Elizabeth Strout : Amy and Isabelle

 James Feriola (1925-1997) Old Sawmill (detail)

The first half of this novel (up to Chapter 13) deserves a review all by itself - as Mr. Robertson (no given name) has finally gotten his fifteen year old math student, the protagonist, to pull down her panties so he can fondle what’s beneath. We’ve been getting prepared for this to happen beginning with the very first sentence of the novel:

 IT WAS TERRIBLY hot that summer Mr. Robertson left town, and for a long while the river seemed dead. Just a dead brown snake of a thing lying flat through the center of town, dirty yellow foam collecting at its edge. Strangers driving by on the turnpike rolled up their windows at the gagging, sulfurous smell and wondered how anyone could live with that kind of stench coming from the river and the mill. 

 These opening words also tell us that these characters live in a world that stinks —- as well as being ugly, uncomfortable, and toxic. And that negativity never lets up except for a few pleasant days of Spring when the above tryst takes place. (BTW - one page after he dampens his finger, the lovers are discovered and that dead brown snake reappears. The erotica in this novel is quite brief.)

 This place is nasty and it’s people culturally deprived. Curiosity, wonder, and creativity do not live here. The happiest person is Fat Bev whose moments of satisfaction are primarily bowel movements. The local Congregational Church has set a standard for propriety, not inspiration. The only excitement comes from forbidden sex - and what could be more illicit than the molestation of children. Is this fascination really typical of small town, rural Americans? It sure seems to obsess the folks who live in the MAGA echo chamber. 

 It’s beginning to appear that this will be a standard melodrama of an intelligent, sensitive young person trying to escape a stultifying world of poverty, ignorance, and to top it off, sexual exploitation 

 Young Amy had an unexplained attraction to the poetry of Edna St, Vincent Millay - perhaps because they both grew up in rural Maine, raised by an impoverished single mother. But Amy is puzzled by the poems and we may assume knew nothing of the poet. She requires Mr. Robertson’s intervention to begin using a dictionary to look up words she does not recognize. She’s not been serious student, - but neither is she a giddy, empty headed teenager who follows fads and seeks conformity. Because of her single mother, she’s an outcast in this small community of farmers and mill workers. Her only friend is Stacy, a ferociously alienated girl who had been adopted at birth by a psychiatrist and his wife.

 Isabelle is her serious, responsible mother. She’s told everyone that she’s a widow. That’s possible, but the narrator has left even her marriage unconfirmed. She diligently aims to please everyone - including her daughter- for whose sake she tries to read great literature, and failing at Shakespeare, can relate to Flaubert by weeping. We can expect a generation gap as she precedes the feminine liberation of the emerging boomers like Amy. 

 The big mystery here is Mr. Robertson whose interior life, or even first name, is not yet shared by the narrator. His behavior is illegal - as well as irresponsible and reprehensible, at least by American standards. Yet he appears genuinely moved by mathematics as well as literature - he’s no dolt. Is he just a smart, lonely man attracted to a girl much like himself- or is he a serial sexual predator ? The progression of their sexual interaction is more detailed than any other kind of interpersonal relationship between them. Their love making does feel rather distant. Amy never mentions his first name, and as she's fondled, thinks of him as “wonderful man”. Meanwhile, he mentions, more than once, how “horny” she is. This does sound more like they’re both into lust more than affection.

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Beleek porcelain creamer

( probably the only thing of beauty in Isabelle’s house, it once belonged to her grandmother, but got smashed to bits  when Avery Clark and his wife “forgot” to stop over for cake)

 And then the second half of the novel is quite different. 

Isabel gies front and center - while Amy becomes a dopey teenager. No more interstbin poetry, she’s  desperately lonely and fixated on  Mr. Robertson. When Isabel finds community with the women in the mill, she finally reveals and accepts her own real story: she’s not a widow at all, she was sexually abused by her father’s best friend and Amy was the consequence. Things start looking up as the hot summer cools off, Amy meets her father’s other children, Isabelle stops fantasizing about her boss, and eventually will marry the kindly pharmacist who dispenses Valium.

The story is a feminist melodrama for educated women ( the ones who don’t read Reader’s Digest), with anger towards the patriarchy and contempt for the backwards small town America that enables it. All men are oafs or worse. But the text appears to have been written forward and backward many times - arranged and then rearranged in a non-chronological order. One example: we’re told that Amy loves Fat Bev long before the passages about Mr. Robertson coming to town. But the story of Amy and Bev first meeting comes just two pages after Robertson reaches up Amy's legs. ( and Fat Bev, loves sex as much as candy - or, at least she did when first married) It’s that intensity of the writer’s involvement that makes the book so irresistible, There’s a precision to the patchwork dribbling out of information about each character that makes each scene so gripping. 

 Some of the little scenes  stand oui nicely as vignettes - like Amy watching the birth movie at Stacy’s house , and then walking home through the woods by the river. Or Isabelle fretting over whether to invite the boss and wife over for desert, and then, regretfully, going through with it. And the story is nicely tied together with the ever present weather as it progresses through the season. 

 But the dominance of feminist ideology gives this “Out Town"  kind of story a very narrow, politicized view. It’s a vertible encyclopedia of male bad behavior. Women are murdered, objectified, abandoned, exploited. Even the minister of the Congregational church was finally revealed to have been abusing his daughter.

 The story is set in the mid sixties - “hippies” have already entered the conversation - but Amy and Stacy have nothing to do with rock music - and indeed music is not mentioned at all except for the church organ. This imaginary American  town is a cultural desert. and as the novel made clear from the very first sentence, the reader is being lowered into a stinking cess pool. 

 A great novel? I don’t think so. But certainly fun to read!

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Most reviews center in the mother/daughter relationship suggested by the title,  but this story is  really all about Isabelle , and her finally coming to terms with the arc of her life.  She’s a strong, brave person who finally stops trying to control her life by sabotaging it.