UNRAVELLING
By Elizabeth Graver
Hyperion, 298 pages, $22.95
We often encounter cautionary tales about how our children are forced to grow up too quickly, too early. It is easy to forget, therefore, that adolescence is a decidedly 20th Century phenomenon. A century ago, most boys and girls became adults virtually overnight–set to work in fields or factories, getting married and having children about the time when kids today are preparing to take their SATs.
Elizabeth Graver’s beautiful and moving first novel, “Unravelling,” explores the confusion and soul-searching, the aspirations and helplessness of adolescence before there was such
a thing as adolescence. The story, set in the mid-1800s, revolves around Aimee Slater, who at 15 leaves her family’s New Hampshire farm to take a job at a cloth factory in Lowell, Mass.
Aimee’s mother doesn’t want her to go. Though their life is arduous and uncertain, as lives on family farms have always been, the Slaters are not impoverished, and Aimee is being groomed to become a schoolteacher. But when a recruiting agent arrives at the Slater home and weaves a tale of opportunity and independence at the mills, leaving behind as a further enticement wondrous photographs of life in the City of Spindles, Aimee triumphs over her mother’s objections.
Her father, cold and distant, allows that the times are changing and that extra money might come in handy. Thus, Aimee joins hundreds of other girls who have left home in search of adventure and excitement and, most precious of all, freedom.
It turns out, of course, that the freedom of the city is only illusory. The workers are cogs in the very large engine driving the Industrial Revolution. Aimee’s description of her first day at the factory is lyrical but utterly convincing. “Threads hanging like a steady sheet of rain before my face,” she says, “to be coaxed through the tiniest of holes. My task sounded as if it came out of the stories my mother used to tell me, of princesses locked up in towers and told to make golden cloaks out of piles of flax. But the place–the place was worlds apart from the still, stone rooms of those old tales. I had never seen so many machines. . . .”
In this passage, and throughout the novel, Aimee uses her mother and her own childhood as the reference points for all she encounters. But as her life veers toward very adult complications–including her love for a handsome young man and the pregnancy that results from their union–Aimee discovers that neither the lessons of her childhood nor her mother’s code of conduct provide adequate guidance for how she should lead her life. Aimee’s refusal to assume the role of the shameful outcast creates an irreparable rift between mother and daughter, and it is this unraveling that becomes Graver’s focus in the novel.
“The year I turned twenty,” Aimee says, “I woke up a little, like an animal coming out of a long, slow sleep. . . . I cleaned my house and trimmed my hair. I started to carve things for my mother–lace bobbins and pine cooking spoons with faces carved into their hollows. The gifts stacked up beneath my bed.”
And Graver has Aimee tell her story as though the narrative itself were one of these gifts to her mother–a gift that must be hidden away, never offered, though it has been made with care and gratitude and love.
There are a few moments when the novel falters–Aimee’s obsession with an incident of childhood sexual exploration with her consumptive brother, for example, introduces an element to the story and to Aimee’s character that isn’t quite convincing–but this finely crafted exploration of a young woman clinging to tenderness even as she acquires a somber and unsettling wisdom makes “Unravelling,” no matter its 19th Century setting, an absolutely affecting portrait of adolescence.
