Customer Reviews

The Gin Closet

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Recently I read Amy Greene's Bloodroot which is about a strange, almost mystical woman whose haunting, painful story is told from several viewpoints. Leslie Jamison's The Gin Closet is Bloodroot's west coast cousin in that it tells a story of a woman whose troubled life mixes with that of another generation.

But while I had issues with Greene's story (even though the prose was gorgeous), I had no such problems with Jamison's debut novel where the prose is lyrical and cutting.

The story is really about two women. It opens with Stella, who flees the loneliness of New York City, after her grandmother dies. Before Lucy died, she tells Stella about her younger daughter, Matilda. Tilly, as everyone but her mother called her, was unknown to Stella. Stella's mother asks her and Stella's brother, Tom, to deliver a letter to Tilly.

Stella, who has issues of her own, compulsively decides to help her newly found aunt reconnect with her son in San Francisco.

Tilly, however, has issues even deeper than Stella's. The title of the book is not poetic. It is meant to be taken literally. Tilly is an alcoholic whose life never got on track after she ran away from home.

It is clear from her telling is that she is haunted by depression that she never gets help for because Tilly is trying to survive. When Stella comes into her life, she is living in a trailer in Nevada. She was once a prostitute. Her son came from a client. To her, he is the only thing she ever did right. When she mentions her son's loneliness, Stella tells her that they'll go stay with him.

This decision is partially for Tilly who Stella wants to help clean up and partially for Stella who is trying to find a life of her own.

Jamison's story is beautifully told. It is haunting and full of melancholy that never shakes free. Her portrayal of Tilly's alcoholism isn't prettified. I had an uncle who never shook free of its grip and I recognized it in Tilly. They knew the problem but couldn't embrace the cure. Not when it seemed to mask the pain that they feared more.

In Abe, Tilly's son, we get the glimpse of why Tilly loves him so. He's not glamorous or spiteful or neglectful. He's just ordinary with flaws but underneath, he's good. Like Tilly and Stella, he's lonely too. In that respect, Tilly knew her boy.

As one reads The Gin Closet, it will seem like nothing is really happening. Tilly gets a job. Tilly loses her job. Abe gets flustered. Abe goes to Detroit. Stella makes salad. Stella freaks when cornered by bums in a parking lot. It is a patchwork of mundane moments and reflections of their lives (Stella and Tilly). It seems disconnected at first, but will suddenly flow together so smoothly and seamlessly that one won't realize that the story is almost over until it is almost over.

The end comes softly but feels real in its post-script gray. It almost seems too abrupt but not really at the same time because we know how the rest will flow. It is too recognizable for the reader to not know that sometimes life goes nowhere but it gets there anyway.

Jamison's debut novel is not a happy read but it is a haunting one that lingers for the right reasons.

The Gin Closet is an extraordinary split portrait, beautifully illuminated and profoundly original. Stella and Tilly are both estranged--from their families, from the world. At once reflective and searching, they reveal themselves with unflinching candor and sensitivity.

Jamison's prose is lyrical but never protrusive, each moment of language perfectly distilled and woven into the narrative.

Its intimacy, its flashes of humor, its unrelenting honesty--this novel is often challenging and always magnificent.

Leslie's character descriptions are amazingly vivid. The physical decline of aging, the obsession of anorexia, the emptiness of alcoholism and the life long struggle for redemption; it's all so beautifully captured in this great book.

Sometimes you pick up a book and it ends up being one of those truly amazing pieces of writing, the kind you wish you could have created when you were in your early twenties with college-angst. The kind professors yearn for and literary critics swoon over. Leslie Jamison makes me green with writers-envy. Her ability to take a string of simple words and turn them into a profound sentence blew me away on (what felt like) every page.

On the material surface, The Gin Closet is a novel about two women, one trying to find herself, one trying to survive. When Stella learns she has an estranged aunt she packs up her meaningless New York City existence and moves to the desert to help this broken woman cope with alcoholism and loneliness. Tilly is a mess, she seems to only hurt the people around her and has been that way she since she was young. She hasn't had an easy life so when Stella turns up Tilly surfaces from her gin-induced waking-coma to think of the life she could possibly have, a life that means something, a life near her son in San Francisco. Together, Stella and Tilly embark on a trip, not a journey to somewhere even though they have a destination; more a sort of movement, fumbling many times along the way.

Told from both women's first-person points of view, Stella is damaged, and Tilly is lost. The dueling narratives juxtapose these women, and give the reader a unique sense of being each of them, as well as watching each of them. This is a novel about family paradigms, but more specifically, female family paradigms: what it means to be a mother, a daughter, or a sister; what we do to our family and what is done to us. Jamison draws a true, poignant portrait of the dichotomy between female relations.

