Marriage is neither heaven nor hell; it is simply purgatory.—Abraham Lincoln

SEA WIFE by Amity Gaige

I found a new favorite writer. Sea Wife had been sitting on the TBR pile all summer. I don’t know what I expected, but it blew me away. The writing is outstanding. The opening line in the novel: Where does a mistake begin? sets the tone for the story of Juliet and Michael, who set sail on a year-long journey around the Caribbean with their children, ages seven and two. The marriage is on autopilot before the adventure begins, so when nautical troubles arise, the couple’s ailing relationship veers into dangerous waters—both literally and figuratively. Juliet tells the reader, “I did not know what the sea would ask of me.” In Gaige’s expert hands, by the end, the reader understands why the journey was necessary. 

Favorite line(s): Too many to list, but here’s one: After Georgie, something had changed in our marriage, and there was nowhere solid to put the blame. We were almost forty, and simultaneously our marriage had—I don’t know—thickened, agglutinated, become oatmeal-like. Differences between us that had once provided sparks now seemed inefficient. Was there love? Yes, yes—but at the margins. At the center, there was administration. Michael worked until six or seven p.m. All I wanted by then was a handoff for that final hour. At bath time, both kids in the tub, slippery and hairless, as I tried to keep one or the other from going under, I would whisper, Please come home, come home. The days were long and shadowy, but no matter how well or poorly I felt I had done as a mother, the final hour of the day was the worst. How time dragged at the end of the day. I’d kept the children alive the entire day but feared some unforeseen disaster in the last ten minutes. Sometimes the panic made it hard to breathe. I felt like an Irish lass caught in the fields at dusk with my apron full of potatoes. Should I drop the potatoes, save myself, and run? Or slow my progress by carrying them carefully through the dark woods?

THE FOLDED WORLD by Amity Gaige

As in Sea Wife, Gaige makes a small insular world come alive in her second novel. Her ability to show so much in so few words is again evident in The Folded World. And like Sea Wife, this is a novel about a marriage. Alice and Charlie’s marriage. Idyllic until Charlie, a social worker, takes it upon himself to try to “fix” his clients' problems and Alice, whose perfect day consists of reading a book in a quiet corner, has her world upended at the birth of twin girls. Mania is a theme as the characters exist mainly in their heads, but their innate “goodness” runs parallel to their actions. And like Sea Wife, Gaige doles out suspenseful scenes that thicken the plot. 

Favorite line(s): For there had to be some upshot, didn’t there? There had to be some persuasive reasons to fall in love, or else nobody would do it. Surely love had to hold some secret wonders that he himself was not gifted to see. Perhaps he himself was not desperate enough to find the wonders. Perhaps he himself lacked the gift or the madness or the talent. But if on one could find the way, and we all began to die alone, our brittle, discrete worlds dying with us, surely love itself would have to take pity on someone—one last survivor, one remaining prophet, false or true, to go forth into the next civilization with these rumors of paradise.

O MY DARLING by Amity Gaige 

I listened to an audio version of Gaige’s first novel. I love a good ghost story, and although O My Darling is technically a story of a marriage, it has that “Gaige” quality of ramping up the characters' limits and disappointments in relationship to the “place” they find themselves in. In O My Darling, that is the old yellow house on Quail Hollow Road. Purchased with money left to him after his mother’s suicide, Clark Adair and his wife, Charlotte, begin to hear voices in the house. Is it all in their head—these voices? Or are the ghosts of other unhappy inhabitants lingering in its rooms to show the couple what is possible in their marriage?   

WANT by Lynn Steger Strong

Told in small bites of beautiful prose, Want is the story of a woman who struggles to keep herself sane in a world while struggling to exist in it. Elizabeth and her husband live in a cramped NYC apartment with two young kids. She holds down two teaching jobs while her husband works weekends because they can’t afford childcare. They can’t afford their apartment either and file for bankruptcy. What Elizabeth “wants” is what she believes her estranged best friend, Sasha has. Success, stability, and money. Until she discovers that you cannot know a person’s hurt unless you remove the filters that mask it.  

Favorite line(s): She’s her but not her: bloated, splotched skin, no makeup; her hair up and unkempt; still beautiful. I look down furtively to see if there’s a car seat that I somehow missed, if she brought the baby with her. I look at her abdomen, wondering if the baby was made up. Hey, I say. All that talking, years of reading: There was a time I thought that all language might contain something of value, but most of life is flat and boring, and the things we say are too. Or maybe it’s that most of life is so much stranger than language is able to make room for, so we say the same dad things and hope maybe the who and how of what is said can make it into what we mean.