Customer Reviews

Unfinished Desires: A Novel

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(26)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

This is a mature, adult book about adolescent girl behavior. Not since Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye have I read such a powerful novel about teenage feminine conformity, coercion, betrayal, jealousy, secrets, and love. Godwin creates a labyrinth that begins with a simple layer and gradually builds to a complex and knotted snare. I was pulled in from the opening pages as this rich, multi-generational tapestry is woven as if from the loom. The book never loses steam, and the lyrical rhythm amplifies as the story builds. Godwin designed an absolutely beautiful brocade of a book. She sublimely and organically explores the conscious, unconscious, and subconscious layers of the human mind and all its dark and light attributes while she braids a tale of intrigue, desire, and loss from the fabric of memory.

The central narrative is the school year of 1951-52 at a Catholic boarding school, Mount St. Gabriel's, in the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina. Mother "Suzanne" Ravenel, age 85, is reaching back and writing her memoir in 2001 of her time as a student and then headmistress of the now defunct school. She is plagued by events that occurred that one year, especially after her freshman girls staged the annual spring play and brought buried secrets into the performance. She feels stuck and unable to write about that time. Memories--how they are interpreted and relived and revived by the people who remember them--that is the primary theme that this intricate web and convoluted story is built upon. Their unfinished desires, a key element of each person's intimate story (and of course the title of this book), is subsumed and sometimes emotionally tampered by various interpretations of past events.

Godwin uses several narrative devices with ease. Developments are non-linear and yet not confusing, and she uses several perspectives, along and within the third-person voice, to tell the complete story. There is Mother Ravenel at her tape recorder or walking with other nuns at the retirement home, contemplating her past and receding into her future. Interspersed with that is the story of that "toxic" year and the girls at the boarding school--shy and recently orphaned Chloe, who talks to her dead mother and draws pictures that explain mysterious incidents; Maud, the enigmatic, elusive and beautiful daughter of a broken home; and Tildy, the assertive ringleader and undiagnosed dyslexic who switched best friends that year from Maud to Chloe and added tension to the clusters of girls.

Tildy's sister, Madeline, animates the narrative with her grounded and giving nature. Their acid-tongued mother, Cornelia, a former classmate of Mother Ravenel, adds history and a fiendish dose of doubt and a wicked but droll perspective. She is contemptuous of Suzanne and imparts her derisiveness to her daughters. Cornelia's twin sister, Anotnia, was Mother Ravenel's best friend when they were students at Mount St. Gabriel's, and their shared history is the source of many of the secrets and future scorn by Cornelia. Then there is Mother "Kate" Malloy, the young teacher and protégé of Mother Ravenel. She is pale, beautiful, and empathic, and a fortress for the teenage girls. She claimed her vocation at an early age, but she also identifies with the tumult of her students.

A handful of the male characters are also dimensional and integral to the story. In any sprawling novel there will also be a few paper-thin walk-ons or mere vehicles for some larger purpose, and Godwin's is no exception. Often, she mirrors the scope and tone of Dickens, especially with her male characters.

We also move forward in time through some epistolary passages, which add a surprising twist and intrigue to the tale. As Godwin switches perspectives, we are carried effortlessly through the story. This is a difficult task for many authors to pull off, but Godwin engages us instantly from moment to moment, even as she changes time and perspective and narrative mode. The story deepens as the pages turn. I found myself in a kind of wonderment when the story was about 2/3 of the way through. I realized that this initially straightforward story, a story that could have become a sappy melodrama in lesser hands, had evolved into this monster of an organism with knotty, knuckled tentacles that surround and imbibe the heart. What is outward about this story is also latent and hidden. There are many submerged facets of this tale that pour into your psyche with a subliminal but fierce gusto.

Unfinished Desires is a dense but very accessible novel. It is not a "quick read" kind of book for the beach. It is a novel you savor and read as it is intended--closely and with its gradual, exalted rhythm. It is a quiet squall, a subdued tempest. The driving action is mostly psychological. It is masterful but not perfect. The last few pages, although revealing, felt a little tacked on, without sufficient roots. However, it doesn't weaken the overall novel, which delivers a sterling tale of humanity, warts and all.

