Miniatures

I had never heard of this book when I saw it on the American Library Association list of best books 2003. But I started paging through it, and then found that I couldn't put it down. It's a true novel, in all the best ways: unique, mysterious, philosphical, funny, sad, intellectually playful, and best of all, beautifully written. To read and really enjoy Miniatures you have to surrender to Labiner's language and just let the sentences take over. It's unfortunate that this book is on one of those backwater small presses, and they just can't get it to the larger audience that it deserves.

Norah Labiner's second novel is an oddity, a labyrinth, and, in its own strange way, a masterpiece. The book may be described as the confession or narrative of Fern Jacobi, who is trying to tell the story of the time she spent cleaning house for a Ted Hughes-like poet and his second wife on the western coast of Ireland. "Trying" is the key word here, as her narrative constantly veers off on literary, historical, mythological and pop-cultural excursions, beginning with the catalogue of literary suicides that opens the book. The narrative teases, withholds, goes astray. It is a book that trumpets its own difficulty, so that the difficulty of both reading and writing is constantly at the front of the reader's mind. It is achingly self-conscious; it thrills and exasperates in equal measure. Some argue that this kind of self-consciousness is the albatross of Labiner's literary generation -- and it's certainly not for everyone -- but she does it with such brio, such constant ingenuity and wit, that it's hard not to be impressed. And I don't want to suggest that "Miniatures" is devoid of conventional, plot-driven interest, either. In fact, Labiner exploits standard Gothic tropes (first wife's mysterious death, isolated house, eerie landscape) to great effect. She does a fascinating feminist rereading of the Hughes/Plath story, altered just enough to give her fictive license. (Franny, the Plath figure, cuts her finger as she's slicing bread, not an onion as in Plath's poem.) And without giving anything away, I'll say that Labiner's attempt to fill in the blanks of this famous relationship is a bold and deeply imaginative one.The Plath/Hughes relationship, a chapter in literary history that has remained mysterious amid so much interpretation, rumor, novelization, and distortion, is an ideal frame for Labiner's book, which is ultimately an extended meditation on the paradox that fiction reveals truth to us by telling us lies. It is her unique achievement to create a book that constantly reminds us of narrative's inadequacy and yet, in the end, seems profoundly honest.

Fern Jacobi is young and on a journey through Ireland when she meets two famous American expatriots who befriend her. In the course of her work for them as a housecleaner, Fern comes to uncover the mystery surrounding a dead wife and a house filled with secrets in Miniatures, a compelling story of discovery and coming of age.

This novel is really genius--the word gets tossed around a lot, but if anyone deserves the label, Labiner does. It is hugely ambitious, wittily referential, oddly suspenseful and strangely touching--truth in Labiner's world comes tangled in a thicket of wordplay and digression; the more we digress, the closer we are to hitting something real.Labiner deserves a wider audience that she has gotten; she is doing something innovative and remarkable with her writing.