The Mermaid Chair
by Sue Monk Kidd
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Book Summary Information
Author: Sue Monk KiddEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-03-07
ISBN: 0143036696
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Penguin
Book Reviews of The Mermaid Chair
Book Review: More than a Midlife Crisis: The Loss of the Self...
Summary: 4 Stars
It would be easy to dismiss Sue Monk Kidd's "The Mermaid Chair" as the rationalization of obsessive love by a narcissistic middle aged woman in the throes of a mid-life crisis. In that respect, one could argue that the narrator is self-indulgent and shallow, unappreciative of the life she has and dangerously inconsiderate of those who love her. However, one could also see in the protagonist's dilemma the struggle to establish a sense of self that for her, alas, has always been elusive. Jesse Sullivan, traumatized and deceived about the untimely death of her father when she was a child, has never really understood herself until she falls in love with a monk and thus discovers in the process, not only the kind of love that is ultimately enduring, but also that kind of heady enchantment which however engulfing and passionate at the moment can never replace the steady, determined course of true love - love that has a history and a grace that is sometimes forgotten in the flux of everyday life.
More than a story of adultery, this book illustrates how family secrets can alter the course of human love by creating fear and guilt in the absence of communication. Jesse's mother, too, is a victim of the secrecy surrounding her husband's death. Unable to explain the true situation to others and to her daughter, the lingering guilt drives her to irrational acts as well as a distancing from her daughter who eventually marries a psychiatrist and cultivates a life as an artist of dioramas to attempt to understand the mysterious accident that killed her father and ended any spontaneity and joy her mother once possessed. Having always believed she was responsible for her father's death, Jessie has removed herself geographically and emotionally from the island of her upbringing until her mother's need finally brings her home. Once there in the familiar environment of her youth, she is once more attuned to the natural world she abandoned for marriage and motherhood. It is there, where her closeness with her father so abruptly ended, that she comes to terms with the sacred in life through the person of a monk at the island monastery.
Moreover, what Jesse must come to understand is that it is a rare man who would forgive one's falling desperately and passionately in love, as Jessie did, without anger and recrimination. While Jessie is originally somewhat contemptuous of her intellectual husband, who in her mind, is far too Freudian, it is he, Hugh, who can overlook her tumultuous feelings for another man and at the same time acknowledge his own need to grow. Moreover, he realizes the two of them need to attain another level in their marital relationship, one where the rules are less defined and more fluid and where Jessie is at last able to nurture her own artistic and psychological independence. Her husband Hugh contemplates the mystery of Jesse's infatuation with the monk: "typically you fell in love with something missing in yourself that you recognized in the other person, yet he couldn't grasp what Jessie had seen in this supposedly spiritual man that could capture her so profoundly." Here Hugh displays the ultimate characteristic of the desirable man, the capacity to try to understand rather than judge, label or react vindictively. He accepts the fact that he "had carelessly glossed over her. He had not given her the small kindness of letting her grow into herself." In this respect he was, in fact, negligent. As a psychiatrist, he should have known how essential this was to a woman's happiness, how it defined any wife's need to be independent for her own sake. The fact that he recognizes this failure in himself and is willing to forgive Jessie's betrayal speaks volumes of the man's abiding love and emotional maturity.
Likewise, it is Jessie's realization of her obligation to her mother that defines her own goodness. Similar to Hugh's attempts at self-analysis of his own shortcomings, Jessie applies herself to understanding her mother's sorrow. In that process she succeeds because she is willing to go with the flow until the truths reveal themselves. She is patient; she is kind. In the end she is forgiving, all part of Saint Paul's message to the Corinthians about what comprises real love. She is living life in the way she knows is right, allowing both Hugh and Whit to decide for themselves, as they allow her the same freedom to determine which ways their lives will progress. This is the truth of life, Jessie and Hugh belatedly understand. One has to let people live and make their own decisions. Sometimes one has to wait out sorrow and confusion in the name of truth. She notes, "You come finally to the irreducible thing, and there's nothing left to do but pick it up and hold it. Then at last, you can enter the severe mercy of acceptance." Jessie, who has been so critical of her husband's domestic habits, recognizes that people have to edge their own way though the struggles of life, and they will make mistakes, as she has done. It is not for her to be critical of her father for what he did, nor her mother for her ensuing coldness, nor Hugh for his personal habits which annoy her. Instead, life is really about the human capacity to love and to continue loving through all the torments and dissatisfactions of life in general. Although she has always been "a boxed in girl," a child for whom truth was originally withheld, it is Hugh and their marriage that in the end will allow her the growth she needs to step out of the proverbial box once and forever.
