Imagine a novel with only one main character, an 83-year-old woman, described in a prologue as “old with her life broken in ways she could not have foreseen.” She goes through each day as though it were “an impersonation of the one before with only a slight shuffle -- as though even for death there is a queue.” Meet Helen Cartwright in some of the most hypnotic prose you’ve read in a long time, metaphor-rich and spot-on in evoking the ordinary habits of the elderly who live alone. Then, again, the author of Sipsworth, Simon Van Booy’s latest fiction, is a master of original stories full of deceptive simplicity. Here he creates with humor and poignancy a surprising and heartwarming tale about loss and love, seamlessly integrating details of Helen’s past into the present-tense narrative. Sections are named for days of the week, the weather always omnipresent -air crisp, “sky so blue it seems painted.” “Large puddles wear patches of fallen leaves.”
Helen, an older Brit has returned to live out her remaining days in her childhood neighborhood in England, after six decades living abroad with an Australian husband and son, neither one, the reader learns slowly, still alive. She passively goes through her daily routines - making tea, nibbling biscuits, watching old movies on TV, listening to opera and BBC radio,” punctuated by news of the day as a kind of background noise. She sees no one. Neither God-fearing nor manifestly depressed, she seems ready to die, but then . . . something strange happens one Friday night in the “stomach of the night.” She hears something. She leaves the “milky stillness” of her sparse bedroom, breaking the “skin of dreaming” and goes downstairs to see what it is. The discovery will change her life and the lives of others.
Van Booy’s metaphors generate a sense of Helen as an intelligent, observant, if somewhat caustic woman, who seems to be sleepwalking to her end of days. That Friday night, however, a neighbor has just discarded a carton of garbage, and though it’s cold and raining, Helen, curious and perhaps bored, drags it into her house. There, in the carton, she sees a toy that reminds her of one that belonged to her son as part of his fish tank set. And then she sees movement. “Having been alone for so long, Helen finds relief in small imaginary dramas,” Van Booy writes, but the drama that soon evolves from that night will involve Helen in invoking memories of her mother and dad, husband and son, and of a traumatic time when she was a child and got stuck in a well for two days. Eventually, she will also find herself engaged in conversation with a few locals – the owner of a hardware store, a librarian, and an “idiot” at an animal shelter, whom she will even tually win over. The cause of her new behavior is her finding a mouse in the wet carton she lugged in. A rodent! Call pest control, get traps, isolate the thing in the kitchen sink.
The slight but telling ways in which Van Booy moves Helen from mild repulsion to inordinate compassion that becomes contagious are ingenious. Helen begins to see “Sipsworth,” her name for the creature, as a true “Cartwright,” risk-taking and independent. She starts feeding him dinner, as advised in a care manual she borrows from the library – the manual and other books mentioned in the novel are real. She sits with him on the couch –she’s sure it’s a he—telling him about opera, movies, and moments from her life. He’s the first living creature she’s touched in 20 years. Only late in the novel does the reader learn what Helen did in Australia. Wow! As if this imaginative concept and fine writing were not enough, Van Booy advances the plot toward the end by leaving bare pages of named days. Sipsworth is an extraordinary work of fiction based in everyday humanity. It’s possible that Van Booy, who has also written children’s books, has an extended young audience here, though there’s something special and memorable for the older set.
