I want everybody to read this novel. Possibly an unrealistic want, but worth a shot. Pearl, by Siân Hughes, tells the story of a girl named Marianne—a woman now—whose mother walks out of the house leaving her eight-year-old daughter, newborn baby, and husband forever. No note, no nothing. Marianne struggles as she grows up—as one would—feeling lost, like an outsider, unhappy, angry, and forlorn. She wears her grief like a heavy, invisible mantle. We meet her as an adult, with a child of her own. (The novel's chapters, each topped with an old folk verse her mother sang her, move back and forth in time, but not in a disconcerting way).
While a lot of Pearl depicts Marianne's struggles, her life before her mother's departure and her mother herself are beautifully described, almost reveled in. This is, in a way, a circling story, as Marianne remembers the past and finally comes to see how her connection to her mother has informed and guided—sometimes misguided—her adult life. Pearl is filled with the tropes, symbols, and imagery of fairy tales. Fitting, because after all, what is more otherworldly than one's laughing, charming mother walking out the door, never to be seen again?
Grief is universal, and Hughes is excellent on the process of grief....how you see the person who is gone, spot their image flitting around corners, recall their sayings and the way they laugh or move their hands, their facial expressions. Their touch and smell. Everyone has lost someone, had someone walk out the door, literally or otherwise.
And Hughes understands, too, what it's like to lose a childhood home—in her case, the house where she last had her mother. She knows what it's like to fall asleep and imagine walking through remembered rooms, seeking out the cobwebbed cubbies and shadowed hidey-holes old houses always seem to have.
While this all may sound like a depressing dirge, it is not, in part because the book is ultimately about forgiveness. The writing is frank, observant, and magical, often in the same paragraph. I read it one chapter at a time, in part because I wanted to absorb what she was writing about, in part because I wanted it to last longer. It's a mystery, a love story, an incantation, and a marvel.
Carin Pratt is one of the remarkably knowledgeable crew at the Norwich Bookstore—and an ardent recommender of books. Before she landed in these parts, she spent 27 years at CBS News, including two decades as the executive producer of Face the Nation.