The Gin Closet is about the things we live with and survive through. How we perceive the one body we are given and what we choose to do with, and to, our life. What definitions do we place upon ourself? Anorexic, Alcoholic, Loner, Dreamer? What do we make of the people around us? Stella expects to be used, expects to be abandoned, but she is hardened and does the same to others. Tilly pushes everyone away until she decides to pull them close, but too close.

A beautiful, heartbreaking portrait of the female soul, a novel with an exquisite use of language, Leslie Jamison's debut is remarkable in its simplistic truth. She doesn't pander to the audience, she doesn't mince words, she's obvious but understated. Like Marilyn Robinson's Housekeeping, or Alice Munro's The Beggar Maid, The Gin Closet is unsettling but utterly remarkable.

In The Gin Closet, two women tell their stories: Stella, a young and disenchanted New York college graduate, and Tillie, her estranged and troubled aunt, whose existence the family has denied for decades. The characters move gingerly into each other's lives, revealing lost worlds of history and trauma to one another. The book charts new territory in its exploration of the rescuer/victim dynamic, complicating the traditional roles at every term. And the pages turn quickly--I was wowed by the personal revelations, the twists of plot, the author's ability to sustain intensity scene after captivating scene. By the end, you feel as though you've read two books: a dazzling work of fiction, and a deeply human philosophical treatise on different types of pain, the many ways we can hurt and be hurt.

For fiction lovers, there's a simple joy here, too: feeling oneself in the hands of talented and capable author. The characters are rendered so well that they nearly lose fictional status--for much of my reading, I had the unsettling, thrilling feeling of spying on real people. There are turns of phrase to savor in almost every sentence, and Jamison demonstrates a gift for imagistic detail. The Gin Closet is an achievement for a first novelist--for any novelist. Highly recommended.

Haunting and honest. Exquisite portrayal of human nature, flaws and all. No sell-out ending here.

I basically didn't put the book down from the moment I started reading it. It is emotive, captivating and beautifully written. Definitely a good addition to your library.

Jamison paints a brutally honest portrait of a woman in crisis. Tilly is a tragic, memorable character, and her struggle to maintain her sobriety and fit in with 'decent' society is so real and sad. Anyone who has dealt with alcoholism in their own family will no doubt recognize this battle.

Tilly had built a wall around herself, and Jamison has the perfect line to describe Tilly's life.
"Tilly told me once about the experience of giving birth. She said she screamed louder than she'd known was possible. "it was the first time I really heard my own voice," she said. "I wanted it to keep on hurting forever.""

The book is also about the damage of keeping secrets. After Tilly reveals one that changed her life forever, the reader has to wonder how different her life would have been if she felt she could have told someone. Would her mother and sister have believed her? Would they have helped her? If she had found her own voice as a child, would she still have been banished from her family?

The Gin Closet is not an easy book to read; it will hurt your heart. But it will also make you more empathetic to people in your lives, people you feel don't live up to your expectations. Jamison made a wise decision to alternate narrators, Tilly and Stella, allowing the reader insight into two fascinating characters.

I picked this up at the urging of a good friend and in a serendipitous bit of synchronicity, I found a powerful and aggressively poignant novel that moved precisely and fluidly with the rhythm of my own emotional life.

The Gin Closet is the story of two women, young and fiercely intelligent Stella and her aunt, Tilly, whose family abandoned her, each woman self-destructive in their own way, each seeking in the other and hoping for some island of serenity in the tumult of their existences.

The depiction of alcoholism in all its cunning and in all its strength is one of the most honest I have ever read and the author does not stray from or skirt around the way the disease increases its demands on the body and soul, just as the comfort it offers wanes, like the tail lights of a rescue vehicle while the sufferer is left on the train tracks, mangled and depleted.

The language is lovely and precise and occasionally surprising in its combination of the two. If there is a fault that I should find here, it is that often, each character speaks with the same loveliness and precision, like characters in a stageplay, and that Tilly's articulateness was too much like Stella's, though the two are so different in their constitution and reality.

That said, this book made me profoundly uncomfortable. Such, I have found, is to be expected of honest and heartbreaking work.

This book is, simply, amazing. Jamison writes magnificently, and her characters feel so real that I can almost feel them in the room with me as I read. The novel focuses on the story of two women, an aunt and her niece, who leave their respective homes to move to California together to try to rebuild their lives. This story touches on true emotions, to which I continuously related. The pages are filled with emotion, but the plot never seems forced or overly dramatic. The words are raw and honest. I can't wait for Jamison's next novel...