Chamber Four

Author: Kathryn Davis

Back Bay Books, 2003

Bests ebook deal: Not Available

I’ll come right out with it: the language of this novel is great, phenomenal in fact.  The book is saturated in detail, but not in the soggy paper towel sort of way. It is more like the language steeps in the book like rose tea in a mug. In fact, I liked the language so much, I often found myself reading sentence by sentence and forgetting to put the ideas together, just to hear the sounds and rhythms in my head. This of course says a lot about the writing, but also makes it a difficult book to follow.  The plotting of the three story lines can be confusing, skipping between multiple stories and delivered through a fluid, not always linear, prose. Edwina Moss, the most focused on character, helps alleviate this with more linear sections, but it can still be a disorienting read.

But oh boy is the writing good. It ranges dramatically from sensory and lyrical:

For I was a girl not quite as other girls are, my delight not dependent on playing nurse to a brood of empty-headed dolls nor on reading the minds of my energetic chums, no, even as a girl I preferred to take for a companion an egg, a potato, a capon, a nut, to replace the dulling rainfalls of human intercourse with the fiery windstorms of the kitchen…to conceal myself for all eternity in an ever-deepening cave of cooking implements even late into the bliss of a summer night, still faintly sensible to the muffled voices of my parents, to the antiphonal music wrung from the hind legs of insects, to the combined smell of pine-tar soap and decaying rose petals and pipe tobacco…

to insightful:

My father’s thirsty and he’s happy. He’s so happy to be away from my mother’s sorrow, my sister’s nosebleeds, my lungs. It’s as if all the women of Atlantic City know he’s headed their way, as if they’re all beautiful, my father a plump amorous Vronsky, a good dancer to boot. Oh yes, before the carpet was wall-to-wall, before the thunderbolt sliced him in two, he used to guide my ungainly body across the living room, the music slow and oddly nostalgic, given it game from a time we hadn’t left behind yet.

to exposititional:

Slowly she pulls herself away from the window; slowly she walks across the floor. A large woman, Edwina Moss, big boned, with thick black hair and creamy white skin, a woman of the type usually called handsome. Nor is she accustomed to moving so sluggishly, to feeling herself so thoutoughly drained of purpose, especially given the gravity of the situation.

All this builds the book to an almost musical point; sections are as much movements as they are chapters. At points it is a fun novel, though it spends a little longer on the sadder side of the spectrum.  As I said before, the plotting can become a bit difficult to follow, too often allowing the reader to get lost in a lush forest of language, but those readers (especially poetry lovers) who are looking for some excellent writing should give this book a read.

Full Disclosure: Kathryn Davis was one of my writing professors in college; she is awesome.

Other Books: The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf (Davis), House of Leaves (Danielewski), Palafox (Chevillard), Finnegan’s Wake (Joyce)