Book Review: Unfinished Desires

Richmond Times - Dispatch

She has written of the perils of adolescence, the problems of adulthood and the promise -- and pitfalls -- of religion.

And now, in her 13th novel, "Unfinished Desires," Gail Godwin melds all three in a story rich in insight and characterizations, sacred and secular.

The story begins in 2001, when Mother Suzanne Ravenel, the long-retired headmistress of a now-defunct Catholic girls school in Mountain City, N.C. (a fictionalized Asheville), begins writing a history of the school. Suzanne was a member of the Class of 1934 and became a postulant in her senior year. She had planned to join an order with classmate Antonia Tilden, but Antonia backed out.

By the 1951-52 school year, the energetic and vibrant Suzanne is headmistress, and Antonia's niece, Tildy Stratton, is a ninth-grader in the class of a new, beautiful and empathetic nun, Mother Kate Malloy. Bossy Tildy is best friends with brainy Maud Norton -- until a typical teenage rift divides them. Tildy soon takes up with recently orphaned and artistically talented Chloe Starnes, who has moved to Mountain City to live with her widowed uncle, Henry Vick.

And here the story becomes complicated, so complicated that the reader must pay fervent attention as the oh-so-Southern interrelationships among the large cast are explained:

-- Tildy's mother, Cornelia, is Antonia's identical twin -- and she blames Suzanne for her sister's early death in a traffic accident in Rome while on her honeymoon with Henry Vick. -- Chloe's mother, Agnes Vick, was a friend and classmate of Antonia, Cornelia and Suzanne. -- Tildy and Chloe are no blood kin, but they share an aunt: the late Agnes, who died in mysterious circumstances. Paying attention? Good, because Godwin weaves a complex story in which the pasts of the elder women wreak havoc in the adolescents' lives.

Told from multiple points of view, "Unfinished Desires" puts the author's twin talents -- storytelling and characterization -- on dazzling display. Godwin brings each of the girls and women fully alive and tells her well-conceived and well-executed story in a leisurely but suspenseful fashion, taking it into the girls' late middle age (and Suzanne's extreme old age).

Some of Godwin's previous work has included her real-life history, and she draws on that experience again in "Unfinished Desires." The school, Mount St. Gabriel's, is based on St. Genevieve's of the Pines, a Catholic school for girls in Asheville that she attended through the ninth grade. But how much of this novel is autobiography and how much is fiction is unknowable (perhaps even to Godwin herself, as memory is a tricky thing) -- and unimportant. What matters is what she takes from that history to create distinguished fiction -- and what she is able to do as a renowned prose stylist.

As such, Godwin creates scenes with cinematic detail, but cinema of an earlier and more refined age:

"Behind the headmistress, almost like a stage backdrop, were the ranges of the western mountains, with Pisgah and the Rat in prominence just above the nun's right shoulder. Maud felt spotlighted by the bright sunshine pouring through those double windows. Mother Ravenel, her back to the windows, was in shadow."

Such careful description is among Godwin's hallmarks, as keenly developed as her ability to get inside her characters and render them fully human. Like the best novelists, Godwin's power is born of restraint. "Unfinished Desires" is Southern, of course, but this is no overwrought Southern gothic. And though Godwin focuses on women, this is emphatically not chick lit.

Ultimately, Godwin turns this affecting and admirable novel on two of life's most critical issues: friendship and forgiveness. With great humanity, understated prose, a generous dose of the sardonic -- and a firmament of faith -- one of America's premier novelists adds to her celebrated body of work with another cause for celebration.

----

More book reviews

More book news

Copyright 2012 by Richmond Times - Dispatch