This a novel by the same writer as Ellen Foster, and this novel I think was stronger over all. I understood the praise for Ellen Foster as a novel, but I think this one is stronger.
This novel takes places over the course of a few decades as we watch a woman (the narrator’s mother) be diagnosed with, live with, and eventually die in conjunction with dementia and some kind of bipolar disorder. It should be noted that the novel is from 1995 and the story is from the 1950s so the language and sentiment is not always people first language or all that sympathetic.
The novel uses the mental illness as a kind of core that the rest of the novel grows out of. So instead of a clear plot structure we have a series of events connected to this family and the town they live in and how this all interplays over time. Like a lot of novels that capture a life, where we understand there’s no “story” per se and simply the various events that make it up.
The language here is touching and poetic and kind of dreamy, but stands out the most clearly is the amount of pain contained with the story. I have a lot of history with a story like this. People with mental illness are still severely mistreated in our society, but there’s also a weird caught between state for the children of parents with mental illness. In the growing sympathy of the world (to whatever extent there is) there’s also a push back against people who have been hurt or had immense amount of pain as a result of the illness. This novel captures that paradoxical state of wanting the best for people, but also acknowledging the damage and pain this situation causes.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Sights-Unseen-Novel-Kaye-Gibbons/dp/0060797150/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1552393572&sr=8-1-fkmrnull)
