The Big Girls [Hardcover]

 

 

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The Big Girls is not easily read. It's a story that sears, discomfits, disturbs our complacency and, yes, sometimes amuses. We meet characters with psyches laid bare, stripped of any subterfuge or protective devices Susanna Moore is s a noted writer ( One Last Look, In The Cut, Sleeping Beauties ) with a penchant for the psychological and she explores, better said, skillfully dissects minds. Her setting is New York's Sloatsburg Correctional Institute and her narrative is related in four voices.

Dr. Louise Forrest has been the Chief Psychiatrist at Sloatsburg for some six months. At times, that feels more like a sentence to her than simply a period of time. She cannot adjust to the below standard conditions at the Institute nor to the incompetence of her fellow staff members, which is only compounded by their callousness. She's far too qualified for this position, leaving one to wonder what life experiences brought her there. A divorced mother, her one solace in life is a young son, Ransom.

For reasons the reader takes to be compassion Louise is drawn to Helen, a prisoner and her patient. Helen is seriously afflicted; she murdered her own children and hears voices. Further, her younger sister was given up for adoption yet Helen believes she has found her in the person of Angie Mills, a move star wannabe. One cannot help but feel pity for Helen as the details of her abusive childhood and adulthood are revealed. Especially poignant are her attempts to connect with Angie via mail.

Angie, the third member of the narrative quartet, has her own agenda and it's all about promoting Angie any way she can. She's also involved with Louise's ex husband, Rafael.

A fourth voice belongs to Ike Bradshaw, a former narcotics detective who is now a guard at Sloatsburg. He is attracted to Louise who reciprocates his feelings.

How the lives of these four intersect, for good or ill, is the crux of the story. Susanna Moore has written a bold, powerful, sometimes violent novel not soon forgotten.

- Gail Cooke

Told through four different voices this gritty and strangely intimidating novel alternates between four different voices and brings to the forefront the grim realities of daily life a maximum-security women's prison situated on the west bank of the Hudson River. The central voice is that of Dr. Louise Forrest, a thirty-something psychiatrist who has been working for a short time at the Sloatsburg Correctional Institution where women are incarcerated with very little thought to their long term well being.

Louise has an eight-year-old son named Ransom and has recently divorced her husband Rafael who is now in Los Angeles and trying to find work in the film industry. Rather than work in an exclusive Park Avenue practice, as Rafael had once suggested, Louise decided to devote her passion to treating incarcerated junkies, whores and murderers on behalf of the federal government.

When Helen, who has been in Sloatsburg about six months, steps into Louise's office, she shows evidence of a particular helplessness, which at first repels Louise, then begins to intrigue her. Locked up for the rest of her life for killing her two children, Helen spends her days constantly looking over her shoulder as if fearful of her own apprehension, and she doesn't really understand that she's going to be imprisoned forever.

Helen continues to see Louise once a week in a private session, and gradually her painful past life unfolds, a life haunted by childhood sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather and of a husband who treated her like a third wheel. As Louise attempts to get the heart of Helen's demons, the voices of "dark horseman," evil spirits that come to Helen, continue to inhabit the girl's every waking moment.

Helen's constant outpourings lead Louise herself to be troubled by her own neuroses and insecurities. Lately she's been feeling strained, indeed she's a nervous wreck and it's a miracle she's lasted this long amongst the "foul odors, the slow black river, the bells, the yellow light, all swirling around me, making her dizzy." A break from all this intensity comes when she meets Captain Ike Bradshaw, a former New York City police officer and undercover narcotics detective.

The attraction to Ike is instant. Bradshaw flirts with Louise and talks to her about the inmates, but can do little to assuage her lack of interest in all things intimate. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, Angie - the fourth voice - is trying desperately to break into the movie industry, spending much of her time hanging out with her best friend Deidra, a popular and established actress, who likes to pop Dexedrine and use her platinum AmEx card to go shopping.

As the story progresses, author Susanna Moore morphs all of these incongruent voices into one as East and West are eventually joined together. But without the use of chapter headings, this sometimes this works, occasionally, however - perhaps to the detriment of the story - it's hard to figure out who is talking at any one particularly time.

Still, the novel highlights a little known facet of the prison system: that of women who are incarcerated and often left to fend for themselves in an environment that exhibits very little compassion or humanity. There are the wild and guilty, both officers and inmates, who rail against the unforgiving surrounds, where innocence has no place, where violence is a way of life, and where the "the unconscious never seems to sleep."

There's Officer Cready, who looks at Louise and simply cannot conceive that anyone working in the prison could be interested in the work, his mantra is that " it's just a job, a frequently unpleasant job, that someone has to do." Then there's Kai, a sullen Korean woman, arrested after fifty-seven balloons of heroin were found in her lower intestine."

There's also the younger girls, the temporary inmates who are given a ninety day sentences, for having stolen a lipstick, or carried a bag of marijuana for a boyfriend and they fall apart the minute they are locked up, the intricate etiquette of prison behaviour unknown to them. And the "bubble gum whores," the officers give some girls the forbidden gum as a reward for sex, the sexual tension that exists between all of the guards and all of the prisoners making for constant speculation.

Despite the novel's structural faults, Moore delivers up a powerful and gutsy tale of those whose lives are constantly on the edge. The Big Girls is a taut and seductive vision of poverty, loneliness, along with the cruelty and the fury of a system that constantly throws women aside, and where love is unfortunately but a mere finite essence that constantly withers and dies. Mike Leonard April 07.

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