Set in a prestigious girls' boarding school run by nuns in the 1950s, Gail Godwin's novel has a cloistered feel. Not that the action (such as it is) does not often move off campus; many of the main characters are day students. But the girls' families seem just as much a closed circle as the nuns are, a hermetic quality enhanced by the fact that several of the mothers were friends at the same school two decades earlier, and the families have intermarried in complex ways. Read the long paragraph on page 9 that introduces the various characters several times over before moving on, and bookmark it for further reference; you will need it.

I did, however, like it that Godwin constantly switches her time frame over an eight-decade span. The container, set in 2001, is the taped narrative of Mother Ravenel, recalling her years as headmistress of the school, Mount St. Gabriel's in North Carolina, in the middle years of the century. Most of the detail comes from 1951-52, which the headmistress refers to as the "toxic year," when a particular combination of high-school freshmen triggered a chain of events that resulted in scandal and expulsions. There are also memories of the school in the thirties, when Suzanne Ravenel herself was a student, and her relationship with several of the mothers of the 1951 crop may well have sown the seeds for later discord. The last few chapters suddenly plunge into 2007 and 2008, covering fifty years of lives led in the outside world; these are a relief from the glacial pace of non-events in the main narrative, but they come too late.

So what is it that made 1951-52 so toxic? Surprisingly little. The girls, despite their human teenage flaws, are attractive and interesting, and what they get up to is little more than petty acting out. But, given the cloistered atmosphere that Godwin creates, even small events can have large consequences. Especially given the larger-than-life personality of Suzanne Ravenel. Is she a manipulative tyrant, or a wise (though sometimes deluded) woman in honest search of God? The principal strength of the book is that Godwin does not take sides. I learned a great deal about the religious life from this book, and it is impossible not to respect these women who have so dedicated themselves to service. On the other hand, the unnatural world that they create around them, and that Godwin reproduces in such stultifying detail, seems a powder-keg heated in the smoke of incense, just waiting to blow up. As it eventually does -- but after such a long build-up, I could have done with a larger spark and a more satisfying explosion.

Gail Godwin's latest carefully crafted novel takes a close look at a group of girls matriculating through a Catholic boarding school in the early 1950s. There are no cheap tricks or shocking plot twists; rather, this is a tightly restrained examination of the various manifestations of often incendiary relationships between women: mothers and daughters, teachers and students, and the perhaps most of all, adolescent girls.

The novel masterfully straddles the past and the present; the conceit is that Mother Ravenel, the former headmistress, has chosen to write a memoir about Mount St. Gabriel, the prestigious boarding school located in North Carolina. Her memories bring her back to one pivotal moment: an incident that resulted in the expulsion of two students and her own leave of absence.

Ms. Godwin's mastery of the Catholic religion -- minus the preachiness that is often found in some lesser writers -- is evident. Mother Ravenel and her newest hire, the ethereal ninth grade teacher Mother Malloy, partially choose their vocation because of the desire for exemption. "I didn't want to be like my mother raising seven kids and sipping cheap sherry. I wanted to be like a certain nun I admired, standing in front of a classroom teaching belonging to no one but an invisible spouse," Mother Ravenel confesses.

But is her calling really pure? There are hints early on about her love for her best friend Antonia who also wanted to take vows. That friend ended up marrying and dying early; her identical twin sister Cornelia has never forgiven her. Now Cornelia's own daughter is under her tutelage -- Tildy Stratton, the high-spirited and dyslexic ringleader of her class and her sometime own best friend, Maud Norton, a girl who may be growing up too fast. And Cornelia is setting her daughter up to become the catalyst for her own revenge.

The unfinished desires repeat and echo throughout this book: Mother Ravenel's inability to confront the ramifications of her friendship with Antonia or the poisonous barbs of her own mother, Tildy and Maud's own complicated friendship, the ways that mothers and teachers can mold and influence daughters and students, and the results of unrequited love and unrequited friendships and yearnings.

