Customer Reviews

Small Acts of Sex and Electricity

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Mid thirties Jane and Mattie have been best friends since childhood, but during college they competed for the affection of Michael with the former easily winning the prize and marrying him. Jane and Michael have two daughters, teenage Livvy and preadolescent Mona. To Mattie's envious eye Jane has everything with her California family while she remains single in the Midwest.

When Jane inherits a house and a Jaguar from her recently deceased grandmother Franny, she decides to take the car and leave her family behind to seek glamour and men not spouses and children. She assigns her visiting pal Mattie to inform Mike that she left him and their kids. Mattie, who came to appraise Franny's art collection, becomes surrogate mother and wife in Chicago while Jane seeks adventuress men.

SMALL ACTS OF SEX AND ELECTRICITY is a strange but entreating relationship drama starring two women, me-me Jane and envious Mattie. They sort of switch places as Mattie, feeling as if she is IN MY SISTER'S COUNTRY, gets a chance to see what could have been if Mike chose her and Jane seizes the opportunity to find out what should have been if she stayed carefree and single. Fans of odd but perceptive family dramas will appreciate Lisa Haines' unusual character driven tale.

Harriet Klausner

Mattie, the 30-something narrator of Small Acts, returns to her childhood environs of Santa Barbara, where she's tempted to switch places with her once-best friend Jane. Jane seems to have it all: perfect husband, two daughters, beach house, material luxury.

This novel explores the solitudes we build for ourselves even within the electricity of a sizzling love affair. The storyteller reveals a present inner world tangled with flashback, using cinematic bursts of exquisite prose.

Small Acts contains many scenes to savor like an assortment of epicurean chocolates: some unexpectedly spiced, others melt-in-the-mouth--an alluring variety of secrets between layers.

If you have ever wondered about the road not taken, and found yourself at that crossroads, again...

I loved this book. As a reader I loved the flow of the story and the many precise, surprising details. Vivid images like the descriptions of the little girl Mona spinning in a circle, and Franny's wonderful collection of shoes kept me reading. But as a therapist I loved how this book captured the messy, uneven, disturbing experiences of life. The children's experience of loss when their mother Jane takes off echoes the narrator Mattie's experience of loss when her neglectful parents leave Mattie to fend for herself as a kid. There are lots of details that resonate like this. Also the book is set in California--one of my favorite places. I highly recommend.

No one writes like Lise Haines. She creates characters of amazing complexity and tells their stories with sheer lyricism. This novel enchants, surprises, and redeems. The characters are real, with all-too-familiar human frailties. Haines is brilliant in her character portrayal of Mattie, whose borrowed life finally becomes authentically her own. Many thanks to a fine author whose transcendent talent teaches many lessons!

The single biggest problem I had with this novel was the authors decision to screw around with the standard form of dialogue. There are standards for writing in place for a reason. Opting not to use quotation marks, and to instead use dashes was highly confusing, and detracted from the overall story. Particularly since the dash (-) provided an opening, bit there was nothing to provide closure. A HUGE mistake, if you ask me.

Imagine two friends so close they could be sisters, one married with a fabulous husband and two daughters, an innocent four-year-old and a contentious fourteen-year-old. Imagine that the wife, in an act of generosity or something more complex, walks away from her happy family one cloud-shrouded early morning on the Santa Barbara coast, leaving her friend to step into her life. When Franny is killed by a train while attempting to save her dog, Jane, her granddaughter, asks Mattie, an appraiser, to help sort through Franny's collectibles. Mattie and Jane, best friends since childhood, are thrown together, long-buried memories intensified by the grandmother's death. Such grief is unpredictable, Mattie accustomed to orbiting her friend's perfect life until Jane takes Franny's classic Jaguar and drives into the sunrise, Mattie handed the man of her dreams under impossible circumstances: "I understood the mind's attraction to the poison wish."

