Sister - Hardcover

Lewis, Jim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1555971784 ISBN 13: 9781555971786

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 1993

Synopsis

Wilson, a drifter, recounts his relationship with Olivia and her sister, Marian, and the events that drive them apart

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

A John Fowles-like account of a young vagabond who lives secretly in the basement of a rich man's mansion and becomes involved with the man's two daughters. First-novelist Lewis's prose is serviceably lyrical at best, using voyeurism to illuminate dark corners, though it occasionally slides into pretentiousness. Wilson, at 17, leaves his home in Lincoln, Nebraska (``a small, quiet city under a huge blue sky''), to go ``for a walk into the world.'' The story, written in the guise of Wilson's confessions, is at first a picaresque road-saga about an adolescent rather taken with his own image as ``a singular creature, a mooncalf, a monster if you will, equally knocked about and knocking.'' He meets bums, dreams dreams, and eventually becomes a gardener, ``tying saplings to stakes,'' at a wealthy man's mansion that's also inhabited by an unhappy mother and her daughters, Olivia and Marian. Since his own mother left him ``occult powers,'' Wilson soon enough gives up gardening to live in the basement and prowl around, eavesdropping (``I was everywhere in that house, an extra, an unforeseen member of the family''). He becomes Olivia's lover and, once she's pregnant, decides that they're as good as married. But the baby is stillborn, and Olivia leaves for parts unknown. Wilson (``in the soft sentences of my undying memory'') finishes the saga: he takes up with Marian, leafs through Olivia's diary, and then witnesses the complete breakup of the family when the mother leaves the rigid father, something she admits she should have done a long time ago. Wilson's fantasies evaporate: ``...the world I wished for has become extinct.'' Though we sometimes see through the voice, Lewis manages to limn an original world where the usual family unhappiness is described through the obsessive mind of a quirky, aptly chosen narrator. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

Haunting and poetic, this remarkable first novel of teenage love and alienation reimagines The Tempest from Caliban's point of view. Narrator Wilson, a 17-year-old newly arrived from Nebraska in an unnamed Louisiana city, has been an outsider all his life and easily fits into the role of lone observer. Sent by a landscape company to tend the property of a family named Miller, he immediately appropriates their garden as his own and soon, like Caliban, is spying on them--Holiday and Anne, their daughters Marian and Olivia--and living beneath their gazebo. Eventually taking up residence in their basement, he stealthily watches the Millers' dramas and protectively eyes the garden. Then one night he reveals his passion to Olivia; they become lovers and her resulting pregnancy sparks the novel's extreme conclusion in which the Prospero-like Holiday is compelled to destroy the upper-middle-class idyll he has created. Lewis's descriptive language is charged with the complex, enigmatic personality of his narrator, who is far more than just a noble savage--indeed, there is a good deal of Prospero in Wilson as well as in Holiday. ("I'm a magician," the boy declares. "My mother was a witch, a Sycorax of the North Plains.") Delicately balancing moods, the author infuses the novel with a young lover's optimistic sense that anything is possible, yet scatters portents throughout that a happy ending is unlikely.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 1555971784
• ISBN 13: 9781555971786
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 205