New novel about Lizzie Borden is a bloody good read
More than 100 years before the O. J. Simpson murder trial, the case of Lizzie Borden fascinated the public, generating a famous folk rhyme and a stream of songs and stories and speculation that endures to this day. Christina Ricci gave a chilling portrayal of the accused murderess in the wacky Lifetime 2015 series The Lizzie Borden Chronicles.
Now Australian author Sarah Schmidt continues the tradition with her debut novel See What I
Have Done (Atlantic Monthly Press, 328 pp., out of eeeg four), a taut, lyrical account of the destruction of the Borden family, both through ax murder and subtler means.
The book opens in Lizzie’s point of view, shortly after the brutal murders of her father and stepmother, Andrew and Abby Borden, on the morning of Aug. 4, 1892, in Fall River, Mass: “He was still bleeding. I yelled, ‘Someone’s killed Father.’ I breathed in kerosene air, licked the thickness from my teeth. The clock on the mantel ticked ticked.”
Lizzie sends the housekeeper, Bridget, to fetch the doctor, and sends a telegram to her sister, Emma, who’s been staying with a friend in nearby Fairhaven: “A terrible accident. Come home.”
The novel alternates between four first-person narrators — Lizzie, Emma, Bridget and Benjamin, a drifter hired by the sisters’ scheming uncle John to cause mayhem in the family. Most of the action takes place across two days, Aug. 3 and Aug. 4, and using these four points of view, Schmidt paints a picture of a house in crisis, stroke by violent stroke.
Andrew and Abby prove themselves eminently murderable, while Lizzie and Emma carry on an unhealthy co-dependent sibling relationship. Bridget sums it up best: “Whole bloody family was crazy.” Lizzie does not take credit for the murders — Schmidt makes clear that pretty much every character has some motive — but ax murderer or not, she emerges as a mesmerizing villainess. She’s spoiled and tyrannical, a 32-year-old woman who demands treats from the housekeeper (Bridget brings her thimbles of sugar), who tries to control her sister’s life and throws tantrums when she doesn’t get her way.
She sees Emma’s furlough in Fairhaven as an abandonment (“Lizzie had slammed her bedroom door, had screamed, ‘You’re not leaving me here alone with them’ ”), and it suits Lizzie perfectly well that the murders force her sister to come back.
Her eerie voice makes for intense, dizzying reading, conveying the corrupt atmosphere of the house, the suffocating sense of wrongness every character seems to feel under the skin.
It’s a relief when the other characters take over — even Benjamin, a menacing man who spends much of the novel skulking around and lying in wait — even though Lizzie is ever present. “(She) had grown gigantic,” says Emma. “I would wake with my sister in my mouth, hair strands, a taste of sour milk, like she was possessing me.”
Schmidt inhabits each of her narrators with great skill, channeling their anxieties, their viciousness, with what comes across as (frighteningly) intuitive ease.
Everything about Schmidt’s novel is hauntingly, beautifully off. It’s a creepy and penetrating work, even for a book about Lizzie Borden.