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Beneath a Perfect, Goop-Influenced Exterior Lurks a Violent Past
In Chelsea Bieker’s new novel, “Madwoman,” a woman is no longer able to keep the demons of her childhood out of her present.
MADWOMAN, by Chelsea Bieker
For years Clove has kept her history at bay, marrying a bland but “safe” financier husband and creating the perfect, organic linen-wearing family in Portland, Ore. From sourdough and crystals, bamboo sporks and rainbow chard, she has built a sea wall against her perilous childhood — a violent father, a mother who could not bring herself to leave him, and one shattering day too terrible for Clove to scrutinize. But what happens to a meticulously staged life when the past’s dirty tide threatens to wash away every defense?
In her third book, Chelsea Bieker breathes thrilling, risky energy into the familiar trope of the madwoman. The novel offers a number of candidates for the title role: Clove, desperate to maintain the sleek fictions she has almost convinced herself are real; her estranged mother, writing to Clove from prison, demanding she tell the entire story at last; perhaps the charismatic Jane, long-limbed and Zen, with whom Clove forms a breakneck friendship more intense and nourishing than her marriage.
But Bieker’s women are no fragile Ophelias or Madeline Ushers, no delicate young wives driven to insanity in yellow-wallpapered cages. And although fueled by rage, they are not spurned brides hidden in the attic, more animal than human, nor femmes fatales plucked from a 1980s screenplay and bent on blood. Rather, they are complex and shrewd, claiming an agency that lends the novel much of its twisty, propulsive plot.
In claustrophobic first person, Clove addresses the narrative to “you” — the mother she has tried to forget. This amplifies the sense of intimacy and interiority; the reader is at once the eavesdropper and the accused. “You said you wished you’d lied to my father in your early days of dating,” she narrates. “Before the first time my father ever hit you. Well, he didn’t hit you, he’d remind us. It was your fault for talking in passing about the guy who’d taken you to your senior prom.”
Punctuating an otherwise current voice with old-fashioned formality, Clove refers to her absent parent as “Mother,” rather than “Mom.” The choice is jarring at first, but over time it underscores the emotional and spatial distance Clove has placed between the two women. Occasionally she recounts events that feel superfluous: “Around the time I was 10,” she tells her mother, who must know this story already, “my father’s buddy Cuddles convinced him to take up work in Hawaii on a major interstate tunnel project in the Koolau mountains.” Such exposition breaks some of the novel’s spell.
