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Pinkerton's Sister, by Peter Rushforth
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Trapped in a suffocating life of convention and party chatter, Alice Pinkerton has turned to the liberating worlds she finds in literature. Like a character from one of her favorite novels, Alice holds a biting, eccentric, but expansive view of life; she wears only white, has a stutter, and knows her peers call her a madwoman in the attic. Various period cures-hydrotherapy, hypnotherapy, electrotherapy, a sanitarium-fail to turn this thirty-two-year-old, highly imaginative, caustically funny woman into one of the silly damsels of 1903's New York Society. Hauntingly, beneath all this lies a dark family secret.
Pinkerton's Sister is a novel for readers, who will thrill to recognize a kindred in Alice's references to our most beloved literary characters: Jo March, Jane Eyre, Leo Bloom, and Hester Prynne, among many others, grace these pages. This intertextual, playful work certainly qualifies as "the ultimate book-geek's guilty pleasure" (Creative Loafing Atlanta).
- Sales Rank: #354280 in Books
- Published on: 2006-05-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.31" h x 5.30" w x 8.02" l, 1.67 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 752 pages
Amazon.com Review
Within the bounds of realism, a more fantastic or original novel than Peter Rushforth's Pinkerton's Sister would be hard to imagine. Alice Pinkerton is a New York spinster of 1905, raised to join the middle-class matrons in her respectable, status-conscious neighborhood, but cursed from childhood with the gift of seeing through humbug. Her ecstatic immersion in English literature has only made things worse, so that by the age of 30, she is too clever, quirky, and dark-mustached to be anything but an object of scorn in the eyes of her peers. When not submitting to her psychologist's latest enthusiasms (she suffers his passing fancies for phrenology, massage, hot water immersion, cold water immersion, dream interpretation, cloud reading, and hypnosis) Alice occupies herself with word games and arabesques, indulging in lengthy fantasies of gender-reversal, spontaneous ballet, and other embarrassments for the doctors, clergymen, merchants, and matrons who patrol the social boundaries that keep bluestockings like Alice locked away as "madwomen," rather than writing and selling books.
There's very little in the way of plot in Rushforth's second novel (the first, Kindergarten, appeared to acclaim about 25 years ago), except for the piecemeal recollection of her childhood friendship with a black servant named Annie. Not much older than Alice herself, Annie was a worthy playmate who tried to protect Alice from her father and the never-spelled-out abuses he and a friend inflicted on them both. Alice's hatred of her father burns even hotter than her love of Annie, and she remains convinced he was responsible for Annie¹s disappearance and probable death. These passions--and a handful of other childhood memories--hold together an otherwise loose, disorderly sequence of satirical jokes and verbal flourishes and sometimes overly long frolics. Don't expect the rustling skirts and repressed emotions of a Merchant Ivory film. Pinkerton's Sister reads like an absinthe-fueled, all-night collaboration between Edith Wharton, Angela Carter, and Monty Python. --Regina Marler
From Publishers Weekly
Rushforth's pyrotechnic second novel (appearing 25 years after the publication of his acclaimed debut, Kindergarten) seeks to capture, in one day, the play of forces—literary, musical, medical and sexual—that made Edwardian New York society. At the center is Alice Pinkerton, nearly 35-year-old "spinster," the "madwoman in the attic" of Longfellow Park. Actually, she is not confined to an attic: she writes, goes to church and takes care of her mother. But these details are almost hidden in the deluge of Alice's inner life flowing over these pages, with a richness comparable to Leopold Bloom's in Ulysses. Alice, it appears, suffers from hypertrophy of childhood memories and a consequent emotional vacancy of adult experience. Does it stem from her discovery, at 20, of the body of her father, who committed suicide in his study? Perhaps the real key to Alice's condition goes back to twinned mysteries: the disappearance of her beloved childhood maid, and the source of her hatred for her father. Alice's fantasies and musings are stuffed with references to Shakespeare, 19th-century novels and poetry (particularly Stevenson's The Children's Hour, which exerts a surprisingly sinister influence in her life), opera and popular music; these are both buffers against reality and a means of mythologizing her neighbors. The flaw is that Rushforth has created no character in the book to counterbalance Alice; you sometimes feel that, in this mansion of a novel, you are locked in a small crowded closet.
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From The New Yorker
Rushforth's second novel, which took him twenty-five years to write, is set in Edwardian New York and takes place on a single day, largely in the avid mind of its heroine, Alice Pinkerton, a bibliophilic spinster with a stammer and a penchant for dressing in white. Something of a cross between Harriet the Spy and Jane Eyre, she passes her days devising ways to expose "the humorless of Longfellow Park," as epitomized by her nemesis, the dowager Mrs. Albert Comstock. She is regarded, unsurprisingly, as the neighborhood eccentric and undergoes various period cures, like hypnotism. Rushforth weaves Alice's often fantastical musings together with bits of the classics, popular novels, doggerel, and even advertisements for dentures and corsets. Although the author's reliance on allusion occasionally shades into the merely curatorial, his novel constitutes an epic inquiry into literature's role as an engine of interior life.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
Most helpful customer reviews
31 of 32 people found the following review helpful.
