Customer Reviews

Pinkerton's Sister

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This is really an astonishing piece of work, weighty in the extreme and filled with literary references that evoke beloved classic masterpieces. From the first page, Alice Pinkerton muses about her life as a woman of the 20th century, still controlled by the rigid Victorian mores that govern every element of society. Likening herself to Rochester's wife, the madwoman in Jane Eyre, Alice is hardly mad, rather a lady of exquisite intellectual sensibilities who does not live incarcerated, attending church and performing other duties required by her station. Rather, it is Alice's mind that is imprisoned, for the entire work, takes place in the character's mind, segueing from one connection to another.

Hers is a fascinating dialog, one that questions, pokes, prods and eviscerates the common mentality. Clearly, Alice is a woman born before her time. The forces that converge in Alice's thoughts, literary, musical, sometimes vaguely threatening, run from simple observations to more convoluted ideas. Were she a man, Alice would be considered a literary master of ideas and revolutionary concepts.

That said, this is a stream-of-consciousness novel with Alice as the only character, driven by her own inner dialog, without the respite of other points of view. Although I tried, I could not continue the journey with Alice, eventually exhausted by the sheer force of words spinning through her intellect. This book is staggering in the number of pages and range of ideas, especially the literary references, which mine long-forgotten, if once beloved novels. I just could not continue past the first 200 pages. Alice proved too much for me.

Such enormous energy is expended in the 727 pages that there must be a welcoming audience for this novel. I envision the author, churning out endless pages, falling deeper into Alice's mind and I cannot imagine that this literary monument should go unappreciated. There is an audience for stream-of-consciousness novels and I hope this one receives its share of applause. Luan Gaines/ 2005.

The first thing to warn potential readers of this book about - it isn't a story so much as the dialogue happening in a woman's mind. Imagine sitting down in the morning and daydreaming and reminiscing all day. Then sit down and write the whole thing down over 727 pages. That is what Pinkerton's Sister is like to read. Comparisons to James Joyce's "Ulysses" are apt. There is no "action", nothing actually happens. It is just thoughts written down (and it skips and jumps between topics like real thoughts do). So if you place a high value on plot, Pinkerton's Sister is best avoided.

Having said that, the thoughts of Alice, the 35 year-old Victorian spinster, who "reads too much" are interesting. There are witty, cynical observations about the people in her neighbourhood and their social pretensions. There are numerous references to literary classics, from "The Scarlet Letter" to "Frankenstein", "Jane Eyre" and even the Bible. Alice Pinkerton relates all the characters and events in books to those people she knows in real life, and the two become intertwined. A play of reality and fiction forms in her mind, and the reader is invited inside.

In the cave of Alice's mind we find bitterness, frustration and contempt for the world around her, all expressed with witty sarcasm. Alice realises the problem isn't with her, but with the society she lives in. A society where women who are unmarried and read literature are considered mad, and sent to see psychoanalists. She mocks this narrow world by comparing it to the rich and varied one she finds in books, the world of her mind.

The writing style and literary knowledge of the author are great. The insights of Alice are beautiful despite their brutal truth. But unfortunately, I couldn't take 700+ pages of thought without any sort of events. With no "external stimulation" so to speak, I got wearing reading at times. It was like being stuck in an elevator, with nothing to do or see, just your thoughts. At times you just had to "get off" and take a break before returning to the "seclusion" of the book.

If that doesn't bother you, I recommend it. As for me, I sort of wish it had been shorter. The experience was good, and I was glad of it, but it lasted too long. You get the flavour of Alice's thoughts in about 250 pages. After that, they begin to feel repetitive. I resented the loss of time I could have spent reading other books.

Whenever Alice, the novel's protagonist, turns her acerbic wit on the stuffy philistines surrounding her, the results are simply hilarious, and I honestly consider rereading some of these chapters to better savour their verbal acrobatics.
Traversing this novel, however, was by no means an unalloyed pleasure: first, as Alice's fellow citizens tend to come across as cardboard caricatures, the sheer length of the harangues does not always seem justified; and what is more, these entertaining bits come in between expansive stretches of densely allusive prose, littered with literary references and snatches of verse.
These parts definitely exhausted my patience and went beyond my intellectual grasp, but I still wonder if to some extent this is not simply a novel that wants to be too clever by half and in doing so diminishes the impact of the monstrosities lurking at its dark core.

