Iris Lockhart lives alone, but is having an affair with a married man.  She gets a phone call about an elderly relative she has never heard of before.  The woman is 76 and has been in a mental institution for 60 years.  Iris goes to visit Esme and learns the institution will soon be closing, leaving the old woman to an uncertain future.  For some reason Iris feels motivated to help Esme find a new place, but when she drives her to the new home, she is appalled by the conditions she sees, so she ends up taking her back to her house.  The old woman recognizes the house from her youth, and although she is mostly quiet and guarded, she talks a bit about her past. 

Scattered through the book are both flashbacks showing Esme's childhood.  Later in the book are streams of consciousness from the mind of Esme's sister Kitty, who now has Alzheimer's disease, and lives mostly living in the past, unable to recognize the people around her.  From these different clues, the reader is gradually able to piece together the story of what happened to get Esme institutionalized at the age of 16, and why her family never mentioned her afterwards.  It becomes clear that while Esme have been troubled, she was troubled by what happened to her, and there was no reason to think that she was really mentally ill.  So the picture of psychiatry from the first half of the twentieth century that emerges is of a profession used to hide away those whose presence is embarrassing to a family. 

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox was published in 2006 in the UK, to a great deal of praise from reviewers.  She is the author of several books, including the wonderful After You'd Gone, [reviewed in Metapsychology 5:46].  The reviews of the new book give the impression that the complex story that unfolds is clear, but I found it confusing.  The book has no chapters, but consists in a series of sections separated by gaps.  The time frame shifts often between present and past, and recollections of the past from the present, so one is constantly trying to work out what events are being described and whose perspective the narration is from.  Esme's sad tale is interesting but there are several obstacles to the reader managing a sympathetic identification with her.  Iris is the more charismatic character, but she has her own rather bizarre life including a very close relationship to her brother.  All the third-person narration is in the present tense, with the narrator observing the actions and thoughts of the characters as they occur, which makes all the action a little unexpected.  The only character whose words are provided from the first person perspective is Kitty, and she is a confused old lady with Alzheimer's, so it is very hard to get close to her.  The overall effect of the book is discomforting and even alienating.  One might make thematic comparisons to Susanna Kaysen's memoir Girl, Interrupted, but the books could hardly be more different otherwise.  While Kaysen invites sympathy for herself for her psychiatric punishment for her wayward teenage behavior, O'Farrell makes Esme a puzzling and finally unsympathetic character despite the injustices that she suffered. 

O'Farrell's crisp prose with short sentences in the third person narration helps to balance the longer meandering sentences in the first person stream of thought, and the mixture of styles does provoke a sense of the author's control of the whole book as she gradually reveals the past.  However, after finishing the novel, I at least did not warm to it more on reflecting on it.  The messy plot, delivered with deliberate obscurity, still does not make much sense when one knows all of it, and it has too many loose ends.  Sadly, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox is a disappointment. 

Link: Christie Hickman Review in the New Statesman

© 2007 Christian Perring

Christian Perring, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Dowling College, New York.

Categories: Fiction