The book could have been tighter still; my belief is that certain ancillary characters could have been eliminated and the ending seemed a little tacked on. Still, this is an excellent book on the reconciliation of past and present.

It can be daunting to review a book by an author as well regarded as Gail Godwin, particularly when the reaction is less than positive. So be it. I wouldn't go so far as to call Unfinished Desires a hot mess, but for me that's a more apt description than the accolades I've read elsewhere.

The book jumps ponderously between the early 1950s and the current decade, and the switches in time are often unsettling. For nearly 20 years, Mother Suzanne Ravenel, for decades headmistress of Mount St. Gabriel's - a now-closed girl's school in North Carolina - leaves her Order's retirement home in the summer to stay with former students. In 2001 an alumna gives her a tape recorder so she can dictate her memoirs. Though she has a strong legacy, she knows she must write about the very difficult 1951-52 school year, a year that she believes almost brought the school down. Several threads form the narrative, but those with the strongest impact belong to young Mother Malloy, Mother Ravenel, and a trio of ninth graders - Maud, Tildy, and her cousin Chloe. Tildy and Chloe are legacy students whose mothers attended the school with orphaned student Suzanne Ravenel. Tildy's aunt, also a student, was to have professed her calling together with Suzanne, but something important - and secretive - happened and it was only Mother Ravenel who entered the Order. Tildy's aunt married Chloe's uncle and was killed in an accident during her honeymoon. Ever since, Tildy's mother Cornelia has blamed the Mother for her twin's death.

The story is told in a soap-operatic fashion, with a tremendous amount of foreshadowing leading up to the presentation - with Tildy at the helm - of a play written by Mother Ravenel when she was a student. It seemed to me that because of the author's subtle hand, she needed quantity to make up for intensity, making for a ridiculously drawn out build-up to the play's performance. Unintended consequences come about after the performance, and then the pace quickens immeasurably to catch up the reader on what happened to the characters during 50 subsequent years. The change in pace is unfortunate because it leads to a lot of telling without much showing, and frankly, I was a lot more interested in what I missed than what I read.

In particular I would have liked more of Mother Malloy's story (as it was she seemed to be a Catalyst Character) and that of Tildy's older sister Madeline, who turned out to be perhaps the most intriguing person in the book.

There are the bones to a fine story here, but for me the book's structure and the author's style were problematic. I did not enjoy Unfinished Desires, but because of Godwin's reputation, am intrigued enough to consider one of her earlier books.

Unfinished Desires is the perfect title for this book...and even, ironically, a shorthand review for it.

Mount Saint Gabriels is a Catholic school for girls set in North Carolina, and who better to tell its story than Suzanne Ravenel? She attends the school and becomes its headmistress (as well as a nun, of course). The book begins with her writing her memoirs but contains multiple (third person) narratives of former students and teachers, from the past to the present day.

This is primarily a tale of girls and women, whose connections interweave and cross through generations. Almost all are finely drawn, complex characters, though I can't remember a character I've disliked as much as Cornelia Stratton, whose charm and wit don't effectively candy-coat her narcissistic and venomous center.

I found this a compelling read and stayed up late several nights entering its cloistered world. The last 30 pages are disappointing, almost tacked on. The climax is anti-climactic and hardly seems to explain Mother Ravenel's lifelong anguish. Poor Sister Malloy ends up being more deus ex machina than a character. She deserves better, as do Tildy, Maud and Chloe, as their stories are summed up unsatisfactorily. Talk aboout unfinished desires!

However, I don't regret the time I spent at Mount Saint Gabriels. Even as an outsider, it was edifying and educational--and I suspect most attendees were better prepared than most to enter the world with "holy daring."

Honestly, I generally enjoy Ms. Godwin's novels but this one left me cold. I confess I didn't finish the book. I gave it 100 pages and when little had taken place and my interest was worn thin, I put it aside not to be opened again. In a nutshell: Slow-paced. Disjointed. Too many characters and none of them gripping. And worst of all, the hint of devious intrigue that supposedly took place in a past class some years ago at this Catholic shool . . . well, after 100 pages, we seemed to be no closer to that shocking story than 8 or 10 pages into the book. My apologies to the author but this one missed the mark.