(3.5) Diary of a "madwoman"
By Luan Gaines
This is really an astonishing piece of work, weighty in the extreme and filled with literary references that evoke beloved classic masterpieces. From the first page, Alice Pinkerton muses about her life as a woman of the 20th century, still controlled by the rigid Victorian mores that govern every element of society. Likening herself to Rochester's wife, the madwoman in Jane Eyre, Alice is hardly mad, rather a lady of exquisite intellectual sensibilities who does not live incarcerated, attending church and performing other duties required by her station. Rather, it is Alice's mind that is imprisoned, for the entire work, takes place in the character's mind, segueing from one connection to another.
Hers is a fascinating dialog, one that questions, pokes, prods and eviscerates the common mentality. Clearly, Alice is a woman born before her time. The forces that converge in Alice's thoughts, literary, musical, sometimes vaguely threatening, run from simple observations to more convoluted ideas. Were she a man, Alice would be considered a literary master of ideas and revolutionary concepts.
That said, this is a stream-of-consciousness novel with Alice as the only character, driven by her own inner dialog, without the respite of other points of view. Although I tried, I could not continue the journey with Alice, eventually exhausted by the sheer force of words spinning through her intellect. This book is staggering in the number of pages and range of ideas, especially the literary references, which mine long-forgotten, if once beloved novels. I just could not continue past the first 200 pages. Alice proved too much for me.
Such enormous energy is expended in the 727 pages that there must be a welcoming audience for this novel. I envision the author, churning out endless pages, falling deeper into Alice's mind and I cannot imagine that this literary monument should go unappreciated. There is an audience for stream-of-consciousness novels and I hope this one receives its share of applause. Luan Gaines/ 2005.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Like being alone inside someone's mind.
By S. Becker
The first thing to warn potential readers of this book about - it isn't a story so much as the dialogue happening in a woman's mind. Imagine sitting down in the morning and daydreaming and reminiscing all day. Then sit down and write the whole thing down over 727 pages. That is what Pinkerton's Sister is like to read. Comparisons to James Joyce's "Ulysses" are apt. There is no "action", nothing actually happens. It is just thoughts written down (and it skips and jumps between topics like real thoughts do). So if you place a high value on plot, Pinkerton's Sister is best avoided.
Having said that, the thoughts of Alice, the 35 year-old Victorian spinster, who "reads too much" are interesting. There are witty, cynical observations about the people in her neighbourhood and their social pretensions. There are numerous references to literary classics, from "The Scarlet Letter" to "Frankenstein", "Jane Eyre" and even the Bible. Alice Pinkerton relates all the characters and events in books to those people she knows in real life, and the two become intertwined. A play of reality and fiction forms in her mind, and the reader is invited inside.
In the cave of Alice's mind we find bitterness, frustration and contempt for the world around her, all expressed with witty sarcasm. Alice realises the problem isn't with her, but with the society she lives in. A society where women who are unmarried and read literature are considered mad, and sent to see psychoanalists. She mocks this narrow world by comparing it to the rich and varied one she finds in books, the world of her mind.
The writing style and literary knowledge of the author are great. The insights of Alice are beautiful despite their brutal truth. But unfortunately, I couldn't take 700+ pages of thought without any sort of events. With no "external stimulation" so to speak, I got wearing reading at times. It was like being stuck in an elevator, with nothing to do or see, just your thoughts. At times you just had to "get off" and take a break before returning to the "seclusion" of the book.
If that doesn't bother you, I recommend it. As for me, I sort of wish it had been shorter. The experience was good, and I was glad of it, but it lasted too long. You get the flavour of Alice's thoughts in about 250 pages. After that, they begin to feel repetitive. I resented the loss of time I could have spent reading other books.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
What Alice knew ...
By baroquemaniac
Whenever Alice, the novel's protagonist, turns her acerbic wit on the stuffy philistines surrounding her, the results are simply hilarious, and I honestly consider rereading some of these chapters to better savour their verbal acrobatics.
Traversing this novel, however, was by no means an unalloyed pleasure: first, as Alice's fellow citizens tend to come across as cardboard caricatures, the sheer length of the harangues does not always seem justified; and what is more, these entertaining bits come in between expansive stretches of densely allusive prose, littered with literary references and snatches of verse.
These parts definitely exhausted my patience and went beyond my intellectual grasp, but I still wonder if to some extent this is not simply a novel that wants to be too clever by half and in doing so diminishes the impact of the monstrosities lurking at its dark core.
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