Salvage [Hardcover]

Jane F. Kotapish (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 17, 2008

Calling to mind The Lovely Bones, this original, electrifying debut explores the collision point of memory, family secrets, and forgiveness. After witnessing a horrific accident, our unnamed thirty-seven-year-old narrator flees her hectic Manhattan life and buys a rambling, Victorian house in rural Virginia to recover in solitude. Yet in the uncomfortable quiet of her own company, she finds herself facing questions and obsessions from life's tangled, and often distrubed past. Meanwhile, she watches her mother, Lois - an eccentric, flamboyant woman who begins dating a series of men all named after saints - grow increasingly unhinged, perhaps poised on the cusp of madness. And as a charming new neighbor slowly moves into her carefully guarded privacy, the narrator discovers the impossibility of hiding from her isolated childhood in 1970s suburbia and talking to the ghost of her dead sister Nancy. Darkly funny, deeply imaginative, and fueled by unexpected, poetic prose, Salvage captures the challenge of finding a home that can withstand all that haunts us and the subtle and disastrous ways in which mothers and daughters lose and find one another, time and again.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Kotapish offers in her unnerving debut a frustrating tale of a woman's struggle to keep her past from overtaking her present. The nameless narrator leads readers through the mazes of her memory, from a childhood spent talking to the ghost of her dead sister, Nancy, through her adult trauma of watching someone get run over by a subway car, and finally to Virginia, where she lives in a ramshackle house. Her cruel mother, Lois, whose sanity is also constantly called into question, becomes the axis on which the narrator's story spins in disjointed bits. The more the narrator reveals, the less reliable she becomes, calling into question whether Nancy is indeed the ghost of her dead sister or simply the personification of repressed grief and resentment. Within this aching knot of remembrance, Kotapish frequently lets her language and attention meander, stringing random thought together in unseemly pastiches that verbosely wind their way to dead ends. The novel has an overly indulgent feel, though some may appreciate the empowering ending. (Mar.)
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Review

""Salvage "is a crazy, lush, tender story of two broken people...This is the kind of book you finish, tell everyone you know about it, and then realize you are ruined for anything else for awhile. Sweet misery."
-- Shelf Awareness
.,."breathtakingly original...Spikily funny and darkly imaginative, Salvage is an unsettling look into a troubled psyche."
-- "DAME Magazine"
.,."evocative and fluid...an extended exploration of the ongoing repercussions of the mother-daughter relationship in women's lives, even far beyond childhood...a revelation."
-- BookReporter.com
"Kotapish artfully juxtaposes with complexity and honesty the ironies of self-reliance and loneliness, of freedom and happiness, and of being independent and female."
-- The Brooklyn Rail
.,."witty...[Kotapish's] ferocious sense of humor--often unexpected and laugh-out-loud funny--and her consistently clever turns of phrase mark her as a writer to watch."
-- Booklist
"Out of Jane Kotapish's deeply poetic prose emerges a range of complex emotions and relationships that linger in the reader's thoughts...The power of the novel lies in Kotapish's unique exploration of how we come to terms with difficult childhood events and the profound impact they have on our lives."
-- The Feminist Review

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 307 pages
• Publisher: MacAdam/Cage (March 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596922834
• ISBN-13: 978-1596922839
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,847,254 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "All we've left unsaid over the years clothes us as closely as skin now.", March 15, 2008

By 

Michael Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Salvage (Hardcover)

A difficult mother-daughter relationship lies at the heart of Salvage, a novel that absolutely brims with some of the most devastating imagery: "the vague rush of a deep seashell held against my skull, hovering in the coils of my eardrums like fever; the slap-happy sun revealed in the wanton lushness of peony and rose," the prose deeply reflective of a tale where memories and the present collide.

In a ramshackle house in Virginia, after fifteen years away from the area, one woman tries to make peace with all of the demons of her childhood. As a ten-year-old girl, the narrator's mother, Lois, proved to be a difficult woman at best. Possessed of a fierce personality and prone to bouts of brutal melancholy, Lois was once pregnant, and then the next day, suddenly wasn't anymore.

Basically left alone with her step father Charles, mild, mustachioed and in retrospect, deeply depressed, our young narrator's home life plays out against the Iranian Hostage Crisis, Peter Jennings on the news and Jimmy Carter in the Whitehouse. Eventually collapsing into herself, Lois hides in her room for fifteen days with only a hot water bottle for company, her mortality now some sort of obscene presence in the house as her daughter tries to cope with her mother's absence.

