Book of the week
Reviewed by Sarah Chandler
Told in the first person in a direct, almost clinical style, Sisters presents scenes from a second wife’s interior life, with its attendant anxieties and complications. For example, the first wife (referred to throughout the book only as she); the teenage step children; the trustworthiness of the husband (whose infidelity arguably put the new relationship on unstable ground to start with); and the knowledge that the narrator has joined this family after her husband’s 20 years of marriage to someone else.
Lily Tuck has taken the book’s title and theme from Christopher Nicholson’s Winter, a fictionalised account of Thomas Hardy’s unrequited love for his muse Gertrude Bugler, where first and second wives are described as ‘‘sisters’’ of sorts. The narrator of Sisters points out the many instances when a man would marry his dead wife’s younger sister – so called sororate marriages – citing examples such as Jane Austen’s brother Charles, and the painter John Collier.
Although the narrator and she (the first wife) are not blood relations (in fact, they barely know each other) they are nevertheless tied to each other through their respective relationships with the husband, an “incurious” New York investment banker about whom we learn very little. (While obviously essential to the plot, he seems quite incidental to the story).
Throughout the narrator’s monologue of confidences, the two womens’ physical traits and talents are compared and contrasted, “She is blonde, fair skinned, big boned and taller than I …. I am dark and petite. She’s a Pisces, I am a Gemini. She was musical … I have a tin ear. She likes cats … I love dogs.” The second wife also drafts a couple of letters to the first which go unsent. She phones her a few times then hangs up, and occasionally grocery shops in her neighbourhood across town.
Although it is easy to say Sisters is about jealousy, rivalry and living in the shadow of a first wife, perhaps Tuck is trying to get at something a bit more ambiguous than that ie, the often deep curiosity people who have an intractable connection via a third party have about each other. The two women in this story don’t know, and perhaps can never know, each other yet they are bound for life by circumstance. Not sisters exactly, but certainly a sorority of sorts.
Given its lack of clear narrative and haphazard impressionistic style, the twist at the end of Sisters is interesting and unexpected. And at about 150 (mostly half-written) pages, you can knock Tuck’s seventh novel off comfortably in one sitting.