Pinkerton's Sister - Softcover

Rushforth, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1931561990 ISBN 13: 9781931561990

Publisher: MacMurray & Beck, 2005

Synopsis

In a novel that celebrates the power of fiction and its ultimate redeeming quality, Alice Pinkerton transports those who belittle her into her own secretly written books where they are forced to reveal their true natures, in a novel set against the backdrop of turn-of-the-century New York.

About this title

About the Author

PETER RUSHFORTH is the author of Kindergarten. A former schoolteacher, he lives in North Yorkshire, England.

Reviews

Elvis Costello once remarked, more or less, that you get 19 years to make your first album and 12 months to make your second. The same holds true for publishing, where successful first-time novelists are expected to crank out sophomore efforts within a year. (If Book No. 2 tanks, you generally can take the rest of your life writing No. 3.) Pinkerton's Sister, the second novel by the English writer Peter Rushforth, arrives a cool 25 years after his acclaimed debut, Kindergarten. That first book was a slender volume -- less than 200 pages -- a controlled, harrowing take on "Hansel and Gretel," filtered through an account of Holocaust survivors and late-20th-century terrorism.

At first glance, Pinkerton's Sister, which clocks in at 729 pages, 235,000 words and 2.4 pounds, seems to have little in common with its trim older sibling. But like Kindergarten -- whose protagonist is an illustrator of children's books, and which is filled with references to children's literature and fairy tales -- the new work is a book filled with other books.

Rushforth's novel, the first of a projected quartet, has a clever conceit -- the Pinkerton of the title is Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, called Ben, who grows up to be "Madame Butterfly's" callow young Lt. B.F. Pinkerton. Ben is recalled as a child for most of Rushforth's novel, which takes place in 1903, during the course of a single day in the life of Pinkerton's 34-year-old sister Alice, who is contemplating a return visit to the Webster Nervine Asylum in Poughkeepsie, upriver from the childhood home in New York City in which she still lives.

Alice is "the madwoman in the attic" -- though she wryly notes, "It should rightly have been called the nursery . . . but she had started to call it the schoolroom when she was a girl, after reading . . . about lonely governesses and grand houses . . . . it was the image that remained: the picture of a young woman going out into the world to make her way alone, sitting in a chair made for someone the size of a child, surrounded by the possessions of others, writing letters home." Like Jane Eyre's, Alice's "home was memory and imagination, her search for someone to love, and these she carried about within her." But Alice has never set out into the world to make her way alone. Her life has been circumscribed by her house and the surrounding (fictional) neighborhood of Longfellow Park. Mostly, however, Alice's life has been defined by reading, and books are what shape the baggy, often brilliant but overlong and overwritten Pinkerton's Sister -- I counted 17 literary references in the first eight pages alone, ranging from Jane Eyre to The Princess and the Goblin.

Alice is one of three daughters named for the sisters in Longfellow's "The Children's Hour," but her own childhood was anything but idyllic. She is the victim of abuses that may or may not have been precisely sexual in nature but were certainly fetishistic, and the unhappy witness to her father's sexual exploitation of the household's servant, Annie, whom she adores. Not surprisingly, Alice is haunted by notions of revenge, obsessive, brooding, impelled by violent impulses that she (mostly) doesn't act upon. Enamored of things both Grimm and grim, she is a bibliophile in the same way that the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" is an oenophile. She imagines violent acts involving cutlery, hammers nails into her dolls' heads until they splinter, and pictures herself as "the guest denied access to all homes, a woman beyond the pale of decent society, and everyone shrank from her defiling presence."

Fortunately, she is not completely denied access to the outside world. One of the book's best set pieces involves Alice's experience as a model for a statue illustrating "The Children's Hour," wherein she is slowly, eerily encased in plaster -- a masterful evocation of the entombment of an intelligent woman's mind and body. There are also hilarious accounts of the loopily philistine culture-vulture manquée Mrs. Albert Comstock, and the awful alienist Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster, who subjects Alice to every form of medical torment at his disposal, from hydrotherapy to hypnotism to crude treatments involving the interpretation of clouds and dreams.

Yet even these are digressions in a maddeningly digressive narrative.

