Jane Kotapish paints a verbal masterpiece in Salvage

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	• Salvage Jane Kotapish Macadam Cage Pub, 2008 - 300 pages average customer review:based on 6 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Jane Kotapish paints a verbal masterpiece in Salvage

From the opening paragraph to the enlightened ending, Salvage melts in your mouth like a decadent dessert. Sad, silly, surprising, surreal.... yet oh so real, Salvage must be indulged to be appreciated. Kotapish is a new voice on the literary scene to keep an eye on. We haven't heard the last from her! PS: I rated this book FIVE stars, not four!

Startling writing

One of the more pleasurable reading experiences I've had recently.

I particularly appreciate the innovative use of language. The simple but shockingly fresh ways she combines a noun and an adjective to create a precise and totally appropriate picture, but in a way that I've never heard (or thought of) before.

The overall effect created a very intimate relationship with the main character. It was almost creepy at times (and this is a good thing) to be let in to the internal world of this very off-balance person. Like I got to know her in ways that I wasn't totally comfortable with. I think to be able to achieve that is pretty special. How many characters are there in literature who we feel both drawn to and repulsed by and also feel like we've gotten to know very well?

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Dealing with depth

For starters, I should say that this is my first review and that I am in no way qualified to review anything. This is just my 2 cents worth on a book I really enjoyed.

In Salvage, Jane Kotapish did a good job of taking me beyond any stereotypes I might try to assign to her book. It really got down to a human scale where I could relate to the characters. I could also relate to the story as a whole, and I think the book handles a person's internal reality versus society's mass external reality in an interesting way......Basically, a person's perception of the world collides with reality. Or in this case, is almost overwhelmed by it. All of the characters represent this theme in unique ways but together they make the book very cohesive.

So I have made it clear that I am a fan of the book, though I am a little biased for two reasons - One, as I hinted above, there is a metaphysical vein that runs through this book and I am sucker for that. But this book doesn't get too syrupy. The story is grounded in reality and there are times when the characters actions actually make you uncomfortable. The story never seems contrived, and I'd say that if you have ever had something happen in your life, which you didn't know how to cope with, then I think you will find the story very compelling.

The second reason I am biased is that I met Jane once many years ago. It was a brief conversation but it made an impression on me because she was so comfortable with herself and seemed so sure about what she was going to do with her life. We got on the topic of Joyce and she said then that she was interested in writing. Many of my friends at that time wanted to be writers, painters, musicians or something of the sort, but she is the only person I know of who actually went out and did it.

Pushing those two reasons aside, the book is simply a good read and I highly recommend it. I am now officially a fan of her work and I am looking forward to her next book.

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Kotapish weaves magic into her imagery

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.

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Watch This Writer

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.

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reviews: page 1, 2

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.

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