The Search Angel’s quest worth following
Adoption tale succeeds despite a flat heroine
Tish Cohen’s latest offering, The Search Angel, opens with a prologue that details — briefly, poignantly — what it might feel like to give up a child.
It’s 1969 and the mother, Isabelle, is at her lowest point. Leaking breasts, aching heart, a baby she did not look upon wrenched from her womb moments before. There are likely few things more painful than giving up a child, and Cohen fearlessly dives into this agony within the first few pages of the novel.
“Don’t look at the baby, not even for a second,” the hospital chaplain tells Isabelle. “If you do, you’ll see that face every morning for the rest of your life. You’ll never move on.”
But Isabelle can’t resist, and down the hall she goes, to press her nose against glass, to regret it almost instantly and to be emotionally marked for life by the way her son looked in the bassinet.
The chaplain was right. She returns to her room, gets dressed, leaves the hospital and lights a cigarette. As a reader, you can see her walking, “out into night air that smells like water.” It’s a bold, evocative scene, and Cohen at her best.
Fast-forward to presentday Boston, where a woman named Eleanor Sweet is rushing around her apartment, attempting to rally the troops — her Great Dane, Angus, and her husband, Jonathan. Eleanor and Jonathan are supposed to be on their way to the airport where they will fly to California and pick up the infant daughter they are adopting. Except Jonathan has cold feet.
He refuses to come out of the bathroom and, when he finally does, admits he’s not ready for this. Also, he’s just not that into the relationship now that he’s not the centre of Eleanor’s attention. Then he leaves.
This moment marks the beginning of Eleanor’s quest to change her life. She was adopted herself and has always been haunted by a fear of abandonment. She has also been tormented by her infertility, a problem she hoped was solved when she gained the right to adopt little Sylvie.
Now, her future maternal happiness is threatened by the absence of her husband (single parents just aren’t as attractive to adoption agencies), and she spirals downward. It doesn’t help that the potential loss of Sylvie, as well as her own barrenness, is highlighted daily by the fact that she runs a children’s boutique called Pretty Baby that caters to happy, pregnant women all day.
Eleanor is repeatedly described as precise and selfprotected, and this is one place where I felt Cohen could have placed more trust in her reader. Because of Eleanor’s fears — of getting hurt, of getting left — she dresses in layers and layers of clothes that she tries to pass off as fashionable but are really just armour. Unfortunately, these layers get way too much play. I almost wanted to whisper into the pages at certain points, “I get it, she’s scared, please stop describing her outfits.”
Other characters seem to come off the page more naturally. Ginny, Eleanor’s assistant at the shop, is a harried mother of three boys with twins on the way who starts reading a dogrearing manual in an attempt to cope with her ever-growing “pack.”
Isabelle, the mother from the novel’s start, turns out to be the “search angel” Eleanor eventually employs to help find her birth mother. Isabelle is a pleasure in every scene she graces. Maggie Smith would play her in a movie and her one-liners are nothing short of brilliant (“I always suspected it, but now I know for sure; being outside of Beacon Hill is nothing short of camping.”).
Then there’s Noel, the unwashed hero who moves into the store next door and proceeds to play Bohemian Rhapsody at all hours as loud as possible, because apparently that song has everything one needs to properly test out music store speakers. (Who knew?)
Up against these vibrant characters, Eleanor can be strangely flat, regardless of how much time is spent explaining how deep her emotions run and why she needs to wear a cape. Still, this book delivers exactly what has come to be expected from a writer with the storytelling talent Cohen so effortlessly displays in her every effort. With smart, redolent writing, Cohen has delivered another winner.