A new heroine, a familiar journey of the soul
The Mermaid Chair
By Sue Monk Kidd
Viking, 335 pp., $24.95
Sue Monk Kidd's first novel, ''The Secret Life of Bees," catapulted her to bestseller lists and the top of book-club agendas because of its rich South Carolina landscape and the story of a woman's search for a secret about her mother. Kidd's new novel, ''The Mermaid Chair," visits similar geographical and emotional terrain, and is likely to prove as successful for its author.
Jessie Sullivan, heroine of the most recent book, is a wife, mother, and -- despite the fact that she hasn't found a way to make her work particularly gratifying to her -- an artist. She suffers from malaise in her marriage and empty-nest syndrome since her daughter left for college a few months before the novel opens. She is yearning for some kind of change but doesn't even seem aware of it until an act of self-destructive violence by her mother draws Jessie to her childhood home on Egret Island, off the South Carolina coast.
Egret Island is also home to a Benedictine monastery, which in turn is home to the mermaid chair -- a seat with arms carved into the shape of mermaids that, according to legend, guarantees the granting of impossible prayers. It is in the monastery that Jessie finds the answer to a prayer she didn't even realize she was offering: that of relief from ennui and emptiness. The answer, as surprising and dangerous to Jessie as her mother's act of self-mutilation, comes in the form of one of the monks, Brother Thomas, so named because of the doubts he has about taking his pending official vows.
In describing the first encounter between Jessie and Brother Thomas, Kidd treads perilously close to the writing in romance novels: ''When I met him, all the dark little wicks in the cells of my body lifted up in the knowledge that here he was -- the one you wait for." We haven't been well enough prepared, before that point, to understand that Jessie's marriage to psychiatrist Hugh is in any kind of trouble; in fact, the evidence points to its comfort and solidity. Why Jessie is willing to threaten this relationship, through her attraction to the monk, remains enigmatic, though later in the book Kidd tries valiantly to justify Jessie's notions of going astray. ''My life had been beautifully contained within Hugh's, like one of those Russian nesting dolls," Jessie observes. She goes on to wonder: ''What if there were no more Hugh in my life? No more of these small antics, the moments we'd pieced together to form a history? But were these habits of love -- or love itself?"
While attempting to solve these questions in the context of Brother Thomas's company, Jessie also has her mother's behavior to contend with, as well as the mystery of how her own father died; who knows how he died; and why it has been a secret for more than 30 years. Since the age of 9, she has carried a guilt related to the death, which she has been led to believe was caused by a spark from the pipe she herself had given her father.
But when she finds evidence that this belief is mistaken, she goes about trying to piece together clues with the help of a circle of women she has known since her childhood. Kidd falls short of rendering these characters in three-dimensional complexity, especially Hepzibah, the local ''culture keeper," who speaks perfect Gullah (the language slaves fashioned out of English and their own native tongue) and leads tourists on the Grand Gullah Tour, which includes a visit to the slave cemetery.
A community of women supporting each other's ''soul travels" -- which is how Jessie conceives of her journey of self-discovery -- is also central to the theme of ''The Secret Life of Bees," although Kidd does a better job, in that book, of characterizing those who help the protagonist come to peace with the central losses in her life. In ''The Mermaid Chair," the reader longs for more of Kat, Benne, and Hepzibah.
During the telling of what Jessie comes to think of as ''a Great Ecstasy and a Great Catastrophe," Kidd makes use of multiple points of view. There are a few chapters devoted to Brother Thomas's experiences and thoughts, which are interesting for the way they illuminate the character's torment as he tries to decide whether to leave the monastic life for the secular one: ''I don't know what my cross is. Is it doing without her now that I've loved her? Or is it doing without the abbey? Or is it the peculiar agony of being spiritual and human at the same time?"
''The Mermaid Chair" doesn't live up to Brother Thomas's definition of art -- which ''gives a person an experience of the eternal" -- but it is intriguing for the philosophical and more prosaic questions it raises. Readers who admired ''Bees" will likely find pleasure in Kidd's new combination of legend, personal history, spirituality, and humanity in quest of its own significance.
Jessica Treadway is the author of ''Absent Without Leave" and ''And Give You Peace." She teaches creative writing at Emerson College.
