“The Lace Reader” review
by V.E. on September 18th, 2009
filed under recap/review
A friend gave me The Lace Reader, by Brunonia Barry, about a month ago when I mentioned that I had spent the last semester studying The Unreliable Narrator. “Read it,” she said, “I couldn’t put it down.” I didn’t want to tell her that I had just escaped from unreliable narrator hell, and I didn’t want to go back anytime soon. But, she’s a friend, so I took the book with the promise to read it and get back to her. As I had other commitments, I didn’t even bother picking it up until this week (though it had been on my official ‘to do’ list since last week).
I finished the book I was reading, and I’ve found that starting a book is the worst part, so I told myself, “It’s now or never.” I (figuratively) girded my loins and opened The Lace Reader. The first chapter begins with, “My name is Towner Whitney. No, that’s not exactly true. My real first name is Sophya. Never believe me. I lie all the time.” I sighed. This could either be really good… or really not. At least she knows she’s unreliable, right?
Well, if time spent reading is any indication of how good it is, it’s a good book. I read it in just under 24 hours, with time for sleeping, eating, and other nonsense. It was worth reading, and it’s going to be difficult reviewing the book without spoiling the ending. Admittedly, it’s not something I’d have picked up on my own, but I keep telling myself I need to read more fiction, so this is a good start. (Maybe I should just ask for suggestions from now on?)
Towner lives in southern California, but when her great aunt Eva goes missing in her hometown of Salem, Massachusetts, she heads home to help find her. While she’s there, another woman disappears, and everything Towner knew—or thought she knew—begins to unravel at the seams. Towner is from a family of women who can read the future in lace patterns, even though she herself refuses to read lace as a fortune teller. Each chapter begins with a few lines from a book Eva wrote before she disappeared, “The Lace Reader’s Guide”. The part before chapter 17 says, “No two Readers will ever see the same images in the lace. What is seen is determined entirely by perspective” (pg. 179). Chapter 22′s snippet reads, “In reading the lace, there is no wrong answer. Even so, is it easy to receive wrong results, simply by asking the wrong question” (pg. 305).
Although it seems to revolve around lace, there is very little actual lace reading in The Lace Reader. I’m not even sure who the title character is, since Towner doesn’t read lace (or maybe that’s something she’s lying about? More on lying in a second…) and Eva, Towner’s great aunt, is only present in Towner’s memories for the majority of the novel. May, Towner’s biological mother who lives on Yellow Dog Island, is also a lace reader, but she doesn’t seem to be important enough to be a title character. Lyndley, Towner’s twin sister, is also only in Towner’s memories since she died before the beginning of the novel, and she doesn’t stand out as the title character, either. But, in the end, it doesn’t really matter. Everything in Towner’s world falls apart anyway.
Now, as for the lying thing. Towner admits in the novel’s first paragraph that she “lie[s] all the time.” I kept that in mind while reading, but it never seemed like she was lying. That is, by the end, I knew she wasn’t telling the truth, but I still didn’t think she was lying. I know, at first glance “not telling the truth = lying”, but that’s not necessarily true, and I’ll tell you why. Shortly after telling me, the reader, not to believe anything she says, Towner says, “I am a crazy woman… That… part is true.” And by the end, it’s clear that she’s struggling with mental illness, and that the way she portrayed things was wrong, but I never got the impression she was lying. She wasn’t deliberately deceiving me, and that’s an important distinction for me. I believe it’s possible to believe something so deeply that you know it’s true. And then, something happens that makes your belief wrong and your world is rocked; you don’t know which way is up and you’re lost. You know there’s going to be some serious soul searching happening, if nothing else. But that doesn’t mean that, when you were telling other people about your belief, you were lying when you told it to them. You’re only lying if you discover you’re wrong and continue to believe it. If that happens, you’re lying even to yourself.
Now, all that said, it’s still unclear how much of what Towner relates is true and how much is her own fiction. Towner narrates the beginning chapters in first person. It switches in chapter 14 to third person omniscient (though the “omniscient” isn’t strictly clear). Then back to Towner’s perspective in chapter 19 and 20. Something strange happens in part 3, which is between chapters 20 and 21. Towner was hospitalized for psychiatric observation in 1980, and part 3 is a “short” story (it’s more than 60 pages!) she wrote while she was confined there. It serves to characterize Lyndley better and explain her death. The way the writing flowed from present (end of chapter 20) to past (all of part 3) like it did was actually pretty slick—kudos to the author for that—but I’m not sure what the point of the short story was except to explain Towner’s relationship to her sister and a few other minor characters. I’d be interested to have someone read just that section, since (in theory) it’s supposed to stand on its own, and tell me what they think of it. After part 3, the writing goes back to Towner’s first person perspective or third person omniscient until the end of the novel.
