BOOKS
A GOOD WINTER
by Gigi Fenster
Text Publishing — $38
Alarm bells may be set off by the first few lines of this novel: “The baby, Michael, grew healthy and strong. Strong enough to be difficult. Strong enough to have tantrums … And it wasn’t so bad for the baby’s mother either. Lara’s daughter, Sophie. It wasn’t so bad for her.” The incantatory, repetitive prose could mean we are in for a wodge of sub-Stein/Hemingway mannerisms. Especially when followed up with … rhyme? “With her nose all red. Used tissues scattered all over the bed. Crying and dripping tears all over the baby. It couldn’t have been good for him. Trying to suckle while his mother’s tears dripped all over his head.”
But this is not a sign of things to come. Fenster, through her deeply troubling narrator Olga, soon settles into a confident, suspenseful and ultimately extremely satisfying groove. The repetition is justified by being psychologically appropriate, to show how Olga and people with her mindset use it to convince themselves that their reality is true.
Other influences are at work: Daphne du Maurier and the passive aggression of Mrs Danvers in ; Charles Dickens and the self-serving obsequiousness of Uriah Heep. There’s a bit of film noir, with the superficially pleasant villain, and some Victorian melodrama with the new mother effectively an invalid confined to her bed. These genres have always been connected, and Fenster synthesises them anew in a pleasing fashion.
