There's
no roiling storm to disturb the preternatural calm over the opening chapter of
Francine Prose's 15th
novel, Goldengrove;
instead, a late-spring idyll is disrupted for good by an ill-timed nap and a
heart condition.
Thirteen-year-old Nico is sleeping in a rowboat when her older sister Margaret,
days away from her high-school
graduation, drowns
in the lake that borders their family's
house. Where Nico was eagerly
anticipating three months of perfecting her celebrity impersonations
under
Margaret's
tutelage, she instead faces
long days working at her father's independent bookstore without the sister she
idolized.
As
Nico's
family folds inward, her
mother and father indulge their own obsessions with finding the
right painkiller and researching a local doomsday cult, but they can't
help fixating
on their remaining daughter. Unable to bear the scrutiny, Nico begins sneaking
out of the house to meet her dead sister's
boyfriend, Aaron,
with whom she cultivates a cautious friendship around doing the things
Margaret used to love.
Perhaps
out of deference to her young narrator, Prose abandons her traditionally
sarcastic tone, but replaces
it with a worldly-wise mode that fits Nico as poorly as the items she borrows
from
Margaret's closet. And Prose never completely commits to
that voice. The dead girl is obnoxiously perfect enough—okay, she
loved vintage clothes and black-and-white movies, but mid-century modern too?—but
Nico is irritatingly perceptive in a way that heaps its own particular
brand of scorn on her parents' situation. As they contemplate suing Margaret's
doctor and dream of moving back to Boston, the grief-stricken family almost
becomes a caricature of a particularly upper-middle-class nightmare; even
Nico eventually
buys into it with
her distrust of the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem for whom Margaret
and the bookstore were named. A 13-year-old would be able to seriously
contemplate that type of karmic dare, but not from the distance of years.
What
Prose gets right, though, is the uncomfortable rapport between Aaron and Nico
as they enact their own particular rituals of mourning. The boyfriend Margaret
saw over the her parents' objections grounds Nico's daily
emotional struggle in an
uncomfortable
progression, the only moving point against Prose's
largely static scenes of mourning. In his late-adolescent pitch, Aaron becomes
Nico's
only real partner in grappling with the reality of a world without her sister,
drawing her toward
the rest of her life.