Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters, TheAuthor: Schaffert, TimothyGenre: General Novels Publisher: BlueHen Books Released: 2002 |
A Review by David Abrams
09/29/2002
You might expect two sisters named Lily and Mabel Rollow, who live in the antique store they own in rural Nebraska, to be a pair of white-haired old biddies who harp and screech at each other like Joan Crawford and Bette Davis tossed together into a wet paper sack.
But no, the Lily and Mabel in Timothy Schaffert's debut novel The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters are twentysomethings who toss around four-letter words, fight over the same boy, drink cheap booze, and generally do their best to exorcise the demons of their past—namely, their father's suicide and their mother's subsequent abandonment.
Two young girls with old-fashioned names incongruously placed in a house cluttered with antiques, not to mention the fact that Lily's sensitive boyfriend Jordan drives serial killer Charles Starkweather's 1956 Packard and that Mabel falls in love with a boy on account of his dead sister—it's got “quirk” written all over it.
Just look at how the book opens with this delicious little paragraph:
In her secondhand shop, Mabel stretched out on the fainting sofa, feeling tipsy from the summer's heat, not knowing, for a moment, if it was June, July, or August. She shook up a leaking snow globe, the white flakes settling in the laps of lovers on a gondola. Mabel had read in a book on antiques that the snow in snow globes was once made of sawed-up bone. Though Mabel was very young, she often pictured her demise, often hovered above her own Valentino-like funeral with women collapsing and broad-chested men singing impromptu bass tremolo. She'd like to donate her skeleton to a snow globe maker, liked thinking of her remains forever drifting among the plastic landscapes of a souvenir.To Schaffert's credit, he pushes most of the gimmicks to the side and allows Lily and Mabel to stand on their own two quirkless feet. The more we get to know these girls, the more poignant and engrossing their orphans' tale becomes. Ninety years ago—in a completely different world from ours—they would have been played by Dorothy and Lillian Gish in the movies (and, in fact, Schaffert alludes to Orphans of the Storm at one point). Like the Gish girls, Lilly and Mabel love each other, mainly out of necessity, united by the tragic failure of their parents.
The girls are united by the ghosts of their family:
She and Lily knew none of the details of their father's suicide, except that it involved a gun. They didn't know if he'd put it in his mouth or in his ear, didn't know if it had taken apart his head or had left a simple clean hole.They spend most of the novel apart—Lily goes on a road trip with the suicidal Jordan in search of her long-lost mother; Mabel remains at the antique shop and becomes involved with the family of a drowned girl, impulsively lying to them that she was the recipient of the dead girl's corneas. Separately, the two ponder the fragility of life: why should we live? why should we die?
Schaffert is sometimes clunky with the didacticism: the antique shop is an obvious metaphor for the hodgepodge of life (the Easter bonnet, the comic book, the phonograph record, “the lace-up boot of a woman who'd almost taken the Titanic”), and it's easy to predict the mother-daughter reunion at least fifty pages before its arrival.
Yet, Schaffert has created characters which engage our attention and, ultimately, our sympathy. Not all of us live orphaned lives in a rural antique shop, but we can all understand the feelings of loss and abandonment—the phantom pain of someone who should be there but isn't.
Lily, Mabel and their mother all come to realize that the only way to keep their lives in balance is by keeping the wounds of the past open and bleeding.
It was a maternal impulse. Of course it was. A deep desire to keep your dead as a constant ache in your heart, and not just a memory or a pain somewhat eased. It had to always be that thing that ruined your life.Grim as that may sound, the sisters each come to realize that even if they can't change the past, they can make the best of the future. Schaffert closes the book with a paragraph of sisterly bonding that's as graceful as the book's opening lines were quirky. It's like a silent-film camera iris slowly closing on the sweet Gish sisters sitting cheek to cheek.
© Copyright ToxicUniverse.com 09/29/2002
