The Mermaid Chair

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“You can't stop your heart from loving, really -- it's like standing out there in the ocean yelling at the waves to stop.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Mermaid Chair

My review..9/6/2020

The Mermaid Chair was a must read for me. I fell in love..immediately..with the cover. I'd also read "The invention of wings" which I'd rated a five. I was prepared to love this. I did not.

I DID love certain aspects. By gosh, this woman can write. And she writes in a way I love. She writes about summer and islands and Mermaids. She writes of Star Fish and beautiful Sea Corral and she writes of water and tranquility. She writes of beautiful flowers and the sweetness of the Sea Spray and of tropical breezes and citrus and her writing is just..simply..heavenly.

But the subject matter..it did not do it for me. The infidelity was not the issue..not really. So what WAS the issue? Lots of things.

I did not really understand Jess. I did understand her motivation, her wanting to be free. And I understood her desire. To people who question why she needed sex to feel free..I get that. Is there anything more exciting then the first blush of pure passion? Of feeling a soul connection? I got all that and it did not offend me.

But her feelings of disdain for her husband bewildered me. Not that she was tired of him. But in certain ways, she seemed to find him repugnant and that I did not get. To question one's life..yes. But at times Jesse almost seemed to dislike him and she became so hostile toward High and so..almost contemptious..that I found it hard to understand.

Add to that:

SPOILERS:

When Jesse had the odd turnaround and wanted to go back to Hugh. It seemed to happen so suddenly. Can one really turn off one's sexuality that quickly? She LOVED this man..Brother Tom..and all of a sudden she was longing for Hugh. I GUESS this sort of thing happens. Not having ever been married maybe I just do not get it. But all of a sudden her feelings shifted toward Hugh and she loved him fiercely. Now if it had been casual between tom and her I'd have understood but she felt Tom was PART of her and her soul. It was hard to understand when all of a sudden she was literally saying the same thing about Hugh. I was a bit baffled.

Plus..the book was depressing. Really gloomy. And very New Agey. And just not in a way I liked.

I'd have adored this book if it had all been just about the island. The incredible writing, the raw and special BEAUTY of how this woman (Sue Monk Kidd) writes is vivid and beautiful. I just was not wild about the story line.

I also did not get what she said about how their love ( her and Brother Tom’s), wasn’t meant for such mundane things as washing socks or living together. Then is it really love at all? I had to wonder. Jesse's marrying herself to the sea was a little out there but I love the sea too so I could understand that. And the images of the island made me want to go there. Very mixed feelings.


And so much time was spent on the mom's story line as well as the story of her dad which broke my heart but was to painful for me to read without skimming..The book was a celebration in a way of life and living and I get that and I deeply respect some of the messages in this book. But the book as a whole was not for me.

I love you as one loves certain dark things, secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
- Pablo Neruda

Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
- W. B. Yeats

This is a weird love story which could have and should have been better. The Mermaid Folklore related to Sainthood was extremely intriguing.

Favorite Passages:

They say you can bear anything if you can tell a story about it.
_______

In the end the mermaids did not save him. But I wonder if perhaps they saved me. I know this much: The mermaids came to me finally, in the pink hours of my life.
_______

When Dee was small, she'd mistakenly called the church the "Scared Heart of Mary." The two of us still referred to it that way sometimes, and it occurred to me now how apt the name really was. I mean, if Mary was still around, like so many people thought, including my insatiably Catholic mother, maybe her heart was scared. Maybe it was because she was on such a high and impossible pedestal - Consummate Monther, Good Wife, All-Around Paragon of Perfect Womanhood. She was probably up there peering over the side, wishing for a ladder, a parachute, something to get her down from there.
_______

I lay back on the bed; I felt like a tent collapsing, the center pole yanked out, followed by the billowy floating.
_______

"Jessie," she said. "The reason I called . . . Yesterday your mother cut off her finger with a meat cleaver. Her right index finger."
_______

