The Folded World
By Amity Gaige
Other Press, 294 pages, $23.95
You’ve gotta love a guy who notices you stepping over cracks in the sidewalk — so as to avoid a disaster — and chases you to introduce himself because he finds your superstition endearing.
Alice Bussard does. Love Charlie Shade, that is. Their meeting in an unnamed New England town (most likely Cambridge, Mass.) occurs in the opening pages of Amity Gaige’s new novel, “The Folded World,” which explores the ways people come to define and understand themselves in the context of young adulthood and early marriage.
Alice, who grew up fatherless in the coastal community of Gloucester on Boston’s North Shore, realizes in “one horrible, ephiphanal crush” at age 22 that if she doesn’t force herself soon to leave her mother, she might not ever escape the town that now looks “shabby” to her, where “the tall skinny tenement houses stood like starving girls in party dresses.” She takes a receptionist job in a dentist’s office and spends her free time as she spent most of her childhood, reading books. She did not attend college, but she vows to take classes as she tries to “wean herself — unsuccessfully — from her superstitions.”
Charlie, for his part, is a long-distance runner studying social work because, having been raised in health and happiness in the Midwest, “he suspected that the difference between his life and other lives could plumb an ocean.”
The young couple marries in front of a judge at City Hall, and Charlie takes a job in the admissions office of a psychiatric hospital. In short order they become the parents of twin girls, which gives Alice a new appreciation for her mother’s experience:
“Back then, it was wretchedly confusing; now, she understood. Motherhood was looking down to see that your ribs were blown open because your heart had exploded through your chest.”
Charlie, who accepts a more demanding, higher-paying position in the wake of Alice’s pregnancy, finds himself facing challenges he had not anticipated, at work and home. He becomes involved with one of his patients, a psychotic woman named Opal, to an extent that earns the reproval of his supervisor and the suspicion of his wife. He and Alice exist in a state of perpetual sleep deprivation, and they can barely afford a baby-sitter to allow themselves a dinner out.
Gaige, whose previous novel “O My Darling” was honored by the National Book Foundation, shifts perspectives among her characters, focusing primarily on Alice and Charlie but also extending to their downstairs neighbor, Charlie’s patients, Alice’s mother and Charlie’s beloved grandmother, who suffers premonitions of catastrophes befalling members of her family.
The author’s narrative alternation is more than merely clever or decorative; it connects the plot elements in a way that seems simultaneously serendipitous and believable, as so much of life does. Stories emerge in layers: The immediate drama concerning Alice and Charlie occupies the forefront, while the backdrop is peppered with the clinical case histories Charlie should not repeat to Alice but does.
The significance of the patients’ experiences only becomes clear as the novel progresses, giving the reader some moments of delicious realization along the way. (A caveat: the stories-within-a-story are rendered in italics; when will publishers learn that most people do not want to read multiple pages of italic print? A font contrasting the regular text will do just fine.)
Gaige’s prose is accomplished, for the most part careful, evocative and precise — witness these descriptions of Alice shortly after her life-changing move from her hometown: “She was not modest, she simply had not yet occurred to herself,” and, “She missed the safety of someone who attempted little.” Or this description of a mentally ill woman hallucinating as she commits suicide:
“The wind blew the braid from her hair, and blasted the clothes from her body, and soon she was flying naked and white through the darkness. The wind was polishing her edges. Sparks shot from her feet.”
The book ends somewhat abruptly, but that may be a function of our having been immersed in an absorbing story and not wishing to leave.
With its mildly complex structure and attention to psychological detail, “The Folded World” will appeal to readers who like to dive into the muck of internal and interpersonal conflicts, and break the surface with breath born of insight and empathy. Amity Gaige’s second novel lives up to the reputation she earned with her first one, as an original, compelling voice.
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Jessica Treadway is the author of the short-story collection “Absent Without Leave” and the novel “And Give You Peace.”
