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Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather ReviewFrom the opening paragraph, a woman's description of being struck by lightning, the reader of this book learns to expect the unexpected-and gets it. Dorcas Mather, the narrator, is a librarian in Frome, Rhode Island, who quietly catalogues books while a hurricane bears down on the town. Fortified with some scotch she has brought for the occasion, she is bent on cataloguing one particular book, her own personal "hurricane"--entitled In the Driver's Seat: The Abigail Mather Story by her twin sister, Abigail Mather, and a ghostwriter, Hilda DeVilbiss. With delightful mockery of the book publishing process, Dorcas reveals that this book is making her sister into a national heroine for not only surviving her "marital horror" but for doing something about it.
Exaggerated, over-the-top paragraphs from the novel written by Abigail and Hilda alternate with Dorcas's iconoclastic and sometimes cynical tales about the real Abigail, as the dual history of the Mather sisters unfolds. Because the narrative moves back and forth between the events as told in Abigail's book and Dorcas's much later reflections on these events, the plot is not linear. The reader learns in the first twenty-five pages that Abigail has committed a "savage act of assertive self-realization," otherwise known as murder, but it is the circumstances which led to the murder and the divergent views and lifestyles of Abigail and Dorcas which provide the interest and intrigue for the reader. As Dorcas tells us, "Abigail and I divided up the world. Sacred and profane. Spiritual and physical. Mind and body." Abigail, sexually liberated since the age of 14, is, according to Dorcas, an "amoral exhibitionist." Dorcas, by contrast, "knows what it feels like...to experience desire," but she has rejected it completely, finding love-making "ridiculous."
The novel is a light, breezy, and often satiric send-up of New England values, the literary life, family interdependencies, our pre-occupation with "self-image," and the cruelties we humans perpetrate upon each other. Firmly rooting the novel in its Rhode Island setting, with its storms, hurricanes, and blizzards racing up the Atlantic coast, author Jincy Willett recreates the tumults and storms of her characters' daily lives, leavening the action with humor at the same time that her characters both create and meet their own disasters. Uncomplicated in its plot and simple in themes, the novel chooses to amuse and entertain rather than provide new insights for the reader. It is a lively look at two peculiar sisters, whose opposing views of life and conflicting values may not seem so peculiar in the end. Mary Whipple
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