The Big Girls
By Susanna Moore
Knopf, 224 pages, $24
Set primarily in the fictional women’s prison of Sloatsburg, just north of New York City, Susanna Moore’s new novel, “The Big Girls,” is a weave of four surprisingly seductive voices — those of Helen, a prisoner who murdered her two children; Louise, her psychiatrist at Sloatsburg and a single mother; Ike, a prison guard who is having an affair with Louise; and Angie, a rising Hollywood actress who, in an unlikely but dryly entertaining plot twist, is living with Louise’s ex-husband in Los Angeles.
Early on it becomes clear that much of the book’s thrust is a slow revelation of the childhood abuse Helen suffered and the violence she perpetrated in her adulthood, so I expected to find the read hard going. What I didn’t expect, as I got further into the book, was to be mesmerized and drawn in by the narrators, particularly Helen and Louise, two quite different but pitch-perfect voices. Moore doesn’t sentimentalize their stories; instead she anoints each of these two main characters with perceptiveness and honesty. These qualities, delivered with Moore’s characteristic lyricism, caused me to read the book in big gulps and even to miss the narrators, particularly Helen, once I’d completed it.
Moore’s previous books are the darkly cast novel “In the Cut,” a thriller of eroticism and violence, and perhaps her best-known book to date; four other novels; and a memoir. In “The Big Girls,” as with “In the Cut,” a recurring theme is the fine edge between love and pain, between intimacy and betrayal. As Helen says, “The people in my life who hurt me the most are the people who told me they loved me the most.”
As if that premise and the detailing of Helen’s childhood abuse weren’t grim enough, Moore adds fictionalized but all-too-credible stories of pettiness and cruelty inflicted on prisoners by prison administrators, and portraits of certain prisoners whose extreme poverty had backed them into violent acts. These well-told but upsetting ingredients hardly suggest a page-turner of a read. It’s all the more amazing, then, that Moore’s construction of Helen’s character, a mix of compassion, astuteness, naivety and madness, keeps the reader gripped.
“The Big Girls” delivers — even more than as a condemnation of incarceration practices and child abuse — as a study in what it means to be honest, and how honesty can function. As Louise uses her psychoanalytic skills to draw the truth from Helen and to encourage some integration of her psyche, Helen becomes more able to see her life and those of the inmates around her, but her pain also becomes more acute. The reader wonders, and Louise wonders, what service to Helen this provides. Even before her psychoanalytic unpeeling, Helen evinces a certain honesty — that of one who has had the worst done to her and who has done the worst to others, and has at times clear sight because of her trials. At other times, before her work with Louise mainly deprives her of them, the imaginary voices and blind spots in her head protect her from seeing too much.
Louise, too, suffers and benefits from honesty, especially concerning her feelings of love, fear, jealousy and confusion toward her 8-year-old son. She genuinely cares about Helen, and Moore renders her involvement with Helen and other inmates with refreshing complexity and bluntness.
Ike and Angie exhibit more pragmatic forms of honesty, ones that, particularly in starlet Angie’s case, help them survive. Angie is messed up but happily and ruthlessly opportunistic and successful. Hearing about her Hollywood machinations, even if accomplished while she is heavily drugged, gives the reader some relief from the unhappy prison narratives. Moore is quite funny about winding some heavy-handed satire about TV through her otherwise psychoanalytically fraught book: At various times Helen’s mother and husband and even Angie are scheduled on talk shows to discuss Helen’s infamous case.
Always, though, the book returns to a darkly seen and subtly realized intertwining of love and betrayal in the stories of its two major characters — familial love gone murderously wrong in Helen’s case, and therapeutic love exercised with skill but painful results in Louise’s. Hard to believe, but the overall read is hypnotic, and the book hard to put down.
———-
Maud Lavin teaches at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her next book, “The Oldest We’ve Ever Been: Seven True Stories of Midlife Transitions,” is to be published next spring.
