But this new novel lacks the spark of the earlier work. Its vision, characters, and even the prose seem tired. Too much of it is told rather than shown, and the story itself is a strange combination of a coming-of-age novel set on Long Island and a brutal story of the consequences of a childhood trauma that leads into a fateful descent into drugs for the main character, Elv, the eldest sister. Elv’s courageous rescue of her younger sister, Claire, from a pedophile and what happened to Elv become the secret that is the linchpin of the book. To escape that horror, Elv creates an imaginary world, Arnelle, and the three girls, Elv and Claire, and their middle sister, Meg, retreat to it, excluding their mother, Annie, who is divorced from their “nitwit’’ father, Alan. This parallel world, with its own language and rituals, becomes the excuse for outrageous behavior as the girls become teenagers.
We are told that Annie could identify which of them had entered a room, “distinguishing them by their scents. Claire smelled like vanilla, Meg like apples. Elv’s skin gave off the scent of burning leaves.’’
Yet Annie is incredibly passive and doesn’t seem to have any of the normal anxiety of a mother in a time and place where hormones are raging, drugs are rife, and dangers abound. Not even their supposedly sophisticated grandmother, Natalia, seems able to act. The girls visit her frequently in Manhattan and Paris, and although she knows Elv is a bully and a thief and, maybe, a nymphomaniac, all we are told is that “Natalia felt afraid for the child. Her friend Leah Cohen had told her that demons preyed upon young girls.’’
Only after the teenager who has been stalking Elv hangs himself does Annie wake up, and the entire family (including Alan) goes for a picnic in the country that ends up with Elv being left at a school for disturbed teenagers in New Hampshire. Elv then begins a descent into drug addiction, which leads to more violence and death. This section is described with real skill and precision, and my heart lifted as I began to feel some empathy for this eldest child who has caused such pain, and then goes missing.
