Bookreporter.com - SALVAGE by Jane F. Kotapish

SALVAGE
Jane F. Kotapish
MacAdam/Cage Publishing
Fiction
ISBN: 9781596922839

"I have always watched myself watching myself. And so I know that what I am doing is flirting with the possibility of going mad…. And I see that what I am doing is sad and pathetic and symptomatic of a pathological loneliness. And I also see that I am fine. I am as close to happy as I have ever been." This short passage, from the point of view of the unnamed narrator of Jane Kotapish's SALVAGE, illustrates perfectly the contradictions and tensions that are at the heart of this challenging but thought-provoking debut novel.

On the surface of things, the narrator, a woman in her late 30s, has achieved a comfortable, even enviable, life. Living for many years in Manhattan, where she explored and embraced the city with enthusiasm even as she achieved considerable career success, she would seem to be a well-adjusted, successful person.

Now, though, as she returns to rural Virginia in the wake of witnessing a grim tragedy, the protagonist reveals, by narrating her life from the time of her childhood, that she has always been "flirting with the possibility of going mad." Raised by her fiercely independent, somewhat prickly single mother, Lois, the narrator longed for affection as a child. Instead, she conjured up the ghost of her younger sister, lost during a miscarriage, a specter of anger and hostility who haunted the narrator throughout her childhood and adolescence, threatening to do harm to herself and her surroundings.

Now, though, as the narrator drifts around her overly large, ramshackle Victorian house and garden in the wake of her New York tragedy, she questions not only her current and past sanity but also her mother's state of mind. Lois, who lives nearby, has claimed to be in the company of saints, from a veterinarian who bears a great resemblance to St. Francis to a cardio funk classmate who may just be the disciple Jesus loved. Perplexed by this turn of behavior in her mother (a woman who re-christened an inherited statue of the Virgin Mary after Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt) and facing the loss of her childhood home, the narrator must confront demons past and present before she can salvage her own sanity --- and her life.

Kotapish's first novel is evocative and fluid, much like the narrator's consciousness. Moving freely between past and present, the narrative invites readers to make connections between the narrator's childhood experiences and her current state of mind. The book is also an extended exploration of the ongoing repercussions of the mother-daughter relationship in women's lives, even far beyond childhood. With a near stream-of-consciousness feel and a deliberately ambiguous (albeit hopeful) conclusion, SALVAGE may not be for every reader; for those willing to enter into the narrator's convoluted consciousness, however, it may just be a revelation.

--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl

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