HATTIE BARNES now a mother and doctor, revisits her childhood with particular reference to her mother Maggie. But Kaye Gibbons's Sights Unseen (Virago, £14.99 in UK) is no exercise in nostalgia. It is the brutally direct, moving and often funny account of her mother's long years of exhausting madness. Set in Raleigh, North Carolina, Gibbons's fifth novel is outstanding. If there is a writer worthy to be nominated the literary heir of Eudora Welty, Gibbons is that writer.
Since her sharp, crafted debut, Ellen Foster (1987), in which 11 year old Ellen begins her story "When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy", and through subsequent works such as A Virtuous Woman, A Cure for Dreams and Charms for the Easy Life, she has maintained the quality of her work, showing herself to be a sharper, more elegant and disciplined writer than Anne Tyler, with whom she has been compared. Gibbons, yet another gifted Southern writer, remains relatively little known. Difficult to forget, this quiet novel, which records the violent, isolated domestic world created by one woman's mental illness and the distressing impact it has on those who live with her, should finally elevate Gibbons to the status she deserves.
Hattie's narrative resounds with the wistfulness of lost opportunity, and Gibbons's success is largely achieved through the mastery of a detached, reflective tone. Hattie has never forgotten a girlhood dominated by the crazed antics of a larger than life mother whose demented behaviour made her all too present, yet curiously absent.
Both Hattie and her brother are affected by their mother's terrifying mood shifts both of them later become doctors but no one suffers as much as their father, the weak son of the patriarchal Mr Barnes with whom their mother conducts a peculiarly friendly relationship.
Somehow Hattie sustains her deadpan tone, despite her longing for a normal childhood. "If she could be well all the time, then I could have girls over to play. They would see my room, something no child outside my family had yet done. Other children from school always rode the bus home together, giggling as they disembarked and talking about building forts in pine thickets, about listening to records and learning new dances. I never went to anyone's house."
"When she was sick," Hattie recalls of her mother, "the theft of her soul by strangers was a topic she dwelt upon. Long after she recovered, she said she had been afraid of being left a shell of a person, a husk." Central to the household is Pearl, the black housekeeper, capable of remaining unconfused by Maggie's illness, because she knows "how to maintain the distance necessary to avoid being drawn into its vortex". Many writers would have allowed Pearl to degenerate in to a caricatured "Black Mammy" figure. Gibbons does not Pearl's sympathetic emotional detachment is as vital to this powerful, understated novel as it is to the Barnes family.
In telling her mother's story with its mood shifts, delusions, paranoia and scenes, Hattie is also exploring the rest of her family's history. Freddy her brother, in reaction against his mother's illness and his father's understandable preoccupation turns in awards and finds comfort in studying, playing basketball and remaining aloof. Freddy also become the first grandchild to be hit by the despotic, domineering Grandfather Barnes, whose money is so useful to Hattie's family. Frederick Barnes, Maggie's long suffering husband, emerges as a gentle, ineffectual character whose life is devoted to protecting his self destructive wife. Hattie is a non-judgmental, precise narrator, who reveals herself to have been a watchful child possessing dreams of happiness yet able to be grateful for the little she receives in the form of emotional support.
This is not a straightforward, chronologically executed narrative. The novel reads as if it took the unexpected, accidental death at 62 of her mother, 15 years after apparently defeating her manic depression, to encourage Hattie to consider the missing parent offer childhood. Learning emotional dependence at an early age has given Hattie an" increased understanding of herself, which also adds to the strength and plausibility of this novel. "My patience came from a deep longing for an ideal, and had I not pitied my mother, I would have stopped waiting for her, given up on her and ranged about for love elsewhere."
Because of its subject, Sights Unseen could have become a weary litany of embarrassing incidents and upsets with the helpless family trapped by the mother's irrational, often shocking displays. But Gibbons is too good for that. Recalling the absence of the photographs taken on her sixth birthday, Hattie calmly records her mother's determination to develop them herself. "She went into the bathroom and shook the film out of the camera and dropped both canisters into a sink full of something she knew would work, like rubbing alcohol. I see her sitting in her slipper chair, chain smoking, looking at herself in the mirror every time she gets up to check the film."
The year 1967, when Hattie reaches 12 marks the turning point of her mother's existence. A final outrage becomes Maggie's salvation. Having sneaked off in her husband's car, she crashes into a pedestrian and then explains to the police she did so because the woman on the sidewalk was "wearing her clothes, trying to look just like her, and she despised it when people tried to mimic her, and she thought she would just knock the woman with the car and teach her a lesson and see if she came downtown dressed in clothes she had no business wearing because only Maggie Barnes wore a red swing coat with a black collar." The episode leaves her husband with no alternative but to send her to a mental institution, where she is given electro convulsive therapy.
The cure works. Waiting for her mother's return is likened by Hattie to "what it must have been for a mourner standing on the edge of the tracks watching for the train carrying the body of Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt to pass".
Gibbons has created a thoughtful, moving and vivid portrait of a mind caught in madness as witnessed by a loving narrator who is nonetheless indelibly aware of having been cheated of her childhood by her mother's insanity. An atmospheric, strange and humane novel from yet another superb Southern writer.