I'd always felt that Kat harbored some knowledge about Mother that was off-limits to me, a wall with a concealed room behind it.
_______

"You can go other places, all right - you can live on the other side of the world, but you can't ever leave home."
_______

. . . I felt myself rise up out of that little smudge of ash, with the determination of a phoenix. I will leave here, I told myself. I will fly away.
_______

The last thing I'd expected was to stand on Hepzibah's porch and feel a seizure of love for Egret Island. And not just for the island but for the woman my mother had been, dancing around a fire.
Something struck me then: I'd never done any of those things my mother had done. Never danced on a beach. Never made a bonfire. Never waded into the ocean at night with laughing women and tied my life to theirs.
_______

I was surprised by the weight of memory, the awful contagion of family, of place.
_______

Kat slid back her foot, and we stood in the late afternoon, in a moment of perfect stillness, and stared at my mother's blood.
_______

That time Mike was eight and got his poor penis stuck in a Coke bottle while urinating into it - for reasons none of us ever understood. His penis had, shall we say, expanded somewhat after entry. Mother had tried to act concerned but broke down laughing. She told him, "Mike, go sit in your room and picture Mother Teresa, and your penis will come right out."
_______

"What happened to her finger?  The one she cut off?"
"It's in a mayonnaise jar by her bed," she answered matter-of-factly.
_______

The smell of gumbo hung inside the house in thick green ropes, like something you could swing on to get across the kitchen.
_______

What would I say to her? Do you have plans to sever any more body parts? It sounded crass, horrible, but that's what I really wanted to know - whether she was a danger to herself, whether she needed committing to some place that could take care of her.
_______

He said his religion was the sea. That it was his family. He'd told Mike and me stories about a sea kingdom ruled by a gang of ruthless and snails and the brave keyhole limpets who tried to overthrow them. His imagination was ingenious.
_______

Maybe her faith in the church made up for his lack of it. My mother and father made a peculiar couple - Walt Whitman and Joan of Arc - but it'd worked. They had adored each other. I was sure of that.
_______

I closed my eyes. I felt that the centerpiece of my history had been dug up and exposed as a complete and utter fiction. It left a gaping place I couldn't quite step over.
_______

Sit in the chair,
Say a prayer.
An answer tomorrow
From St. Senara.
_______

What matters is giving over to what you love.
_______

"Her hand is nearly mended," I said, "but I worry that her mind may never be."
_______

"Don't throw it away," she mumbled, her tone barely audible.
I bent over her. "What are you saying? Throw what away?"
A nurse making marks on a clipboard nearby looked up.
"She's been saying that since she started waking."
I bent down where I could smell the noxious odor of the anesthetic from her mouth. "Throw what away?" I repeated.
"My finger," she said, and the nurse stopped writing and stared at me with her mouth formed into a small, pinched circle.
"Where is your finger?" I asked. "I looked for it."
"In a bowl, in the refrigerator, " she said, her eyes already closed.
_______

"That's what I mean about redemption," I said. "I think all this dismembering she's doing is really about her need to grow something, or make a new world, to re-member herself back in a new way."
________

I'd thought we would be buried together. Side by side in a nice cemetery in Atlanta. Or that our cremated remains would sit in matching urns in Dee's house until she found it in herself to go out and scatter them. Once I'd imagined her hauling the urns all the way to Egret Island and tossing handfuls of us in the air on Bone Yard Beach. I'd pictured the wind whipping us together in a blizzard of indistinguishable particles - Hugh and me flying to the sky, returning to the earth, together. And Dee walking away with bits of us in her hair. What was the mysterious and enduring thing that had made me so certain of us for so long? Where had it gone?
_______

I sat in amazement, the translucence that comes when life hardens into a bead of such cruel perfection you see it with the purest clarity. Everything suddenly there - life as it truly is, enormous, appalling, devastating. You see the great sinkholes it makes in people and the harrowing lengths to which love will go to fill them.

This has to be one of the best opening paragraphs ever:

"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."

