Sue Monk Kidd's novels are about lives in traumatic transition, but her writing rarely reflects the disorder her characters are feeling. Her runaway 2002 bestselling fiction debut The Secret Life Of Bees followed a 14-year-old white runaway who found an unlikely home with three aging black sisters in 1964 South Carolina; the follow-up, The Mermaid Chair, tracks an older woman fleeing a limiting life and rediscovering herself in 1988 South Carolina. But both books are mannered, pat, comfortably distanced, and packed with plot threads that wind up woven into a revelatory but occasionally too-neat little bundle.
Like Life Of Bees, Mermaid Chair centers on a character who has long blamed herself for a parent's death. Middle-aged housewife Jessie Sullivan lost her father to a fishing-boat explosion; the newspapers reported that a leaky fuel line was probably ignited by a spark from the pipe Jessie gave him. More than three decades later, Jessie is still living with the guilt when an old family friend calls her with grisly news: Tormented by her own inner demons, Jessie's mother Nelle has cut off her index finger with a carving knife. Returning to the small coastal island where she grew up, Jessie revisits her past and starts repairing her long-damaged relationship with Nelle, but when she finds proof that the pipe wasn't involved in her father's death, old wounds reopen. Jessie's life is further complicated by a sudden need to escape her arrogant, belittling psychiatrist husband, and by a passionate desire for Brother Thomas, the youngest among a group of Benedictine monks on the island. And then there's the implication that Father Dominic, the monastery's librarian, knows more than he's saying about Nelle's troubles.
At times, Mermaid Chair sinks into romance-novel cliché, as Jessie and Brother Thomas escape the confines of marriage and monastic life to deal with gasping, idealized love at first sight. At other times, it's simply trite, especially in the simplistic symbolism that permeates every act, hobby, habit, and memory, from Jessie's art (confined, like her, in little artificial boxes) to her husband's nightmares of outer-space isolation to the reasoning behind Nelle's self-mutilation. The orderliness of Kidd's world is warmly reassuring, and her prose is catchy and enjoyable, especially wrapped as it is around a plot full of surprises. But her precision chafes. It's hard to feel the pain of characters lucky enough to live in a world where every question has an easy answer, and even disintegration comes packed with meaning, and with unfaltering, benevolent purpose.