Not Oprah’s Book Club: Salvage

We’ve got a great guest review from Chelsey Clammer this week. Chelsey is a feminist, queer, and disability rights activist living in Chicago with her partner who wants credit for the ideas in the last sentence of this review. You got it, Marie.
In her debut novel, Jane Kotapish puts the fun back in dysfunctional. The story opens with an unnamed narrator explaining the eccentricities of her childhood: “I named my dead sister Nancy and talked to her in the privacy of my closet for eleven years.� Emerging from the delusion of her best friend/worst enemy/dead sister/imagined ghost relationship, the narrator eventually grows into a generically successful New York City woman. But not all is right in adulthood. In NYC, the narrator witnesses a horrific accident that eventually sends her back to the Virginia countryside to contemplate her life and identity.
In her newly acquired quiet Virginia life, the narrator—now in her 30’s—reacquaints herself with her delusional and idiosyncratic mother, Lois. Ultimately a novel about unconventional mother-daughter relationships, Salvage reveals the ways in which connections can form through peculiar ways. You see, Lois has also taken up talking to imaginary friends. While these friends do not come in the form of the daughter she had a miscarriage with years ago, they do come in the form of Catholic Saints. And eventually both the narrator and the reader start to question if these Saintly friends are actually imagined, or if life is really just that weird. As this delightfully dysfunctional mother-daughter pair navigates their past and present delusions, they learn how to re-adjust their atypical relationship with each other.
My favorite relationship in this wonderfully quirky and poetic novel, however, is the bond that the narrator forms with her next-door neighbor, Edith. As our narrator drinks wine by herself in her enormous Victorian house, she begins to notice the crazed life of the woman who lives across the street with one too many kids, not enough support from her husband, and never enough time to herself. The narrator calls Edith one day when she notices a slight pause in the chaos of Edith’s house:
“I don’t say, I saw you hesitate in the doorframe, you’re lost and half-crazed with fatigue, come keep me company in my neurotic isolation. I say, ‘Hey, looks quiet over there, want some tea?’� As the tea turns into vodkas, these women solidify their friendly love for each other and create a community of support for each other to better deal with their own families.
It is with Kotapish’s lyrical style and understanding of women’s lives and relationships, as well as her approach to detangling the knots of grief and longing in a well-told story that make Salvage amazing. Shifting between the child’s perspective and the woman’s narration, the unnamed narrator is specifically unnamed as tries to connect the pieces of her past in order to understand the fractured person she is now. Smart but simple, Salvage encourages a certain self-reflection of the reader’s past—it is a novel that makes you think about how it is you remember the things you have yet to forget.
–Chelsey Clammer
Next week: I Was Told There’d Be Cake by Sloan Crosley and then Without a Map by Meredith Hall the week after.