The fictional consciousness that streams through Pinkerton's Sister is compelling but often tedious and not very likable -- less the madwoman in the attic than the smarty-pants in the classroom. Amiability, of course, is not the best measure of a memorable fictional character: More than anyone else, the young Alice is reminiscent of another prickly, precocious know-it-all girl -- Louie, the protagonist of Christina Stead's masterpiece The Man Who Loved Children.

Still, the narrative heart of Pinkerton's Sister is what befalls Alice and Annie at the hands of Alice's father and the frightening figure known only as "Papa's 'friend.' " This story, with its sinister echoes of the gothic tales that Alice loves, and a nightmarish, beautifully written denouement set during a blizzard, should have been freed from some of the wads of paper that surround it. Pinkerton's Sister is a very fine novel, at once sprawling and intimate, and blessed with long gorgeous passages worthy of Henry James; but one senses always the greater book imprisoned inside it, like poor mad Alice trapped within her plaster shroud.

Reviewed by Elizabeth Hand
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Rushforth's pyrotechnic second novel (appearing 25 years after the publication of his acclaimed debut, Kindergarten) seeks to capture, in one day, the play of forces—literary, musical, medical and sexual—that made Edwardian New York society. At the center is Alice Pinkerton, nearly 35-year-old "spinster," the "madwoman in the attic" of Longfellow Park. Actually, she is not confined to an attic: she writes, goes to church and takes care of her mother. But these details are almost hidden in the deluge of Alice's inner life flowing over these pages, with a richness comparable to Leopold Bloom's in Ulysses. Alice, it appears, suffers from hypertrophy of childhood memories and a consequent emotional vacancy of adult experience. Does it stem from her discovery, at 20, of the body of her father, who committed suicide in his study? Perhaps the real key to Alice's condition goes back to twinned mysteries: the disappearance of her beloved childhood maid, and the source of her hatred for her father. Alice's fantasies and musings are stuffed with references to Shakespeare, 19th-century novels and poetry (particularly Stevenson's The Children's Hour, which exerts a surprisingly sinister influence in her life), opera and popular music; these are both buffers against reality and a means of mythologizing her neighbors. The flaw is that Rushforth has created no character in the book to counterbalance Alice; you sometimes feel that, in this mansion of a novel, you are locked in a small crowded closet.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Rushforth's second novel, which took him twenty-five years to write, is set in Edwardian New York and takes place on a single day, largely in the avid mind of its heroine, Alice Pinkerton, a bibliophilic spinster with a stammer and a penchant for dressing in white. Something of a cross between Harriet the Spy and Jane Eyre, she passes her days devising ways to expose "the humorless of Longfellow Park," as epitomized by her nemesis, the dowager Mrs. Albert Comstock. She is regarded, unsurprisingly, as the neighborhood eccentric and undergoes various period cures, like hypnotism. Rushforth weaves Alice's often fantastical musings together with bits of the classics, popular novels, doggerel, and even advertisements for dentures and corsets. Although the author's reliance on allusion occasionally shades into the merely curatorial, his novel constitutes an epic inquiry into literature's role as an engine of interior life.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Rushford's debut novel, Kindergarten, made quite a stir when it was published in 1979, but readers had to wait until now for a follow-up. His new work is a large, sprawling stream-of-conscious novel set primarily in the head of Alice Pinkerton at the dawn of the twentieth century. Alice isn't yet ready for the new age; she's a vestige of Victorian times, a "madwoman" living on the third floor (not in the attic, she insists) of her family's home. "No one was as close to her as words on a page," Alice muses, and indeed, she relates more to characters from the novels of George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, and Charles Reade than to the people who surround her, especially the thoroughly modern socialite Mrs. Albert Comstock, who represents everything Alice hates. Alice's doctor, who seeks to cure her of her "malady," proclaims, "Imagination is an impediment to progress." For Alice, there's no more chilling sentiment. Though Victoriana and stream-of-conscious style is an odd mix, literary readers will want to take note of this ambitious, fascinating novel. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: MacMurray & Beck
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1931561990
• ISBN 13: 9781931561990
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 727