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: Nothing Less Than Magical
Summary: 5 Stars
The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd begins with this sentence: "In the middle of my marriage, when I was above all Hugh's wife and Dee's mother, one of those unambiguous women with no desire to disturb the universe, I fell in love with a Benedictine monk." I read a recent book review which ridiculed this sentence, and I found it incomprehensible. After reading this sentence in a bookstore, I almost got a speeding ticket because I was so eager to get home and continue reading. The Mermaid Chair is the eloquent and complex story of Jessie Sullivan, who is mystified when she falls in love with another man--Father Thomas, a monk of all people. It is an exquisite love story that deals not only with the love affair between Jessie and Father Thomas and its ramifications for her husband, Hugh, but with her fervent love for her parents, her love of family, of close friends, and of her childhood home--the mystical Egret Island off the coast of South Carolina.
Jessie is called back to the island by a phone call in the middle of the night from her mother's close friend Kat, who explains that Jessie's mother has chopped off one of her fingers with an axe. She tells Jessie that she has no clue what might have possessed her to do such a thing. Jessie takes the ferry home to find her mother behaving irrationally, refusing to talk about what she has done. What we eventually learn is that the secrets the mother clings to are withheld not out of malice or insanity, but because she wishes to save those she loves from pain. She believes that in maiming herself, she is healing her own unbearable pain over the death of her husband.
In the midst of this mystifying event, Jessie finds herself inexplicably in love. She describes her feelings for Hugh as having been "a ravenous kind of wanting" for so many years, yet she admits her marriage has "lost its imagination." She compares what happened to their relationship to animals who are "...taken from the wild and put in nice, simulated habitats where they turn complacent, knowing exactly where their next meal would come from." I often wonder if a thriving marriage, due to its length, is unfeasible, whether it contains the seeds of its own destruction. I have doubts that it can sustain the ardor that created it, that it can offer the continued growth and excitement I, for one, expect of it. This stunningly written novel reminds me that, indeed, equally strong feelings can replace the more passionate ones.
Jessie's story is that of a woman who wishes to belong to herself, to remain open to all that is possible for her, and not take the road of comfort and mindless security, so easily taken. It is a story of self-inquiry--for Jessie as well as for Father Thomas and Hugh. Such a journey is inevitably fraught with indecision and confusion. Herein lies Jessie's conundrum. How will she proceed? She is stymied and in anguish, not knowing what to do, which risks are the right ones to take... as is Father Thomas. Hugh, as well, has had the rug pulled out from under him. His anguish as he recognizes his wife's sudden emotional and physical distance is dramatic; his conclusions, ultimately, courageous. All three characters are caught in the crisis of a new phase in their life. Yet each recognizes responsibility in what has befallen him or her.
A favorite theme of Sue Monk Kidd in her previous novel, The Secret Life of Bees, and this one is the enormous power of guilt. Jessie is wracked with it, believing that her father died in a boating fire ignited by the spark of a pipe she had given him as a special gift. A pervasive guilt drives all the characters. Shame, tragic loss, the need for intimacy, and the ever constant belief in a greater power propel this story into fascinating territory.
The author masterfully interweaves human guilt with the significance of the Catholic monastery on the island. That is where the mermaid chair comes in, though I do not wish to give away its significance. Enough to say that it sits in a side chapel in the church,the holiest place in the monastery. Every year, the mermaid chair takes center stage in a special ceremony on the blessed day for honoring St. Senara--a mermaid before her conversion and becoming a saint. I will not say more here except that the chair is a place of solace. To sit in it, to touch it connects the believer to all that is sacred.
Sue Monk Kidd's writing, in my view, is nothing less than magical. I have a new love of mermaids and reread The Mermaid Chair before I go to sleep at night in the hope a mermaid might swim her way into my dreams and guide me where I need to go.
by Duffie Bart
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women
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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