Gail Godwin's newest book, Unfinished Desires, is an intriguing character study of the female students and nuns who inhabit an outwardly idyllic Catholic girls' school in North Carolina, Mount St. Garbriel's. The novel takes place primarily in the 1950's where the students jockey for power, prestige and friendship. The nuns, too, have their own histories and secrets. The Mother Superior at the School, Suzanne Ravenal is writing a history of the school. This part of the book takes place in 2001 when Sister Ravenal is in a retirement home for nuns. The book goes back and forth from the every-day school intrigues of the 1950's to 2001 when Mother Ravenal is writing her school's history.

All the characters in the novel have unfinished desires - - for God, friendship, love (sapphic and heterosexual), personal dreams and hopes. They aspire toward the good and the evil as is not uncommon with pubescent girls. What is interesting is that the current mixture of students is compared to the students who attended Mt. St. Gabriel's when Suzanne Ravenel, now headmistress, was a student there herself. We are privy to the old histories, agendas, friendships, angers, loves and alliances that existed when Sister Ravenal was a student, many of which continue into the 1950's. The same families continue to send their daughters to Mt. St. Gabriel's generation after generation and alliances and enmities form.

There is a definite hierarchy of students, such that exists in virtually every school. Tildy Stratton considers herself the Queen Bee. The summer has just ended and a new semester is opening when the book begins. Tildy has decided that her best friend Maud is no longer right for her and so she decides to invite Chloe into her circle, excluding Maud. Chloe is fragile, a recent orphan and easily manipulated by Tildy. As the story opens we learn that Tildy's mother, Cornelia, was an identical twin. Her sister died on her honeymoon. More interesting, perhaps, is that she was Suzanne Ravenel's best friend at school. Suzanne was secretly in love with her and has been trying to atone for this love for years. There have been bad feelings between the Swintons and Sister Ravenal for many years because of many intrigues and complex issues. These feelings have been passed down the generations. The Swinton girls often feel singled out by Sister Ravenal for punishment.

Gail Godwin writes beautifully. We can imagine sitting in an idyllic pasture at Mt. St. Gabriel's with a slight breeze blowing, reading an assignment and then stopping to worry about whether we have paid enough attention to one of our students. One of the most interesting and important characters in this book is a new teacher, a young nun named Sister Malloy. She is pallid and beautiful - like a tragic pre-Raphaelite figure - with a real frailty about her. The students love her and she has a tender and empathic way with the girls. She, too, is dealing with unfinished desires. She had been in the middle of her graduate studies when she was moved to St. Gabriel's in order to take over for another teacher who had been forced to leave the school due to an act of cruelty by the students.

There is a lot of information about Catholicism in this book and the practices of the Catholic church. I found this fascinating but it it not necessary to read all of it to get the gist of the book. If this aspect of the novel is not for the reader, it can be skipped over and the essence of the book will not be lost.

I am a fan of Ms. Godwin's and love the depth of her characterizations, the perspicacity of her writing and the way she draws the reader in to the world of her novel. This is not an easy read as it takes on so many past and present histories and their ramifications. However, it is well worth the effort for it is beautiful in its manifestation. When it all comes together, it is perfect. Some parts, however, don't come together as well as I'd hoped they would. There are no spoilers in this review and that makes it difficult for me to be more specific about aspects of this book. If you're a Gail Godwin fan, go for it. If you're not, and you love a book of depth and intrigue, this may well be a perfect novel for you.

"Unfinished Desires" is more than anything else a character study of a few girls and some of the teachers involved in the graduating class of 1954 freshman year at Mt. St. Gabriel catholic school. A catholic school located in Mountain City N.C., Mt. St. Gabriel's has a long history of offering the very best education for girls-from the locals to daughters of foreign dignitaries, catholic and non alike. Run by nuns from the small order of Saint Scholastica, the school is a friendly, open place for girls to learn and grow.

But every place has its own secrets.

