The unnamed narrator of Jane F. Kotapish’s “Salvage” has lost her bearings, and she’s concerned her mother is losing her mind.
The protagonist was a hard-charging New York career woman. Although her job is never specified, it allowed her pricey shoes and expense account dinners, and it has provided her with enough savings to pull up stakes, buy an old house in Virginia and redecorate. The woman is recovering from witnessing a horrible accident, and work is beyond her these days.
The narrator’s mother, Lois, has always been eccentric, but the narrator is concerned about the men in her mother’s life. Or at least, the men Lois says are in her life. John, who was a fisherman. Cuthbert, who tended sheep. Simeon, the librarian, who refuses to eat. Thomas. Bartholomew. Francis, the veterinarian. He loves animals. Lois seems to be dating Catholic saints. What’s more disturbing, Lois insists these men are saints.
Lois was, for the most part, a single mother. The narrator’s father disappeared before her birth. Lois won’t discuss him, and the only time the protagonist saw him was in photographs as Lois burned them. Lois was, for a time, married to Charles, who called the narrator by the disturbing nickname of “Ticklepants.” Lois sent Charles packing after Lois had a miscarriage when the narrator was 10. Lois retreated to her bedroom at that time and didn’t come out for 15 1/2 days.
That span of time became significant in the narrator’s childhood. The girl began spending large amounts of time in her closet. She talked to her sister, Nancy. Nancy talked back. Nancy lived in heaven, and she hated. “Nancy was an ornery creature, a rabble-rouser, furious over her early demise,” says the protagonist. Lois never seemed to notice that her daughter was disappearing into the closet for hours at a time, and she never questioned what her daughter was doing.
But Lois was a bit of an oddball anyway. While infidelities and unhappy marriages were common, “no one got divorced over them” in their suburban neighborhood, not in the 1970s. Lois and her daughter are exotic creatures in their husbandless, fatherless house.
The narrator’s disappearing act doesn’t really concern Lois, even when Lois finds her daughter in the closet with a lighter in one hand and a burned patch on the other. Nancy always did like to talk about fire.
After that incident, which took place on a visit home from college, the narrator put Nancy out of her mind. She moved to New York eventually, fell in love with the city and set about having a successful career. “I sacrificed myself fully to New York’s swallowing rhythms like a virgin tossed into a volcano,” she says. “I sometimes forget how good I was at what I did. At living.”
After witnessing a woman die after being hit by a subway train, the narrator loses her desire to live and work in New York. The narrator feels responsible, that she could have or should have been the one thrown in front of the train. She retreats home to Virginia and spends more time with her mother than she ever has as an adult. The more she hears about the saints, the more she thinks Lois is getting dementia, or perhaps going mad. But really, who is the protagonist to talk? Nancy talked back to her for years.
Being near her childhood home makes the narrator examine her childhood, as well as the accident she witnessed. Although the question of if the saints are saints is never answered, they’re not central to “Salvage.” The book deals more with the relationship between Lois and her daughter. It looks at what one person might need to do to recover from a horrible experience.
It’s jarring that Kotapish never chooses to give her protagonist a name. The author does an excellent job of never — not once — letting another character call the narrator by a real name. Kotapish never reveals anything about her main character’s job, friends or previous life. Although she’s the heart of the book, readers find out far less about her than about anyone else. We know her thoughts, her dreams and her feelings, but she’s still a cipher.
Janna Fischer: 303-954-1270 or jfischer@denverpost.com
Fiction
Salvage, by Jane F. Kotapish, $24
