Book of the week
A screenwriter and journalist, Tamara Colchester’s prose is sharp and pithy – perfect for the tension-filled dialogue.
The Heart is a Burial Ground by Tamara Colchester (Scribner) $38 Mommie Dearest, that memoir of troubled mother-daughter relationships penned by movie star Joan Crawford’s daughter, Christina, looms large across the narrative of US author Tamara Colchester’s startling first novel, The Heart is a Burial Ground.
Crawford’s tale of maternal abuse, promiscuity and neglect is in many ways a mirror of Colchester’s plot. In the latter, four women’s intersecting lives are explored: grandmother Caresse Crosby; mother Diana; daughters Elena and Leonie. And while both works are based on influential real people, Colchester’s cast is drawn from the 1920s ‘‘Lost Generation’’ of American writers who relocated to Paris to find themselves.
Crosby and her husband, Harry, founded the seminal Black Sun Press (early publishers of writers such as Ernest Hemingway) and The Heart is a Burial Ground is as much about the excesses of the literary world as it is about the dysfunctions of female familial relationships.
Like Mommie Dearest, it’s a fascinating study of the intimate, everyday lives of its characters. Away from their influential public personas, Caresse, Harry and the rest are convincingly captured as manifestly fractured individuals.
Caresse particularly stands as an exemplar, not of the sadistic, bitter kind of mother who calls into question our belief in the ‘‘maternal’’, but as a woman whose negligent parenting style nevertheless fails to nurture and care for daughter, Diana.
As this becomes Diana’s learned pattern behaviour as she raises her offspring, The Heart is a Burial Ground develops into a deeply thoughtful examination of how the famous often exhibit the same monstrous cruelties as the average sociopath. Essentially, Colchester reminds us, fame is no disinfectant for abuse.
A screenwriter and journalist, Colchester’s prose is sharp and pithy – perfect for the tension-filled dialogue which appears throughout the narrative. Take the opening sentence: ‘‘This is a story about a woman I never met and the lives she created.’’ Power and control of prose; power and control of story.
Additionally, the writing’s lyrical nature offers an intertextual nod to the Lost Generation it characterises, its poetic, cadence and stanza-like chapters pay homage to the poems written by Crosby and his ilk.
For its sumptuous, expressive writing alone, The Heart is a Burial Ground is a must-read. For its stunning, complex exploration of the lives and relationships of women and the literati, it epitomises the best of American writing at the moment.