The Mermaid Chair

By Sue Monk Kidd
Read: Attempted May 2009
Rating: Disappointing.

I really, really liked The Secret Life of Bees. I was happy to see Kidd had another book, but I held off on getting it. My mom and I watched the Lifetime version of Mermaid Chair a while back and it didn’t strike me as particularly good–but that was Lifetime. So when our neighbor offered to loan me her copy, I took it and finally got around to trying it.

Goddamnit. I really wanted to like it. I tried. I thought maybe I wasn’t getting into it because my beloved guinea pig Reepacheep died this week. I thought I might just be short on sleep and that was why I was dozing off in the bath. I stuck with it for 116 pages.

Then I checked the Amazon reviews, and saw that it’s not just me. It’s VERY MUCH not just me. Two and a half stars not me. The same complaints I was having, though most are more bitter.

It strikes me as nothing so much as a fictional version of Eat, Pray, Love. Woman with a really, really good life is… not altogether happy. Rather than trying to improve her situation, she takes an opportunity to escape the people who care about her and have a wild affair with a stranger. The other reviews call Jessie, the protagonist, selfish and narcissistic. I just found her boring.

Don’t get me wrong, Kidd’s prose is lovely. She has an exquisite touch for describing scenery–really beautiful. But I was lulled to sleep by it. I don’t give a damn about Jessie. She isn’t compelling. There isn’t any suspense. I’m not gripped by the mysteries. And I’m not attracted to the man she goes after. In fact, I’m pitying her husband, who may be kind of a prat, but he’s by no means a demon.

It’s a modern attempt at The Problem That Has No Name. Back then, women were unfulfilled because they had been limited. Society told them what to want, and restricted their access to anything beyond it. They weren’t fulfilled because they weren’t allowed to be. But Jessie, and that cow who wrote EPL, don’t have that problem. No, their problem is restlessness. They have good lives that they created. Jessie is an artist, with a husband she was mad for in her youth, a daughter she’s close to, and a house big enough to have her own damn art studio. If she’s not feeling fulfilled then she has a myriad of options. She can take a step back and try to understand herself, figure out what it is she’s really lacking. She can go back to school, or change art media, or start a new career. She can see a therapist (something she actively resists, as it’s suggested by her psychologist husband). If she’s not longer attracted to her husband she needs to tell him so; it isn’t fair to him to scrap 20+ years without giving him an opportunity to try to make things work again.

I didn’t expect such shallow storytelling from Kidd. The Secret Life of Bees is truly marvelous. Skip this one, and go for that.