The Patron Saint of Liars is a book I’ve seen kicking around for years. I’ve always told myself that one day I’ll get around to reading it and finally the time came. I didn’t know what to expect going in, other than the blurb about it taking place at a home for unwed mothers in the 60s and 70s.
The narrative structure rotates through three main points of view. Rose, the not-so-unwed mother who leaves her husband when she finds out she’s pregnant. Just takes off one day and heads to Kentucky from California. As a character, Rose frustrates me. She’s so clinical, almost unable to love. There’s no explanation given for that though. She was raised by a caring mother who always put her first, she seems to have had a good life. Her damage, for lack of a better word, is unexplained and I found that to be frustrating. Even when you’re reading from her point of view, you rarely get inside her head.
The next narrator is Son, a man who’s been working at the home for twenty-some years. He’s escaping a past of his own, living out his days keeping the old hotel in decent repair. He falls in love with Rose early on in her stay, from the first night. Again, this was another point of frustration for me. Call my cynical, but this love at first site, especially when the woman is clearly not interested, bothers me. It seems creepy. His back story unfolds slowly as you learn about the tragedy, the loss of a woman who didn’t really love him to begin with (a common theme in Son’s life.) He and Rose marry weeks before she’s due to give birth. They plan on raising her child, a girl, with her thinking that Son is her real father. Son knows nothing of Rose’s life from before she arrived, no piece of her history. They live together in a house on the grounds of the home, and Rose takes over full time as cook. Thus they continue, coexisting rather than living together.
The last section of the book is told through the eyes of Cecelia, known as Sissy. She was raised by the nuns who ran the home, by the girls who came and went, and by her father. From an early age, she fought for the attention of her mother, rarely getting it. Sissy was my favorite of the three, the most sympathetic by far. She was raised not to ask questions, a source of endless frustration. She learned early on how to lose people, how to make friends with the new ones arriving. At her point in the narration, she’s 15 and realizing that she needs her independence. She’s able to start connecting with Rose during driving lessons, the car being the only place her mother feels safe and comfortable enough to start opening up.
The whole book is building to an ending. Secrets are going to come back to haunt, truth will be revealed…but nothing really happens. The whole thing ended up falling flat to me, feeling like it was a cop out. I love an ambiguous ending with done with purpose (See: Eleanor & Park), but this just felt like Patchett had given up and couldn’t figure out how she wanted to end it. I’m sure there’s symbolism and meaning and all that imbued within the story, but it was lost on me.
