Guest review by Jane Bailey: AMY AND ISABELLE by Elizabeth Strout

"We are used to love-hate stories between lovers, but this one is a ruthlessly astute observation of the relationship between mother and daughter ..."

JANE BAILEY is the author of six novels, and has edited many anthologies of work by

young people for First Story. Her fifth novel, What Was Rescued, became an Amazon

bestseller.

Jane Bailey is the author of six novels, and has edited many anthologies of work by young people for First Story. Her fifth novel, What Was Rescued, became an Amazon bestseller. 

JANE BAILEY is the author of six novels, and has edited many anthologies of work by

young people for First Story. Her fifth novel, What Was Rescued, became an Amazon

bestseller.

JANE BAILEY is the author of six novels, and has edited many anthologies of work by

young people for First Story. Her fifth novel, What Was Rescued, became an Amazon

bestseller.

North America seems to have a number of respected writers who write about ordinary lives with razor-sharp observation: Alice Munro, Carol Shields and Ann Tyler spring to mind. Elizabeth Strout is another such writer who burrows beneath the surface of her characters and finds the real, gripping drama in everyday lives.

Amy and Isabelle gets us right into the deepest and most subtle thoughts of single mother Isabelle Goodrow, and her teenaged daughter, Amy. They resent each other, hate each other and love each other with equal passion.

The novel is set in the fictitious small mill town of Shirley Falls, which is divided in two by ‘a dead brown snake’ of a river. Isabelle, who works as a secretary there, has rented a house ‘temporarily’ on the affluent side – for the last fourteen years – in the hope of finding a husband. She dotes instead on her staggeringly dull, married boss, who has suddenly stopped looking at her.

What has happened, to change everything, is gradually revealed in a time-shifting narrative, and it involves a terrible shame which her daughter, Amy, brought upon her. This is the more dreadful because it is clear that Amy has a pre-arranged summer job in her mother’s office, so that mother and daughter are condemned to spend the hottest summer on record breathing the same stultifying air as each other in a room shared with other women at the mill.

Amy recognises that they are not like other mothers and daughters, and longs for a different, more normal parent. Her mother is prim, wears pantyhose even in the heat, and keeps herself apart from the other office workers (Fat Bev, for example, who sits opposite Amy, and smokes and eats and talks incessantly). Amy likes Fat Bev and is nauseated by her mother’s stuffiness and her obvious attraction to the boss, Avery. But when she sees her mother’s hopeless attempts to flirt with him, Amy is also moved by her: ‘It was terrible, what she had seen, the nakedness of her mother’s face. She loved her.’

But this is a novel of carefully crafted parallels, and just as Amy feels this contradictory tenderness, so her mother, whilst enraged with her daughter’s burgeoning sexuality and inappropriate behaviour with her maths teacher, is actually offended - when she confronts him - that he didn’t even really care for Amy.

Similarly, the shears that Isabelle uses to savagely cut off her daughter’s hair in a fit of rage at her sluttish behaviour, are the same shears she will use to cut and curl ribbon on a basket of flowers she has tenderly put together for Amy’s friend, a teenager who has just had an unwanted baby.

Isabelle has had to curtail her own education to bring up Amy, and resents it when Amy gently tells her that she has mispronounced ‘Yeats’. But mostly she feels angry and intimidated by her daughter’s beauty and the fact that she has enjoyed sexual relations with a man while she herself has been wilting with longing for them. The anger generated by this leads to the most cruelly shocking scene in the book. Amy picks up her chopped hair ‘like an amputated leg with its shoe still on.’

If this all sounds like a depressing read, it is anything but. The kindness of the women in the office - women Isabelle has always felt slightly beneath her - brings about revelations which transform the lives of both mother and daughter.

The characters have entertainingly active imaginations. Isabelle often lives so much in her mind that she almost forgets what is real and what she’s imagined. For example, unable to face asking her sister for advice, she imagines what her sister would say: ‘All this imagined advice Isabelle agreed with, found inspiring.’

Although the focus is firmly on Amy and Isabelle, Strout sometimes zooms out to consider the inhabitants of Shirley Falls as a whole. She has an almost Dickensian way of slipping into each of their lives and examining their relationship dilemmas, affairs and betrayals with a quick brush stroke here and there.

This is a story about women, their guilt, their denial, their longings, and how they relate to one another. We are used to love-hate stories between lovers, but this one is a ruthlessly astute observation of the relationship between mother and daughter. It is also a story about kindness and, in Strout’s hands, heartbreakingly moving.

Amy and Isabelle is published by Vintage.