Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. (Author tour)Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. But Strout demonstrates exceptional poise, and an uncommon ability to render complex emotions with clarity and a sympathetic intelligence, evoking comparisons with the work of Alice Munro and Anne Tyler.
In less sure hands, all of this would seem merely melodramatic.
Matters come to a head when Amy and her teacher are discovered in compromising circumstances, and when members of her father’s family suddenly get in touch. She also renders a wonderfully nuanced portrait of Isabelle, a bright, often angry woman who has only imperfectly replaced passion with stoicism. She catches, with an admirable restraint, and particularity, Amy’s emergent sense of self, the wild succession of emotions in adolescence, and Amy’s stunning discovery of sex. Strout nicely interweaves these elements within the record of Amy and Isabelle’s increasingly charged relationship.
New elements, however, signal a darker time: UFO’s have been sighted, and a young girl is missing and may have been abducted. Some elements of the life there seem timeless: the steady flow of gossip, the invisible but nonetheless rigid social hierarchies, the ancient disruptions of life (illness, adultery, violence). Part of the novel’s power derives from Strout’s ability to set Amy and Isabel’s painful struggles within the larger context of a small town. Amy, at 16, has a poised, delicate beauty, and finds herself-at first with alarm, then with a barely suppressed excitement-responding to the flirtations of a new teacher. Now, Amy’s innocence is under assault from various quarters, and her mother finds herself losing touch with the daughter who has been the focus of her existence. Amy has grown up knowing little about her father and, thanks to her closeness to Isabel, also knowing little about the rough give-and-take of life. Isabel Goodrow had settled in the mill town of Shirley Falls when her daughter Amy was an infant, reluctantly admitting to those who asked that both her husband and her parents were dead. A lyrical, closely observant first novel, charting the complex, resilient relationship of a mother and daughter.
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