Idioglossia by Eleanor Bailey
Eleanor Bailey - hailed in the UK as a female John Irving - proves herself an accomplished and witty storyteller in her debut novel, Idioglossia. Exploring the lives of four generations of women, Bailey depicts mothers and daughters in a book that adroitly combines a sharp satiric edge with epic, even comic reach. Bailey's wit and uncanny characterizations show how these variously disturbed women come to understand each other through their individual experiences of depression.
At the head of the lineage is Great Edie, a scary, cantankerous old woman and an inspired seer, who runs a gloomy boarding house in London. Her daughter, Grace, suffers the most extremely from the family illness. A schizophrenic, she spends most of her adult life locked away in a mental institution, recalling a dead sister whom she believes she killed, and babbling what seems like nonsense to her patient but condescending nurses.
Grace's only daughter, Maggie, left to grow up on a cruise ship in the care of her drunken ventriloquist father, is a bright, idiosyncratic Alice-in-Wonderland type. Lost, wide-eyed and cast adrift amid a group of eclectic performers from the ship's nightly cabaret, Maggie retreats into her own games and inventions until a mysterious entertainer comes on board. Twice her age, he has the wit to play her games and, because of his attentions, Maggie finds herself falling in love. He stays involved as long as she can provide him with access to her imaginative childlike world, but when that ends, he disappears, leaving her pregnant and alone. Thirty years later, he returnsto her, by then an old man.
Frozen solid with despair, Maggie passes the years at the mercy of Great Edie's cruel tongue. Her only vision of heaven is the thought of being left alone in a quiet room. At times she envies Grace her strange freedom, her complete surrender to the psychological weakness that runs through their family like a fault. Sarah, Maggie's daughter doesn't much like or understand her mother. On the run from a childhood peopled by loveless adults, Sarah uses deadening temp jobs and increasingly depressing one-night stands to distance herself from the world and get revenge on her mother. She tries to find solace with her anti-social computer-geek friend Alex, whose sophisticated games seem to be a means of escape for them both. But even after she moves in with him, she finds herself edging closer to her own breaking point, eventually seeing no alternative to just letting go. At last it's up to Maggie to rescue her daughter from spiralling into the family madness.
Idioglossia is a rich and powerful book, full of insights about mothers, daughters, and the temptation to break from the harsh reality of the world. Its publication marks the arrival of a writer of great imagination and heart.
Publication Details
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Binding: Paperback
Published by: Doubleday: , 2000
Edition:
ISBN: 9780679311256 | 0679311254
384 pages.
Book Condition: Good
pp382 wrappers proof copy
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