For days on end, Lois manages to carve herself a niche among the bereaved, while our narrator names her dead sister Nancy and begins to talk to her in the privacy of her closet, a conversation that lasts for eleven years. There was no way of knowing whether Nancy was a real girl, but certainly throughout the course of this novel, our narrator becomes engaged in a slow motion battle with who we might have been in a world of Lois's denials and evasions.

There's a part of her that wants to set the record straight, that life is not what it seems. So begins the sad and somewhat melancholic vigil of this young woman who is possessed of a mother whom she knows instinctively was never there, while also resorts to bitter rants to Nancy in the closet, intent to tell her about her unjust and foolish world.

But it an incident in New York, which truly proves to be a turning point and the incident/accident, ends up shaking her confidence to the very core. And it is this catastrophe that causes her to leave Manhattan for a" cold river green" house in Virginia with its lavish reckless back yard, the property coming to a halt at a thick cluster of hemlock trees and a dilapidated gazebo standing just off to the side.

This book is most notable for the author's ability to create truly astonishing images, as she dazzles our senses with the sights, sounds and smells of our narrator and her mother's troubling conversations with saints that no one but she can see. Later in the novel a sweet and kindly neighbor enters into the fray, her uncomplicated wisdom and friendly banter adding a measure of temerity and also a welcome reprieve from the complications of Lois and her younger suitors.

Although light on actual plot, Kotapish uses her dexterous prose to show how a single life is subject to myriad interpretations. In the end, this book strives to present the inner life of one woman's heart and the sometimes difficult and fraught relationship that she's had with her mother. Mike Leonard March 2008.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Watch This Writer, May 17, 2008

By 

Brian Seagrave (Vienna, VA, USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Salvage (Hardcover)

Reading Salvage, by JF Kotapish, is a bit like spending a rainy Sunday afternoon at the art museum, contemplating impressionist paintings, rather than going to the movies. At the museum, standing close enough to the painting to make the drowsy guard snap to attention, the picture looks blurry, like when you slightly cross your eyes or let them drift in a day trance, but up close the tiny pieces of workmanship that the painter used to tell his story are sharply in focus, such as brushstrokes and ever so slight changes of color. Standing back, from across the silent, paneled room, the painting is whole and clear, a beautiful analog to life.

The workmanship of Salvage -- the tangible, vivid and poetic descriptions of place and people, the crafty banter between friends, the processes of the subconscious hidden beneath the visual surface we observe of ourselves and the people around us -- is a delight for the critical reader. While the bizarre seminal event that stirs the subconscious of the main character -- not an accident, an incident -- jars the reader like a shove from behind, the tale in Salvage is largely not moved forward by plot but rather by the healing of the main character. If you secretly video-taped the bi-monthly psychoanalysis consulting sessions of a patient with traumatic stress disorder, then edited them down to just the patient's revelations, epiphanies, and milestones of mental health, that would be Salvage. It is a literary work about the human psyche, filial love, and the inseparable weaving of the two that forms the kernel in every one of us.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Kotapish weaves magic into her imagery, April 13, 2008

By 

Sharon Elin (Mechanicsville, VA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Salvage (Hardcover)

Some authors are magicians with words, casting spells that leave readers almost lovesick. In Salvage, I fell in love with Kotapish's stylish, lyrical phrasing and imagery. Take, for example, this description of roses on a fence: "... the roses have completed a magnificent bloom and linger like drunk women at the end of a party, voluptuous past repair, faded, sick with their own perfume." The book's plot weaves like a stage whisper throughout the novel -- the character's first-person musings and point of view reveal much more than any action, and the main theme of the novel emerges as a loose, lyrical, haunting thread that reticulates her emotional quest: the redemption of a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship. The unnamed main character moves to Virginia to recover from witnessing a tragic accident in New York, rekindling her relationship with her often emotionally vacant parent. We see everyone and everything through this main character's eyes and emotions, with fragmented, unclear revelations of what actually happened or what is going on; for example, she frequently converses with the spirit of a stillborn sister in a closet, a puzzling derangement that reveals the extent of the character's fragile mental state. In contrast, she enjoys happy rapport with a neighbor, Edith, who is the "normal" antithesis to her own injured persona. The main character explores herself and her mother through a ruthless, probing lens, yet her descriptions remain richly sensitive, expressive, endearing, and enlightened. "Time brings a terrible revealing light to the murk. In the happy ignorance of the moment, things are what they are... Shame arrives later, a rude guest stomping in during dessert with no explanation, dripping weather onto the carpet." This is Jane Kotapish's first novel, and as an entranced reader, I consider myself a new fan.