Sorely conflicted, Mattie is clearly enamored with Mike, but Jane intrudes on every thought, every action. There is no time when the absent Jane isn't present, burdening them all with unanswered questions, fear kept at bay by minutiae. While Franny's loss permeates the house, Jane's exit has upstaged even that tragedy, pulling all into the vortex of her inexplicable behavior. All are hostage- husband, daughters, friend- an impossible, tension-filled present with an unpredictable future. Like a suicide, Jane's departure seems inordinately selfish, as though her great idea of "trading lives" with Mattie is an act of revenge. Left to untangle Jane's damage, Mattie does not judge; meanwhile each family member retreats, hoarding their emotions, in stasis. Mattie is left to care for them all, aware of the impossibility of the situation. Now she "has" Jane's coveted family, but on untenable terms: "For a time we experienced life at an altitude-sick elevation."

Rather than plunging into the banal, Haines carefully dissects the outwardly-happy, inwardly-troubled dynamic of two long-term friends. Reconstructing the earliest days of the relationship, sharing Franny's largesse, boyfriends and finally Jane's husband, Mattie examines her attraction to the quixotic Jane since they first met. The painfully convoluted emotional ties to Jane are part of Mattie's adult identity, but Mattie can no longer indulge in immature what-ifs. Nor can she substitute herself for her friend. I specifically did not give the novel five stars: by the end, the long unraveling began to wear, each character obsessed with her own discomfort to the exclusion of all else. Dripping chlorinated water on an expensive Persian carpet, pouring bottles of bubble bath into the ocean, Mattie and the girls remain oblivious to their surroundings: "We left candy wrappers on countertops and coffee tables, strewn over rugs", the sympathetic turned self-indulgent. Too much ambient angst finally overwhelms- for me- the truly stunning prose that comes so naturally to this talented writer. Luan Gaines/20057

Mattie and Jane have been friends since they were little girls, neighbors for part of the year on the Santa Monica beach. Both were escaping from dysfunctional families in those years, Jane summering sans parents with her grandmother Franny. And Franny wound up offering a second home also to Mattie while her parents sailed and mingled and drank cocktails. This pattern--Mattie playing the loved but resented (by Jane) third wheel--would repeat itself in the girls' adulthood. When Lise Haines's Small Acts of Sex and Electricity opens, Jane has been married to Mike for some fifteen years, and Mattie has been watching their relationship since its conception, as if with her nose pressed against the glass, debarred from a relationship that might have been, should have been hers: the "electricity" of the book's title refers in part to Mattie's attraction to Mike.

But Haines soon upsets the balance of this not quite comfortable threesome. After Franny's death, Mattie returns to the beach house to help appraise the property, and Jane takes the opportunity to walk out on her family, in essence surrendering her life to Mattie. Haines tells the story of what happens in the following weeks, how Mike and Mattie respond to Jane's offering, from Mattie's perspective, in the first person. Direct speech is introduced by dashes rather than quotation marks, and the speakers are rarely identified, which makes following conversations difficult at times. Haines's writing has a dreamy, indistinct quality to it, perhaps reflecting Mattie's state of mind after Jane leaves. The characters seem to float through the story, not addressing their problems directly, not communicating with one another effectively. Sometimes the writing is strained:

"I have no affinity for the afterlife. No desire to play with its rolling energy as Jane did. She treated death like a boy inside a tire at the top of a steep road. She stood in his path, unflinching, taunting his friends to let go of the rubber rim."

The premise of Haines's book is an interesting one, but I never came to care about the characters--a bunch of not particularly likable people doing not particularly likable things. They are more than two dimensional yet fail to come to life on the page. Book groups will enjoy dissecting the motives of the author's various principals, but in the end I don't think the book is likely to linger in one's memory. Not a bad read, but not a great one.

Debra Hamel -- author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece (Yale University Press, 2003)

Seems not too many people read this book. Well they did themselves a favor. This book was filled with shallow characters and while seeming to promise an intriguing plot turned out to be a bore. I forced myself to finish it; don't ask me why.