Playing House – A Book Review
A Major Literary Force From Fredrica Wagman
Towards the very first few pages of this brilliantly thought out novel, our unnamed narrator hits upon the secret to the universe through a freakish accident. The only problem is that this secret is something she shares with her brother. Playing House, a story that has shocked readers across the nation is about a woman’s struggle with the lasting effects of an intimate childhood relationship with her brother.
Themes: Reality and Dreams
What is real? At certain points of the novel, our narrator mentions this question. What is real, she keeps asking Turtle, her husband of many years whom she had had two children with. And he would try to comfort her that the formless dark mass of blackness wasn’t it. Real was her life, her children, her husband and daily living.
But our narrator refuses to see this. It is mentioned throughout the novel, ‘the dream’. She, in actuality is living in a dream, a fantasy that she has courted as a child.
In the novel, at her older sister’s funeral, she finds her sister’s funeral as unreal as her death. She realizes that the only real thing is her brother. He is the only one anchored, who is going somewhere, even the way he walks and talks, commands and affects people. It gives a lasting impression over her, more so than her sister’s death did. So much that her brother becomes everything to her: her mother, her father, her lover, and her benefactor. Her reality is intertwined in his, until everything else is unfulfilling or unreal without him. Because of him she becomes lost and disillusioned.
Imagery in Playing House
A repetitious imagery that plays back again and again in the novel is the image of a tunnel that is forever looking backwards. In a sense, this tunnel represents our narrator. Her vision is centered on the past: she cannot forget the golden sunshine and the leaves that mirrored over the springhouse where her brother and she first made love. In all her paintings and writings, she is trying to capture an image, a youth that is already past.
The imagery mentioned in this novel is in actuality abstracts of reality. Each character is given an abstract of their own for the narrator to define and ground her reality around: The Mother is governed by mirrors and a world of reflections, Turtle by singular objects that stand out and then slowly defines him, The Brother by blond hair falling over his eyes, chubby formless cheeks, and fleshy hands, and the Doctor by his huge Cheshire Cat-like smile.
Lasting Motifs
The narrator only comes alive in her youth. This is when the reader finds the ramblings of the narrator to be most clear and real. The focus is coherent and one could see the narrator reaching into the realm of her past to grasp the clarity that only could exist through her childhood. But it is only the dream that the unnamed narrator tries to possess.
She recreates it through her art. As a young child of nine or ten, the violin was her instrument for creation. But once she masters the instrument she quickly grows bored with it.. Life is pretty much like that for our narrator. Like what Turtle tries to express in his monologue to her, “The secret is, that the other human being needs something no one can give him. They need a dream to be broken over and over again, they need to be destroyed and reconstructed just so they can be destroyed again and that’s their whole sad hopeless lousy story and they take you with them”. Our narrator co-exists in this realm of creation, and existing and then destruction, this maddening cycle happening over and over again. She reincarnates herself each time refreshing herself for the next ‘fix’ in life. And the men in her life have always been there to try and help her. They were the other half of creation; to try and mend her broken self.
A Confession
As if wishing to be anonymous, the narrator refuses to give any names. And in part confessional, this tryst into madness is, in a deliberating sense, a personal confession. The narrator is confessing her sins to at first a priest and then the swan. For a while the priest represents the purity of the church, and it is something the narrator can absolve to until she dirties it. Then the swan becomes the pure entity to which she can formulate her thoughts from.
In a sense, the reader is like the golden archer described in this novel. “He understood the impossibility of reality. He could draw a little circle around madness and point it out and hold it in his hands without losing his own sanity, without becoming it. He didn’t laugh at it, he didn’t run from it, he understood.” We are like the golden archer, making sense out of this madness, although not taking part in it.
What the Critics Think…
The Washington Post hails this spectacular novel, “A kind of unsparing honesty that makes you shiver but also stop to admire.” Fredrica Wagman is definitely one of the greatest novelists of her time. Author of five novels, including, His Secret Wife, she has written a novel that will be talked about years from now. Having truly penned a literary force, Wagman’s Playing House will reach audiences decades from now with its candor and disparing honesty,
Wagman, Fredrica
Playing HouseRandom House
2008
978-1-58195-225-4
Playing House (cover)
|
What do you think about this article?
More in Reading & Literature
Latest Articles