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Review by Laurie Parker
Ellen Gilchrist not only understands the strange and unknowable bonds that bind people together -- even at times against their own wills -- but she can also write about them, something only a very select and talented few can do. In her 15 books, she has pondered and explored the tangled webs of family, romantic love and friendship, creating in her fiction a host of memorable figures whose lives tie together into "a net of jewels," a metaphor Gilchrist used as the title of an earlier book.
In "Sarah Conley," her most honest novel since "The Anna Papers," Gilchrist turns her pen to a set of individuals unrelated to any of the eccentric extended families who populate her previous works. With this fresh approach, she creates characters of great depth and intensity, with thoughts and emotions that can sometimes strike disturbingly close to home. Gilchrist focuses on the lives of four friends and the families they make, destroy and rebuild. She centers her lens on the title character, a National Book Award-winning novelist and editor at "Time" magazine who is unexpectedly pulled by the death of a friend from the independent urban existence she has created into a life she thought she had left behind.
Eugenie McAllen had been Sarah's closest friend since adolescence, through their years at Vanderbilt, and even after Eugenie married the man Sarah loved and Sarah married his brother, Timothy. But Sarah broke away from their world. While the other members of the quartet stayed in Nashville, safe in their steady and orderly lives, Sarah moved to New York and made a name for herself as a writer with a roman a clef that alienated her from those she had left behind.
Now Eugenie is dead, and Jack McAllen is free again. After years of distance and misunderstanding, he and Sarah come together like two magnets, as if that were simply part of the natural order of things. Yet Sarah feels herself disappearing in this relationship, as if she is losing the very self she had worked so ruthlessly to create.
When the opportunity comes for her to go to Paris to write a screenplay, Sarah jumps on it, "trailing lives behind [her] like a Portuguese man-of-war." Jack comes to stay for a few weeks before he must return to his medical practice. While those weeks are blissful, they also contain a set of experiences that show how very different Sarah's and Jack's lives have become. Now it seems Sarah must choose between her own treasured and hard-won independence and the man she has loved since she was 17.
"Sarah Conley" is about choices: the choices we make because we feel we have to, consequences be damned. Sarah is one of Gilchrist's finest characterizations yet, a fully formed, self-sufficient, modern woman who believes that she can have everything she wants but doesn't know how to get it. Through her, Gilchrist shows us how sometimes even people of Sarah's strength find that choices aren't always black and white, right or wrong, that the mind must sometimes come to a compromise with the heart.
This is Gilchrist's best work in years -- sharp, candid and perceptive. She is in top form as she shows us yet again that "life is too complex to be answered with anything but acceptance."
Laurie Parker is a frequent reviewer of modern Southern fiction, whatever that means. She lives in Baton Rouge with her two greyhounds, Walker Percy and Ellen Foster.
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