THE MERMAID CHAIR
By Sue Monk Kidd
Viking. 335 pp. $24.95
Sue Monk Kidd puts together a novel the way a teenage girl blows through a shopping mall, collecting embellishments and accessories with fierce exuberance. In The Secret Life of Bees (2002), her colossally popular first book, Kidd adorned her story of a 14-year-old girl's coming of age with an abusive father and a glamorously dead mother. She added an explosive backdrop of civil-rights-era Southern bigotry as well as a trio of eccentric yet heroic African-American mother-substitutes. Into the narrative she layered many educational passages about beekeeping. And -- most interestingly -- she introduced a creatively reimagined Christianity based on a worship of femininity and motherhood, with an array of attendant icons and rituals including a black Madonna statue, an elaborately scheduled "Mary Day" celebration, a backyard "wailing wall" constructed to absorb both sorrows and wishes, and a fervent belief in the curative properties of honey.
Somehow, while squeezing every last drop of quirky sentimentality from its pages, Kidd's overheated production worked. This was largely because of the engaging voice of the novel's young narrator, Lily Owens, whose droll humor provided a balance when things got too sticky-sweet. Perhaps reluctant to mess with a winning formula, Kidd has given Jessie Sullivan, the protagonist of her second novel, a yearning adolescent sensibility similar to Lily's. The bad news, however, is that Jessie is 42 years old, with none of Lily's sprightliness. While the self-absorbed quest for love in The Secret Life of Bees was appealing, it is catastrophically less so here, where it takes the form of Jessie's dissatisfaction with her 20-year-old marriage and her subsequent affair with an unavailable man.
Summoned suddenly from her Atlanta home to tend to her ailing mother on the small South Carolina barrier island where she grew up, Jessie is glad for the chance to flee her empty nest -- her daughter is comfortably settled at Vanderbilt -- and her handsome but predictable husband, Hugh. Upon reaching Egret Island, however, she's unprepared for the challenge awaiting her. Her "insatiably Catholic" and increasingly disturbed mother, Nelle, has recently chopped off her index finger with a meat cleaver and now rejects assistance from Jessie, from her longtime women friends, and from the Benedictine monks at the monastery next door, whose meals Nelle has been devotedly preparing since the death of Jessie's father 33 years ago.
Fortunately for Jessie, a grand distraction from her mother's declining mental health presents itself in Brother Thomas, a monk-in-training for whom she feels an instant attraction. It isn't long before she's motoring around with him on his boat, exploring the island's egret rookeries and trading personal histories. Inevitably, they end up together in his secret lean-to on a remote inlet, where, according to Jessie, "I unhooked my bra and let it fall down next to his cross." He gazes at her with his denim-colored eyes and murmurs, "I've wanted you from the beginning."
Oh, mercy. The romance that follows is almost too easy to ridicule, with much saucy tossing back of Brother Thomas's cowl, and one after another of Jessie's avowals that "yes, there was transgression and betrayal and wrongness" in her affair, "but also mystery and what felt like holiness, an actual holiness." Jessie's so caught up in this actual holiness, in fact, that she fails to prevent her increasingly ill mother from chopping off yet another finger. And so love-struck is Jessie that she feels only moderately guilty about the pain she is openly inflicting on her good-guy husband, whom she asks for a separation. The price of getting her groove back is steep, Jessie learns, and her petulance grows when she realizes she stands to lose both her husband and her lover, who is soon to take his final vows. For her, this double loss would be nearly as unbearable as the death of her father so many years ago.
If only Jessie had worked out her abandonment issues at age 14, as Lily did in Kidd's previous book, she might have spared readers this embarrassing escapade, narrated deadpan and unleavened by wit. As a distraction, Kidd tries gamely to load her second novel with as many bells and whistles as her first. She fills it full of mermaid lore: The monastery is named for St. Senara, who was said to be a mermaid before her conversion. Its prized possession is a carved "mermaid chair" that is carried around the island in an annual procession and is said to grant wishes to anyone who sits in it. Jessie compares herself to a mermaid, taking "a leap against all proprieties and expectations, but a leap that was somehow saving and necessary."
While Kidd was clearly hoping to make the mermaid as potent a symbol as the bee was in her previous book, instead it has a kitschy, gift-shop feel. All of the religious trappings in The Mermaid Chair" feel hollow here: Brother Thomas is only playacting at being a monk, and while Jessie claims that "falling in love with him had had everything to do with his monkness," she's awfully cavalier about his chastity vow. Where the talismans in The Secret Life of Bees had an eccentric improvisational allure, the ritual symbols here -- a turtle skull, Nelle's relic-like severed fingers, pebbles called "Mermaid's Tears" that are tossed in the water on St. Senara's feast day -- are just plain creepy. In the end, the more-is-more approach that succeeded so audaciously in The Secret Life of Bees can do little to rescue Kidd's new book from its own puerile, waterlogged plot. •
Donna Rifkind reviews regularly for Book World.