We learn of the history of the school as in modern times Mother Ravenel, one time student and long time headmistress of the school, writes a memoir of her experiences at the now closed institution. Though the school was her only true home, and its staff and students her family the old nun is having a hard time putting on paper the events of 1951-"the toxic year"- which threatened to bring forward deep secrets from her own past.

We follow the toxic year through many points of view. Students, teachers, parents and other on lookers. Periodically we are jumped to the present as Mother Ravenel struggles with her memoir and attempts to come terms with the past.

Because this book is basically a character study the toxic part of the toxic year isn't anything that would be considered very newsworthy today. It's no giant scandal, no great crime. But it is something that disrupted and harmed the lives of the people involved in it and the outcome of it is no doubt something that could haunt a person who felt responsible. More than anything else we get the individual character responses to what the event caused.

This is a charming book to read that does hold your attention (some many different third person voices, all so distinct) but it doesn't have much of a plot. There is a crisis point reached but it's no much of a crisis. More than anything this book is about how a group of characters shaped an event and how that event shaped the characters back.

Three stars

You don't have to be Catholic or a Southerner to love this novel, and you don't have to have gone to an all-girls school or women's college to understand it. Gail Godwin's storytelling skills are so masterful (mistressful?) that almost any reader can relate to her large cast of complex and interconnected characters --students, nuns and many extended family members--but it probably helps to be smart and patient. As many reviewers here have noted, this multigenerational, time-shifting story is not a light-hearted romp of a read, but it is nonethesss a page-turner, and its dramatic arc is deeply satisfying.

On the first day of school in 1951 at Mount St. Gabriel's in North Carolina, where the best families send their daughters for a rigorous, old-fashioned education, Tildy Stratton, the irascible, charismatic ringleader of her ninth-grade class, ditches her old best friend, the socially iffy Maud Norton, whom she had taken under her wing years earlier, and trades her in for the newly orphaned, brooding and artistically gifted Chloe Starnes. The other girls in their class, as Tildy puts it, are really just "background" for the adolescent exploits and titular desires of this trio. But the desires are not limited to their era; a generation earlier, their autocratic headmistresss Mother Suzanne Ravenel (who spends 60 years at the school as student, teacher and head) was a classmate of Chloe's late mother and Tildy's mother and her long-dead twin sister. (You really do have to pay attention to keep the relationships straight at first, but they quickly become as familiar and emotionally engaging as those in your own family.)

The unfolding story, which involves a dark, semi-Sapphic secret and a school play written by Mother Ravenel as a ninth-grader, moves back and forth from 2001, when she is in her 80s and tape-recording a history of the school, to 1951-1952, when Tildy is put in charge of re-staging the play, to which she adds some inflammatory but truthful touches of her own. To tell you more would spoil the fun, but be assured that there is fun to be had, as well as tragedy. If you are fond of "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" and other intensely charged school sagas, put this thoughtful, absorbing melodrama immediately on your reading list.

An exclusive Catholic girls' school in North Carolina is the setting for this book and the time that is most focused on is around 1930 to the early 1950's. The book uses a memoir style of writing to illuminate the relationships between the nuns, girls and their families in the town and in other towns and even other countries. Many of the mothers of the girls in the school were themselves students so the relationships are many and varied.

The cruelty of teen-aged girls is demonstrated in several ways as the story unfolds. Schools are communities which develop their own ways of acting and learning and the school in the story seems to have been superior academically. However its inability to totally civilize all the teenagers in its care is only to be expected. Cliques and other groupings are a feature of most schools.

This is a philosophical book and not an action book. It examines ideas and relationships more than actions. The ending is a bit tamer than I expected. It sort of fizzled and the explosion was contained. That might have been best for the school if it was to continue its mission. But the story would have been more interesting if secrets had been uncovered more, even such tiny secrets of wishing rather than doing. The title itself notes that the secret is one of thought only.

This is a book that will probably appeal more to women than to men. It especially might appeal to teachers or mothers who are teaching their daughters. It definitely will appeal to those who have daughters in Catholic schools.