I have to say that I'm surprised that this book hasn't received the praise and attention it richly deserves. I bought my copy used from my public library and it appeared as tho it had been checked out only once.

For anyone who loves being quickly drawn into a book lush with quirky, colorful characters, portrayed in many shades of light and darkness, great splashes of color and spicy with droll humor, you will have a literary feast with this great novel.

I'm only a quarter way thru the book, but it is an entire world of it's own that irresistably draws one in.

Not for the novice reader, a sophisticated, witty, huge romp!

I long to know more about Peter Rushforth, the author. What an incredible fertile imagination. The type we loved in Sir Author Conan Doyle especially. Unpredictable and wise, along with a command of the English language and literature. Give this one a fighting chance.

If your idea of a novel is something with a plot and conversations, this is not the book for you. This is 400-some pages of rambling, in which nothing really happens. The first 270 pages are filled with what the thoughts of Alice Pinkerton as she gets ready for church, the last 100 or so are her thoughts that evening as she readies for bed. On top of not actually being about anything, this book commits the sin of being pretentious. Ooh, I know who Trilby is, ooh, I know what Lewis Carroll wrote other than the Alice books, ooh, I've read a lot of obscure and not so obscure plays. If you enjoy the unfocused ramblings of the mad, or you like playing find the literary reference, buy the book. If you want a plot and character development, look elsewhere.

Ok, I get it...but this style is at best really annoying when it is ever present. These mental amblings and (yes, pretentious) references are effective only when placed within a, shall I dare say it, a plot! Otherwise, reading something like this is like constant vibrato and every note trilled. An annoying disappointment.

Peter Rushforth, Pinkerton's Sister (MacAdam and Cage, 2005)

Writing a novel where the prose-- it's lyrical qualities, its construction, etc.-- is the focus is an admirable goal. Far too few do it these days. But the best novels of this type-- Wendy Walker's books, Cormac McCarthy's, Kathe Koja's, Lucius Shepard's-- all have one thing in common-- while we're all marveling at the prose, the author never lets us forget that there's something going on beneath the surface, as well. The novels of those authors all have exceptionally strong plots to go with their gorgeous prose. That's what makes their books some of the best in the English language-- you can sink your teeth into them on many different levels.

Rushforth has created a nicely-written book here, but he forgot to add anything to it. Worse off, he's done it in seven hundred fifty-two pages. In books where this sort of thing works (James' The Aspern Papers comes to mind), their brevity is a controlling factor. Rushforth just kept going-- almost three hundred pages of Alice Pinkerton getting ready for church for forty-one chapters, and then a two-hundred-page, one-chapter depiction of the service itself. With, of course, long notes, digressions, and reminiscences from Alice's mind. It just keeps going, and going, and going, like the Energizer bunny.

I devoured the almost-six-hundred pages of McCarthy's Blood Meridian, lingered over the four hundred fifty of Walker's The Secret Service. They were great novels. When MacAdam and Cage's publicists trumpeted this doorstop, which may have gotten a bigger advertising budget than any novel MacAdam and Cage has ever released, as "the book everyone will be talking about in 2005," a small part of me expected something along those lines. To say I didn't get it would be quite the understatement. (And the blurb ended up being quite the overstatement; the novel has garnered a total of four reviews on Amazon, as I write this, in the years and a half since its release.) In fact, by the time I reached page three hundred of this bloated, overwrought, underperforming monstrosity, I was ready to use it for kindling; it's a good thing I finally abandoned it during one of the hottest weekends Cleveland has had in May in the past century. I ended up just taking it back to the library, so some other poor, unsuspecting fool might try to find something of use in its bloated pages. I couldn't. (zero)

Pinkerton's Sister is a very compelling story, I found it hard to put down. Recommended!