A review this long already, and I haven’t even gotten to the town, the witches, the antagonist, the Circle, or the love interests. The town is Salem, Massachusetts. The author, Brunonia Barry, lives there and—to her credit—does a good job of laying out the streets, statues, museums, and tourists for a person who’s never been there. Her descriptions were enough that if I had ever been, I’d know what she was talking about but not so much that I got bogged down in scenery and space. It’s not a travelogue—I didn’t get an overt sense of place from the rough sketches, but it was enough to let my imagination fill in the details for me. (For the purposes of this review, I’m assuming that “space” is a physical area with which I have no familiarity, like visiting a city for the first time, and “place” is a physical area in which I feel at home, like my hometown. I can get around without thinking about it in a “place” but not in a “space”, for example.)
And what would Salem be without the witches?—Notwithstanding, of course, that there were no witches there originally (which is something Barry points out more than once in the novel itself). Towner’s great aunt, Eva, has the distinction of having the unofficial title of “Salem’s most eccentric woman” which—in Salem—is equivalent to winning the Olympics or something, I’m sure. She’s not a witch, but they claim her nonetheless, as she has a tendency to befriend the underdog. At one point, Ann Chase, “with the exception of Laurie Cabot… the most famous witch in Salem” (pg. 59), tells Towner that Eva was her friend before it was fashionable to be seen with her. The same goes for Rafferty, but I’ll get to him in a minute. Generally speaking, the witches in the novel are there to balance the antagonist and his followers.
The primary antagonist is Cal Boynton and his fanatical group of followers, the Calvinists. He preaches hellfire and damnation in an Armani suit. Eva and May both have restraining orders out on him, but it’s Eva’s daughter, Emma, who was married to the man, even though he beat her. When Lyndley and Towner were born, May gave Lyndley to Emma because she was barren and May “had an extra”… I learned as I read that, before she died, Lyndley and Cal also had a less-than-stellar relationship (and that’s putting it mildly). His group of fanatics include a schizophrenic who dreamed that he was the reincarnation of John the Baptist and other fanatical characters who have nothing left in life, it seems, than to harass the witches and make trouble for abused women.
The Circle is a group of women and children living with May on Yellow Dog Island. They took their name from old fashioned women’s sewing circles, but many people people that they are a coven of witches. (They’re not.) They make lace using bones for bobbins and thread from the golden retrievers that run wild on the island. (It’s not called Yellow Dog Island for nothing, after all.) It seems to be May’s calling to take in abused women and their children and rehabilitate them, and the island is a good place to do it; if the docking ramp is pulled up, it’s nearly impossible to land without drowning or smashing against the rocks along the island cliffs. It only becomes clear why May is so invested as the story progresses.
Towner’s primary love interests are Jack, a townie, and Rafferty, the police detective in charge of Eva’s missing person report. On the one hand, I can understand the need for Jack; Towner tells the reader that he was in love with Lyndley (and even, at one point, asked her to marry him) before she died. He also went out with Towner, after Lyndley moved to southern California to be with her mother, Emma, and Cal, against Eva and May’s wishes. He’s an important character because Lyndley is an important character, and he seems to represent Towner’s past. Rafferty, on the other hand, is important because he’s the detective assigned to Eva’s case after she goes missing. He and Towner build a rapport, but it doesn’t feel like they need to. I mean, he is enough of a character without also apparently falling in love with Towner. Their romantic interaction—for me, at least—just detracted from the main story. I kept wanting to skip over the scenes that built their relationship because they seemed somewhat forced and generally unnecessary.
The end is extremely well set up. I don’t want to give it away, but suffice to say that it made me want to immediately reread the entire novel to see if I could find more clues hinting at its end. I did reread sections with a new understanding of what was actually happening (which brings me back to Towner not-really-lying). And, as Eva tells Towner early in the book, “There are no accidents” (pg. 44). The Lace Reader began as a dream, Brunonia Barry admits, and I’m glad that it turned out much better than other books I’ve read with a similar genesis (coughTwilightcough). Definitely worth the read.
If nothing else, when reading Barry’s debut novel, remember this:
Out of the chaos and the swirling of pattern, the images will begin to emerge. The first will appear at the still point. These are the Guides. The lace Reader must use the Guides to move past the still point and beyond the veil. Beware of images that emerge at this place. They are not real. The Guides are tricksters. They will show you their magic and invite you to linger. If they are able and the Seeker is vulnerable, the Guides will fool you into believing that they themselves are the answer. Their egos are great. The Reader must resist the urge to allow the Seeker to rest here, no matter how captivating the images seem, or how true. It is the Lace Reader’s job to move the Seeker past the still point to the real truth, which lies not within the veil but just beyond.
—The Lace Reader’s Guide (pg. 283 of The Lace Reader)
What is the psychatric history of this author? Her knowledge of psych illness is to real!