by Kelly A. Harrison
August 22, 2022
Kelly A. Harrison, MFA, teaches technical communication at Stanford University and works as a writer and consultant in San José, CA. She edited West Winds Centennial, an anthology of works by the California Writers Club, for which she won the Ina Coolbrith award. Her works have appeared in literary journals and anthologies, including Reed Magazine, Hidden Compass, and Celebrate Creativity, and she writes for Technical Communication. She is the Associate Editor for West Trade Review.
Elsewhere by Alexis Schaitkin; Celadon Books; 240 pages; $26.99
Alexis Schaitkin explores motherhood and the mother-daughter dyad in her latest book, Elsewhere, a tale with fable-like and speculative elements narrated by Vera, a resident of an isolated village “high above the rest of the world.” In this place, the weather is always pleasant during the day, while at night, everyone follows a voluntary curfew as the clouds eerily roll in. Our narrator describes her village, built by others in a language they don’t speak, as having Germanic street names (Hauptstrasse, Gartenstrasse, Hinter der Wald, and so on), high in a mountain jungle (not a forest) with a river that magically never overflows and never dries. The villagers understand there’s an “elsewhere,” separate from them in significant ways, not least because the strangers live far down the mountain where no one goes except for the one man whose quarterly trips from elsewhere supply the village with goods in exchange for the baskets woven skillfully by the women.
This quaintness of place seems antique, like a fairy tale where guilds, manual labors, and slow living are the norm. The more intriguing descriptions, however, are of the behaviors and customs. Schaitkin presents a world with cult-like behaviors. Villagers follow strict moral and behavioral codes, including no premarital sex. Here, women wear their hair braided and pinned, each having her own hairpin with which she pricks her husband during sex—literally letting down her hair—and then she tastes his blood. In this village, people touch each other often, such as when exchanging goods or money, their fingers sliding over each other. The young girls form “threesomes” or, less frequently, “pairings.” The touching and pairings and threesomes, however, are all innocent situations—another characteristic that adds to the village’s feeling of other times, other worldliness.
The anachronisms story may surprise and confound the reader. The village has a photography shop that develops and prints photos, and Vera’s husband is a dentist. Schaitkin spends most of parts one and two of the five-part novel building this world, where mothers have an “affliction”—one that takes them into the nightly mists, villagers suppose, where suddenly they disappear and no one knows why or where they go or if they die. The anachronisms like the photo shop are deliberate because they serve distinct plot points. When villagers wake to find a mother is missing, the they respond ritualistically—burning all photos of the mother, among other acts. In this fire, the memory of the mother is excised from the community, and then life continues. All of this is essentially world building, and perhaps that is the greatest flaw in this novel. The telling unfolds slowly at first and often includes elements that don’t seem to matter or have little significance, like the pairing/threesomes of the girls.
The elements that keep readers engaged, revolve around mothering. On the one hand, mothering is love and caring. On the other, it is dark, mysterious, terrifying, and deadly. This fear of disappearing haunts every mother and infects their parenting. Did a mother disappear because she was too connected to her children? Not connected enough? The affliction, while mysterious, is accepted as part of their life in the otherwise idyllic village, but it’s also a source of blame and speculation even if no one knows the source or purpose of the affliction. Schaitkin seems to be commenting on the ways society blames mothers for things that seem out of their control, and yet she leaves readers in an ambiguous state where situations are never clear, never concrete.
As Schaitkin explores mothering, the telling of the story offers insights around motherhood, childrearing, and the push and pull between mother and child. For example, she writes that “A mother was a chance to hate someone as much as you loved them, carrying and wounding, a push and pull that only tightened the knot that bound you.” The complex act of mothering and being mothered filters through Vera’s narrative. As a mother, she struggles to find what’s right, what parenting techniques might keep her close to her child, what tiny movement off the parenting path might result in the affliction taking her in the night, what actions might save her life so that she may watch her child grow. This tension is one of many showing that mothering is fraught: “Impossible to predict, what motherhood would bring out of a woman, what it would show her about herself, the end to which it would carry her.” Vera makes a sudden decision about her safety, and the novel turns on this point, perhaps too late because the turn feels more like an inciting incident that should come earlier because so much of the plot and tension comes after this point. What gets readers to that later turning point is the strangeness of the world, but for some readers that might not be enough.
Throughout the storytelling, Schaitkin includes insights in unexpected places, and astute readers will start hunting for them. As narrator, Vera lingers through world building, through summary rather than scene, and then suddenly the reader gets a line of much deeper truth, richness, and complexity: “I loved to love her this way, even as I worried that this love might not be what a child needs, that it might also be a kind of harm.” This darker side of motherhood and of mother-daughter tension becomes a character of sorts, wending itself like a poisonous snake that could strike on the next page. When the mothers are gathered with their children and a young girl needs care, but “When her mother ran up from the grass with a wet handkerchief to wipe it away, Di rolled her eyes and sassed, ‘I’ve got it’; she combed the mess out of her hair with her own fingers rather than give her mother the satisfaction of being needed.” The daughter steals emotional gratification, because in this world “Mothers and daughters brought something out of each other.” As Vera moves from childhood to motherhood, she’s confronted with parallels, with her struggles and choices as a mother reflecting those her mother made. One tension in this area is the obvious one: Will Vera become her mother, taking a similar path?
The central questions in the novel include how does a mother negotiate her own needs with the needs of the child? To what lengths will a mother go to save herself, to become herself? What’s at stake if a mother abandons her child in attempts to stay alive to see her child grow up? Straddling two worlds, Vera’s journey takes readers through a woman’s desires, her emotional needs, and her wishes to acquire self-actualization.
©2022 West Trade Review
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An Exploration of Mothering, Daughters, and the Self in Alexis Schaitkin's Elsewhere
FICTION REVIEW
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