Critique du New York Review of Books

BEVERLY JENSEN'S book "The Sisters From Hardscrabble Bay" may be a collection of stories, but thanks to its chronological sweep (from 1916 to 1987), its multiple settings (from New Brunswick - so vividly rendered that it becomes another character - to Boston to coastal Maine) and a good half-dozen of the richest fictional characters I've encountered anywhere, the book delivers the emotional rush of a novel, indeed of a great novel. Of course, when a book is this satisfying, it probably doesn't matter what we call it, only that we have it, although in this case, sadly, we'll never have another. Jensen died of cancer in 2003, before any of her stories made it into print. In fact, it's not clear she intended for them to be published, which may explain their remarkable intimacy and unflinching honesty. The lives of Idella and Avis Hillock, the sisters of the title, are shaped by forces as harsh and seemingly uncaring as nature itself. In "Gone," the girls are introduced wearing hand-me-down shoes "still molded by the shapes of other feet." Despite having few advantages, they are happy enough, until their mother dies - a victim of pills mistakenly prescribed by the family doctor - shortly after giving birth to their sister Emma. Idella, not quite 8, hearing her mother's cries of pain, sneaks downstairs and hides in the kitchen, a silent witness to her mother's bloody, agonizing death, whereas Avis, two years younger, waits upstairs in the literal and figurative dark, terrified and confused. Bill, their father, at a loss for how to relate to his daughters even before his wife's death, has little to offer them or their older brother, Dalton, afterward, his remoteness in effect making orphans of all his children. Grief-stricken, he loses himself in the endless toil of the family farm - pulling lobster traps and pushing "every goddamned potato through the ground with my bare hands" - making servants of his daughters, his rage at life's injustice never far beneath the surface, frightening them. To Idella, her father seems to have resigned not just himself but also his children to a life of loss and endless drudgery, until one by one they flee. Much of the pleasure of the subsequent stories derives from witnessing how Idella's and Avis's early experiences, together with their temperamental differences, determine the kinds of young women, wives and later mature women they will become. Idella, intelligent and dutiful, though wary of a world she knows can turn hostile in a heartbeat, remains hopeful by cautiously lowering her romantic and economic expectations, until those expectations can reasonably be met. Combative Avis, having apparently concluded that she has already absorbed life's cruelest blows, takes the world head-on, demanding something like her fair share, never mind its stubborn reluctance to cough up rewards. In any event, she's done genuflecting. Such profoundly different stances produce results that are not as dissimilar as one might imagine. It never occurs to careful Idella, who marries Eddie, the first man to show her any interest, that she might be selling herself short, just as it never occurs to hard-drinking, promiscuous Avis that the world might have more to offer her than a series of cruel jokes. The starkly beautiful, yet barren and unrelenting New Brunswick landscape also shapes the sisters' characters. Perched precariously on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic, the Hillock family farm is scoured by winds so severe that the few trees that can survive there grow "as though bent from the waist," and we quickly sense, the way one does reading Thomas Hardy, just how inextricable such land is from the people who live on it "by their wits," as Idella remarks, "which were more considerable and deep-rooted than their plantings." This connection between the land and the battered people who scrape a marginal living from its rocky soil is illustrated most powerfully in the character of the young French Canadian girl, Maddie, also motherless, who in "Pomme de Terre" is hired to cook and clean. Compared throughout the story to a potato, Maddie, who wears the same thin-at-the-elbows dress every day, has even less in the way of material possessions than her young charges. The terrible paucity of the girl's dreams and expectations is symbolized by the faceless, hairless doll she treasures. People here do without - not just without beauty (the tiny wildflowers along the cliffs bloom only to die within hours), but without even the eyes to see it. A book that follows the lives of characters from childhood through death can't help being about destiny, and as temperamentally different as Avis and Idella may be, their fates are clearly linked. Their lives get slightly easier after they leave Canada, but the ensuing stories reveal the extent of the damage done to them before their escape. In "The Opera," the sisters, living in Boston, are given cheapseat tickets to a production of "Carmen." Naturally, Avis is quite taken with the brash, self-confident title character (Idella reminds her that Carmen ends up dead) and has a grand old time directing acerbic quips at the wealthy old women in the balcony. Idella tries to enjoy herself, but she's distracted by how much better dressed everyone else is, and she's particularly humiliated by her large, ugly brown purse, when all the other women have stylish, tiny ones. Ironically, the only things in the purse are her gloves and a folded handkerchief (her luggage, after a fashion, is also her baggage, her burden). In another story, much later in life, Idella has to convince a boy who tries to rob her convenience store that often, a person is better off with less. Hungry and desperate to escape his home, the kid wants everything, not just the bills from the register, but also the coins and bags of chips and a footlong sandwich from the deli counter and a couple of six-packs of beer. Too much, too quickly, she advises him, can become unwieldy. All those rolled coins just drag your pants down. Desire becomes the enemy of both flight and freedom. Such hard-won wisdom, leavened by sometimes gentle, sometimes boisterous humor, is the core joy of Jensen's narrative, and it's in the collection's final two stories that the emotional payoff is richest. In "Wake," Avis and Dalton, drunk, manage to lose their father's coffin (with Bill in it), then find it again and make a harrowing journey in a borrowed hearse to New Brunswick in an ice storm. This circumstance may be comedic, but it provides the foundation for a serious and profound meditation on loss and suffering, on a world that seems to turn treacherous as soon as you get your bearings in it. And yet there's no discounting its brutal beauty. The morning after the ice storm, the rising sun makes a crystal wonderland. Idella - still Idella - asks what will happen to the little birds. They'll fall, Avis replies, on their butts: "Like us." Now at a point where they can take a long view of their lives, the sisters conclude that the entire Hillock clan are a bunch of wretched "fools"; indeed Hillock behavior often seems to warrant exactly this assessment. But how brave and resilient they are. How resourceful. How wonderfully human. Fools they may be, but their condition is so nearly universal that it's hard to take much pleasure in judgment. The lives of Jensen's characters are shaped by forces as harsh and uncaring as nature itself. Richard Russo's latest novel, "That Old Cape Magic," is now out in paperback.