So much tantalizing plot is known from the start. Jessie, the 'I' of the paragraph, returns to the South Carolina island where she grew up after her mother - who cooks for a nearby monastery - has cut off one of her fingers. While Jessie has never truly recovered from the loss of her beloved father when she was nine, this return triggers more memories and puzzles - many involving her mother.

The highly symbolic mermaid chair of the title (what is one's true home? Mermaids are caught between sea and land...)lends itself to explorations of love, faith, fidelity and the nature of the soul.

I liked this alot, in spite of my predilection not to once I realized the gist of the story. I didn't enjoy it quite as much as The Secret Life of Bees... it was exceptionally well-written, definitely better than most of the stuff I have been reading. It was relevant and I think prompted reflection on my general psychological well-being and state. But I couldn't help but feel like it wasn't fresh... to me. Some of what the main character Jessie learned I feel like I already knew. So I didn't relish the spectacular affair she had with Brother Thomas, because I knew all along how it would end. That part wasn't a discovery for me.

Where I think Kidd's true strength is, is in her writing about family ties and how they influence us. Jessie's relationship with her father was the most poignant for me, and the most true. I felt like her mother was pathetic and this part of the story, about the women-bonds in Jessie's life, didn't really ring true. The story was about Jessie's relationships with men and how her father impacted those.

Having said I enjoyed it and it prompted reflection on my own life, I was vaguely uneasy with all the psychological posturing in the book. I guess it was an integral part of the character's journey, but it was a little too self-conscious, particularly when shared from the viewpoint of Hugh.

Although I prefer her first novel, I would recommend this one and I'll read anything else she puts out. I think this novel may be more profound than I am giving it credit for... perhaps because, as I've said, what Jessie discovered about her need for self just didn't seem like news to me.

Just starting this tonight so will update soon, hopefully will enjoy it as enjoyed her other book The Secret Life of Bee's.. Well I had seen many great reviews of this book and between them and her first book I read I expected this one to be just as great! Though I've found it harder to get in to this one.. bc of liking the author and not completely disliking the book I persisted with it and am glad to say I'm liking it more.. Not confident to say that this will be book of the month though.. Ok so I made it through 30% of this book which sucks I know but I just couldn't read it anymore. I've not had to this for a while really so it is pretty hard but.. So many books.. Not enough time!! Right? I know you all get what I'm talking about.

I have to think on this before writing a full review. I loved some of the writing in the prologue and hoped that it would continue throughout the book. There were glimpses and the ending paragraph, but I wanted more of her descriptive and reflective prose. The overall story was good, I liked the setting, I was very interested in what was going on with the MC's mother, I even was okay with how everything concluded, but one of the pieces was distasteful to me and kept me from being all in. Like I said I'll think on this to see if I can capture my feelings about the novel.

I really wanted to like this book and after being pleasantly surprised (and touched) by "The Secret Life of Bees" I was pretty eager to read it. Having said that, I didn't dislike it. I guess disappointed is the word. I was disappointed in the characters, the themes, the motivations and the plot overall. The characters seemed stock/shallow and a bit forced with the only believable one of the lot being the poor husband (and the friend’s “off” daughter, who was a hoot...we needed more of her) and the dog. Nothing is really explained and while I understand that impulses don't always warrant explanation, it still left me feeling a bit used up and frustrated. The sex scenes were especially tedious and sometimes I almost felt as if this was a serious confessional (but I also think I’m a bit of a prude). I found myself plodding along because it wasn't a very long book in hopes that at some point it would suddenly make sense. And don't get me wrong, Sue Monk Kidd has talent, there are some brilliant passages here, beautiful and moving and as real as anything you'd like. The mystery of the mother and her self mutilation was quite intriguing as well as various "touched upon" descriptions of the island (like the slave cemetery). But overall it was a bit of a let down and I may have expected too much of it because of the previous read. So I apologize for wanting that "heck yeah!" feeling I got with "Secret Life of Bees" and should have just let this one present itself on its own without pretext.