Book Review: The Daughters
/The Daughters
That, she said, depends on who is telling you the story. Most people don't understand the rusalka, and so they wouldn't tell you that she has tears in her eyes as she jumps down from the tree and lands softly in the leaves. They wouldn't tell you of her heaving sobs of regret as she walks back to the river, her body light as air.But then again, my baba would say, what most people would tell you is also true. That she will find another man; that she will do it again. She will sit in the trees and sing her song as often as she needs to, take as much strength as she requires to survive.
The qualification is important; The Daughters is a novel charged with contradictory emotions and involuntary harms – it's a novel in which a rusalka can never quite be a simple demon.Lulu's mother Sara is a down-market jazz singer who leaves the family when her daughter is nine, so it's her grandmother who coaches and trains her in the musical abilities she's possessed from birth. “With or without my mother's explicit approval, my cells were coaxed together in arpeggios and crescendos,” she recalls. “I was born, much to Sara's dismay, with a large head and a strong jaw, giving my very first scream a breadth and tonality that stopped my doctor in his tracks.”When The Daughters opens, Lulu has recently returned home from the hospital, from the end of a difficult pregnancy and the birth of her daughter Kara. John, her husband - a fellow opera singer although not, we suspect, equally talented. The background atmosphere in their home is tense for a number of reasons, including the fact that Lulu knows he's not Kara's father and hasn't told him:
Still, I can't help but know what I know. I know when my heart rate increases by a single point, know the placement of my ribs with chiropractic precision. Feeling a child wake up inside me was as obvious and instantaneous as a slap to the face.
Still deeply impressed by the Polish folktales on which she's been raised, Lulu can't help but link her cessation of singing with the birth of her daughter, the folkloric concept of mothers sacrificing something vital for their daughters. Celt weaves that concept through the length of her story, fleshing out the history of Lulu's family as immigrants in America and binding that history to the rich mythology of Lulu's heritage. These more colorful elements drive the story, but even so, Celt's most heartfelt passages deal with the complex dynamics bubbling under the surface of Lulu's marriage to John, the strange and stinging verisimilitude of their love and distrust for each other. Lulu is a relentless analyzer of everything that happens to her (in fact, one of Celt's only narrative oversights is her failure to realize how insufferable this trait would make Lulu – in the book, there's almost no indication that Lulu's priggish, self-pitying, micro-obsessive internal reflections would make her priggish, self-pitying and micro-obsessive externally as well), and some of Celt's most quietly persuasive segments watch Lulu watching the decline of her marriage, as in the seemingly offhand moment when she suddenly realizes that John's hair is thinning:
When you're young and your love is new, you map the geography of a person's body inch by inch. You want to know them so well you could make another version of them, one wrought out of gold and filled with light. And so when you touch your lover, you're also molding and reshaping their avatar. This rib slightly lower down. The birthmark higher, above the hip. Later, you don't look so hard. After so much careful scrutiny, you come to believe that you know wall the secrets of your beloved's skin and bones. You run your hands over the golden version in your head, thinking it is the real flesh. Thinking you can do everything by memory. We were only four years married, that night. And yet his hair seemed like a revelation.
There are low-key revelations like this one throughout The Daughters, which moves and convinces to a mighty impressive degree for a debut novel – the appearance of a very promising talent.