THE CAPE ANN
Faith Sullivan
New York: Crown Publishers, 1988
350 pp., $18.95
In Faith Sullivan's Minnesota, to paraphrase Garrison Keillor, all the women are strong, all the men good looking, and all the children are above average. Her heroines have an eccentric energy and independence that drive them to take control of their own lives, even when it means upsetting their ineffectual mates. Each of her four novels deals in some way with women forming their identities and coming to terms with their losses in love and marriage, but this theme grows more complex, with deeper implications for the characters, from first novel to last.
Sullivan's work represents an evolution in portraying feisty women, from the humorous, flaky housewife who confronts her colorful adolescence in Repent, Lanny Merkel, published in 1981, to Arlene, the spirited and resourceful mother in her new novel, The Cape Ann. Each successive woman character is more willing to take risks, defy convention, and suffer losses to arrive at a meaningful life for herself. Each novel is richer in texture and nuance than the one before, more subtle in characterization, and more reflective on the nature of love and the weight of sadness in family relationship. It is a pleasure to see a writer's work deepen as Sullivan's does, growing more complex in its exploration of the human heart and more sharply observant of the ways people make a place for themselves in the world.
The Cape Ann is certainly her most ambitious novel, revealing a troubled marriage through a child's eyes and drawing a lively and touching portrait of several families in rural Minnesota during the Depression and the early years of World War II. Lark Erhardt, six years old when the book begins, tells the story; her voice is the perfect vehicle for the vitality, humor, and magic that animate all of Sullivan's work.
Lark is one of those precocious young narrators whose fresh, intelligent observations, made without grown-up excuses or bias, are an accurate comment on the foibles and tragedies of the adult world. Adults may be more subtle and complicated, and therefore wiser, but children have an unsurpassed clarity of vision, an innate sense of justice, and an empathetic response to kindness and cruelty.
In Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, which follows the trial of a black man accused of rape in a small southern town, the young narrator is able to measure the compassion of the adults, observe the workings of society, and struggle with her own moral outlook in ways no grown-up could. In Ella Leffland's Rumors of Peace, a child growing up in California during World War II confronts questions of life and death, fear of invasion, and shock at the magnitude of the war's destruction with the painful intensity of someone on the brink of maturity and understanding. Like all children, these characters are in the process of discovering who they are, how complex the world is, and how they can best live in it--discoveries the adult reader can experience and share.
For Lark, the world centers on her mother, Arlene, and her father, Willie, and their unconventional home in a section of the railway depot where Willie is a clerk. Arlene is determined to have a real house,
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