Volume 42, Number 18 · November 16, 1995
Story of X
By Joyce Carol Oates
In the Cut
by Susanna Moore
Knopf, 180 pp., $21.00
Susanna Moore is the author of three previous novels, set for the most part in her native Hawaii: My Old Sweetheart (1982), The Whiteness of Bones (1989), and Sleeping Beauties (1993). Each is a novel of substance and achievement in the fullest Hawthornian sense—rich with 'minute fidelity' to the socially ambiguous, physically seductive world, narrated with sensitivity and intelligence by young women who have broken with their mesmerizing pasts. Of the three, My Old Sweetheart is perhaps the most delicately realized, an elegiac reminiscence of an island childhood passed under the spell of the narrator's charismatic but mentally unstable mother, who eventually kills herself. My Old Sweetheart is one of those elusive, shimmering works of fiction, bold, impressionistic, subtle, and mysterious, that resist paraphrase and summary, like Marilynne Robinson's equally haunting first novel, House-keeping; like the prose of Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, the early stories of Eudora Welty. One is reminded too of Jean Rhys's master-piece Wide Sargasso Sea, with its obsessive lyricism and mounting dread. The poisoned paradise of subtropical islands, for those of white skin! My Old Sweetheart evolves into something of a mystery as the narrator searches for her eccentric physician-father who seems to have disappeared into Cambodia as a medical relief worker, but the mystery is never resolved.
Review, 2463 words
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