of Therese Belivet, a stage designer trapped in a department-store day job, whose salvation arrives one day in the form of Carol Aird, an alluring suburban housewife in the throes of a divorce. They fall in love and set out across the United States, pursued by a private investigator who eventually blackmails Carol into a choice between her daughter and her lover."
The first word that comes to mind after reading this novel? Odd. A deeply moving book, however far more complex and nuanced than the lesbian romance story that it has been marketed as.
There is an ambiguity to the relationship between the women, between love, obsession, mutual understanding and the projection of fantasies. However it stands apart from other novels of its type in the 50's as it is explicit that these women are more than friends. It allows the women to have a complicated relationship, without it being able to be brushed off as merely "galpals."
However, this book felt more like a character study of Therese, a women so frustratingly passive that she functions more as a narrator than as an actual character at times. The relationship feels more like a first erotic awakening on Therese's part than an actual romantic meeting of souls. Now, this is by no means a bad thing and is actually something I enjoyed about the book. However I feel that this could have been further\better explored by Therese leaving Carol for a women who she could love on both an emotional and physical level.
The writing style is something that really drew me to the novel, easily my favourite part. It is poetic and sensitively written (at times it's almost claustrophobic in its details) and an intriguing portrait of 50's repression, conformity and depression. There where some passages that, despite the time difference, so accurately evoke the feeling of helplessness and claustrophobia of normal life that you only become aware of when you are slightly apart, slightly other. However the road trip section dragged for me, it became repetitive and pointless.
However I just can't sing this books praises. For, while on an intellectual level I could enjoy it, emotionally it was a slog. I can't read Therese as anything but a pathetic petulant child with an obsessive fixation on someone she barely knows. I don't understand the swooning over Carol when, to me, she's written so nebulously that it's almost as if she isn't even present in the novel, let alone present in the relationship with Therese. Possibly that is the point, to show that Therese is more in love with the perceived idea of Carol, rather than the actual person, however this just makes the ending all the more irritating thematically. I find both of them wholly unlikable and unrelatable.
Age Rating 15+. Nothing untoward, however
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