table waiting for her mother to call,” Eleanor “read a book about evolution. She was hoping to evolve—to become a scaled amphibian heading back toward the water or a bright yellow duck.” The plot is as sluggish as the protagonist—not much happens, which of course makes sense given the morbid torpor that infects Eleanor. Toy’s prose deftly captures her languor—it even parallels it—but the result is sometimes closer to a portrait of melancholy than an engaging story. Still, readers will empathize with Eleanor as she deals with a soporific lethargy. Yet sometimes that tedium is broken with gibberish. Consider this excerpt from a letter Eleanor writes to a former teacher: “I am writing not only to apologize, but to offer you the combination that will unleash the ringing sound inside my telephone. You forgot, I am sure, to ask for it. You are forgetting also, I am sure, to ask when I am coming to visit. Unfortunately, I am tied to my supply of French fries and white bread and will not be coming soon.” Eleanor finally begins to recover from her lassitude, partly as a result of therapy, and comes to grip with the human condition she previously resisted. Her ultimate revelation, though, seems a bit trite—she finds solace in recognizing that others are far more “dysfunctional” than she is.

An intriguing but slow-moving emotional drama.