Critique du New York Review of Books

TWO years ago, a British study suggested that men and women who grew up with sisters had happier lives and rosier outlooks than men and women who didn't. The presence of even one sister in a household was enough to foster an atmosphere of emotional openness that helped family members communicate and tackle problems. No such benefit accrued to people who had only brothers. The study was small - only 571 subjects took part - but it was heartening to think that sisters, so often portrayed as fractious rivals, envious of one another's attractions and covetous of one another's friends and clothes, might actually serve as mortar binding the bricks of a family's psyche. For the British writer Rosamund Lupton, the power of the sisterly bond must not have come as news. In her first novel, a taut, hold-your-breath-and-your-hand-kerchief thriller that was a huge critical and popular success in England last year, she makes a point of crediting her own younger sister as "the inspiration for the book and a continued blessing." In "Sister," Lupton puts the bonds connecting two distant and seemingly dissimilar siblings under the microscope. The elder, Beatrice, 26, bossy and cautious, has left her mother and sister behind in England to live in New York, where she has acquired a sensible, dull corporate job and a sensible, dull fiancé. Her free-spirited younger sister, Tess, 21, lives in London, where she floats around painting abstract canvases, befriending stray cats and cashchallenged foreigners, and having love affairs with unsuitable people. Though an ocean divides them, the power of sisterhood unites them. This is not to say that they don't have their differences. While Beatrice admires the exuberance of Tess's artwork - "Joyous. Beautiful. Explosions on canvas of life and light and color" - she doesn't tell her so, not wanting to encourage her in such a chancy career. Tess, angelically, doesn't take offense. Though she knows that Bee, as she calls her, would "rather be safe than happy" and is "afraid of life," she would never hurt her feelings by saying so. As Tess writes in an e-mail, she has Bee's "best interests at heart." "You are my sister in every fiber of my being," Bee thinks to herself. "And that fiber is visible - two strands of DNA twisted in a double helix in every cell of my body - proving, visibly, that we are sisters." This reflection leaves out two other strands that bind them. Both women mourn the loss of their brother, Leo, who died of cystic fibrosis when they were children. And during the excruciating time of Leo's last illness and death, their father left the family, decamping for France. When Bee was packed off to boarding school, Tess comforted her by sending her letters written in lemon juice, invisibie until Bee shined a flashlight onto the paper. "Ever since," Bee reflects, "kindness has smelled of lemons." Before anyone grows too misty-eyed at this idyll of sisterly counterpoint, it should be noted that Lupton's readers learn of it only gradually, in retrospect and from hearsay. As the novel begins, Tess is dead - found, soon after going missing, in a disused public bathroom in Hyde Park, her wrists deeply slashed, just days after giving birth to a stillborn baby that had tested positive for cystic fibrosis early in her pregnancy. The authorities call the death a suicide, but Bee, who flies home to London as soon as she hears of Tess's disappearance, insists that the little sister she knew so well would never have ended her own life. Nonetheless, she worries: Did she really know Tess that well? If they were so close, why hadn't Tess told her she was in trouble? Had Tess called, and had Bee possibly missed the message, too wrapped up in her New York life to notice? "If I had taken more time to be with you," the stricken Bee agonizes, "if I had been less preoccupied with myself and listened harder, I might have realized something was very wrong months earlier." Had Tess, not Bee, been the more caring, responsible sister all along, despite her youth and "scattiness"? "I ran away, didn't I?" Bee frets. "I pursued an uncluttered life on another continent. No different from Dad." These self-recriminations come in a long, soul-searching letter Bee writes to her dead sister, in which she retraces the chronology of her struggle to learn how and why Tess died. That searing confession forms Lupton's novel. "Why am I writing this to you?" Bee asks the sister who's no longer there. "I need to talk to you," she says. "It's a one-way conversation, but one that I could have only with you. . . . I'll tell you one step at a time, as I found out myself, with no reflecting hindsight." Will she find a murderer in the rearview mirror, or was Tess stalked only by her own bad luck? Either way, as Bee's investigation widens, the reader begins to wonder if her increasingly reckless confrontations with the people she labels as suspects are altogether safe. If someone did murder Tess, should Bee make her sleuthing quite so obvious? And if someone didn't, could Bee be losing her mind? WITH "Sister," Lupton, who has a long history as a scriptwriter, enters the highly charged ring where the best psychological detective writers spar, her hands raised in a victory clench. She encircles her story with electrified ropes: new developments continually jolt her readers, which doesn't stop them from eagerly - and a little sadistically - awaiting the impact of the next blow. Like Kate Atkinson, Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell, Lupton builds suspense not only around the causes and details of her story's brutal denouement, but also around the personalities and motivations of those who lunge and those who duck. Of course, the mystery Bee attempts to solve doesn't involve only how and why Tess died, but who Tess really was and who Bee is - and will be without her. And Lupton adds yet another source of tension into this tingling welter of unknowns: she uses technology not as a deus ex machina but as a kind of diabolus in machina. Early on, Bee reveals that Tess took part in an experimental medical trial to cure her baby in utero of the cystic fibrosis that killed their brother. The unsettling science behind this procedure accompanies the narrative like an unsmiling doctor in a white lab coat, injecting a mood of anxious uncertainty. Initially Bee, "wearing my full older-sister uniform," had counseled Tess against the treatment; but it had worked. Hearing that news from Tess, months earlier, Bee had wept with relief, "big-wet-tears crying. I had been so worried, not about your baby, but about what it would be like for you looking after and loving a child with C.F.," she had explained. "A small risk," Tess had told her, "is something I have to take." Both tear-jerking and spine-tingling, "Sister" provides an adrenaline rush that could cause a chill on the sunniest afternoon - which, perhaps, the friendly company of a sister or two (or, in a pinch, a brother) might help to dispel. The narrators sister is found dead in a park, her wrists slashed, days after giving birth to a stillborn baby. Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.