Through her experience with Whit, she wisely recognizes how important is the "solitude of being." Whit had called that "aloneness," but in the final analysis it is just that solitariness that both defines and enriches the human experience. This steadfast willingness to stand alone takes a courage not all people possess, but fortunately Jessie gains this and her husband is a quick study in recognizing its significance in their marriage without destroying the truth of her need by senseless anger and ego. Similarly, Jessie acknowledges "Back there, somewhere, I'd lost the solitude of being that told me who I was. The whole mystery of myself. I'd been incapable of wearing the earth on my arms and legs, of diving and surfacing in my own erotic depths." Sometimes a woman whose grief was bottomless in adolescence has missed out on the erotic experiences that define one's entrance into sexual maturity, and so it was with Jessie until she had the relationship with Whit and was then able to grow beyond it. She notes "how loving and being in love are so different;" she then chooses her destiny wisely, recognizing "how belonging to myself allows me to belong more truly to him." This is mature love, something many people never experience, but Jessie does yet only after she has made her own mistakes. "What I want is the enduring, the beautiful enduring," she recognizes in a heartfelt moment that lies at the center of this novel. Passion and eroticism aside, she acknowledges a deeper, more profound love in what has passed for a seemingly ordinary relationship.
This is by no means a perfect novel. One gets bogged down in the metaphor of the Mermaid Chair, for example, and in the Catholicism theme in general, but in the end "The Mermaid Chair" is a satisfying and wise read. Kidd's use of language is poetic and perfectly precise. She observes wisely, her dialogue is meaningful, her story worth reading. Mostly what speaks to me is a sense that the writer knows what it is to feel alone and then reinvigorated, alone and at peace, and at last grateful for the destiny she's carved out for herself through a willingness to venture out of her warm, comfortable cocoon into the ambiguous world of risk and rejection. Underlying her journey is a sense of the need for authenticity, for honesty, for the sacred found in all of nature and in man himself, as she perceives it in the women who surround her, in Whit and Hugh and Dee and her own despairing mother, so lost for so long until she, too, comes to terms with her own truths and at last sets them right. "The Mermaid Chair" does not take you down under like the mythic mermaids did the unlucky sailors; it elevates and enthrones those whose mission is often misunderstood but whose goals are nevertheless laudable. In the end, Jessie affirms her spiritual integrity, her generosity of spirit, and her loyalty to the miraculous truths of the heart. For me this is enough to ask of literary fiction.
Marjorie Meyerle
Author of "Bread of Shame"
Colorado Writer
Summary of The Mermaid Chair
Inside the abbey of a Benedictine monastery on tiny Egret Island, just off the coast of South Carolina, resides a beautiful and mysterious chair ornately carved with mermaids and dedicated to a saint who, legend claims, was a mermaid before her conversion. Jessie Sullivan?s conventional life has been ?molded to the smallest space possible.? So when she is called home to cope with her mother?s startling and enigmatic act of violence, Jessie finds herself relieved to be apart from her husband, Hugh. Jessie loves Hugh, but on Egret Island?amid the gorgeous marshlands and tidal creeks?she becomes drawn to Brother Thomas, a monk who is mere months from taking his final vows. What transpires will unlock the roots of her mother?s tormented past, but most of all, as Jessie grapples with the tension of desire and the struggle to deny it, she will find a freedom that feels overwhelmingly right.
What inspires the yearning for a soul mate? Few writers have explored, as Kidd does, the lush, unknown region of the feminine soul where the thin line between the spiritual and the erotic exists. The Mermaid Chair is a vividly imagined novel about the passions of the spirit and the ecstasies of the body; one that illuminates a woman?s self-awakening with the brilliance and power that only a writer of Kidd?s ability could conjure.
Sue Monk Kidd's The Mermaid Chair is the soulful tale of Jessie Sullivan, a middle-aged woman whose stifled dreams and desires take shape during an extended stay on Egret Island, where she is caring for her troubled mother, Nelle. Like Kidd's stunning debut novel, The Secret Life of Bees, her highly anticipated follow up evokes the same magical sense of whimsy and poignancy.
While Kidd places an obvious importance on the role of mysticism and legend in this tale, including the mysterious mermaid's chair at the center of the island's history, the relationships between characters is what gives this novel its true weight. Once she returns to her childhood home, Jessie is forced to confront not only her relationship with her estranged mother, but her other emotional ties as well. After decades of marriage to Hugh, her practical yet conventional husband, Jessie starts to question whether she is craving an independence she never had the chance to experience. After she meets Brother Thomas, a handsome monk who has yet to take his final vows, Jessie is forced to decide whether passion can coexist with comfort, or if the two are mutually exclusive. As her soul begins to reawaken, Jessie must also confront the circumstances of her father's death, a tragedy that continues to haunt Jessie and Nelle over thirty years later.
By boldly tackling such major themes as love, betrayal, grief, and forgiveness, The Mermaid Chair forces readers to question whether moral issues can always be interpreted in black or white. It is this ability to so gracefully present multiple sides of a story that reinforces Kidd's reputation as a well-respected modern literary voice. --Gisele Toueg
United States Books
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