Jane Alison

I'll admit it: part of the reason I enjoy reading midlife memoirs like "The Sisters Antipodes" is that they're usually fairly scandalous. They're good stories, yes, and often well-written, but part of the reason I like them is because they showcase instances of nearly unbelievable human misbehavior. "The Sisters Antipodes" doesn't exactly fit that mold. Its tone is literary, lyrical, almost abstract. The author raises some important questions that she can't really find answers for. Why, exactly, did her father essentially switch families with another man, and why did the mothers involved accept this bizarre arrangement? Who made the first move? What -- perhaps more precisely, who -- did she lose when she left Australia for the United States? "The Sisters Antipodes" is far from unsatisfying, but I get the impression that the author was far too young during much of what transpired to remember everything she relates here. I suspect that "The Sisters Antipodes" is one half autobiography and one half imaginative writing exercise. It seems that a couple of reviewers expected a more straightforward narrative, but, considering the profound changes she underwent during her childhood, there might not have been any other way that the author could have written this one. She mentions several failed attempts at putting her story on paper in the opening pages. Considering that she lost not just her father but also her nationality at an extremely young age, that hardly comes as a surprise. The writing here, while not always direct, is often beautiful and, on many occasions, positively heart-wrenching. "The Sisters Antipodes" may not be a wholly factual or complete account of what Jane Allison and her sisters went through, but I get the impression that the author wrote it the only way she could.

"The Sisters Antipodes" is also, in its way, a doppelganger story. After the divorce and remarriage, it could be said that the author was twinned with the girl whose father became her step-father. Their relationship is complex and often painful, but also intimate in a way that few of us could possibly understand. Alison foregrounds it to the expense of all others in the book: we hear little, for example, about her own sister and her new opposite. According to the author's recounting, she once was pretty similar to her pseudo-sister: they were both smart, pretty, ruthlessly competitive, and faced enormous emotional challenges. While the author seems to have been able to cope with the psychic damage she suffered, her complement seems to have had a much harder time of it. Although the author never articulates it, this is another one of the unanswerable questions in "The Sisters Antipodes": why did one sister thrive while the other gave way to the pressure she was put under? Were they just different people? Did they face different sorts of challenges? Or was there something in the dynamic of this strange, conjoined family that made things harder on her?

It would be difficult to say that the author is completely at peace with the events she describes here: this is the sort of stuff that keeps people in therapy forever. But, unlikely as it may seem, her family's dramatic separation gave her, in the very long run, a sort of blended family: two fathers and two mothers, and two extra sisters, even if they spent most of their time continents away from each other. Alison is too good a writer to say something as banal as "time heals all wounds": indeed the wounds are still there. But time, along with some human qualities, produces unexpected transformations. Though it shouldn't be confused with a work of investigative journalism, "The Sisters Antipodes" is as close to proof of that as you're likely to find anywhere.… (more)

Fifty-odd years in. Twenty-one floors up. J.'s life unspools in loops, a wavering sequence of repetitions: blistering walks to the store, naggingly beautiful vistas all around, purposeful swims, lustful daydreams, a faltering cat, a mistrustful duck, a few soggy dates, some mulish memories of lovers who don't deserve them, each ill-chosen man candidly, compulsively dishonest. She translates Ovid, thirty lines a day, and her work is interleaved with her life, the wet words of each story soaking through the page into the other. She has wishes and regrets, but she can't tell if they're blooming or fading away. She chats with neighbors down the hall and spies on strangers high up in buildings across the street, jogging on treadmills, whoring and johning, doing origami, each in a cube of light suspended over Biscayne Bay.

J. is adrift but becalmed. She doesn't pretend otherwise. But she's not ready to quit. Does love require luck or will? It's a question that matters to her, but does it matter enough? Alison's plot is atmospheric, but her observations are concrete. This is as it should be. What she truly nails is the way the setting of the developed Florida coast—the blazing sun, the bright sea, the towering white buildings, which upon closer inspection are revealed to be riven with cracks and pocked with decay—affects the mind and spirit. It is paradise and it is the step right before paradise, and you can't quite find your footing in either.

A couple hundred feet below, the cruise ships have become skyscrapers, dwarfing structures on land and bleeding their slop into the water. But at least they move. So now the skyscrapers aspire to be ships. J. calls her building, Nine Island, the Love Boat, a pleasure palace gone to seed, its aging pool dripping stalagmites of decaying concrete into the garage below. Comic and forlorn, much like J. herself, the Love Boat longs for the sea but finds itself stuck in dry dock.

Toward the end, Alison's plot quickly but convincingly draws into a thread. She finds ends and beginnings in a place people come to when they'd rather stay in between.… (more)

This book reminds me of some of the books I read for the fiction writing class in Greece, perhaps because it is set in ancient circumstances, but maybe because it blends more of the fantastic into the fabric of the historical setting. Giving Xenia the ability to see into the future gives the story a more comprehensive chronological sense, which is interesting as a reader aware of the variety of distances between here and Rome. The decision to spend so much time in Ovid and Xenia’s consciousness was a bit exhausting as a reader, and I would have preferred more action and dialogue. But as an authorial choice it made sense with the true topic of the story, because though framed as the story of their relationship, this is just the story of their independent characters, fiercely separated despite their intense temporary collision.… (more)