The Folded World

Summary (from the publisher): Acclaimed for her excquisite prose and crystalline insights, Amity Gaige returns with The Folded World, the story of an idealistic young social worker drawn into the lives of his mentally ill clients. Charlie Shade was born into a quiet, prosperous life, but a sense of injustice dogs him. He feels destined to leave his life of "bread and laundry," to work instead with people in crisis. On his way, he meets his kindred spirit in Alice, a soulful young woman, living helplessly by laws of childhood superstition. Charlie's empathy with his clients — troubled souls like Hal, the high-school wrestling champion who undergoes a psychotic break, and Opal, the isolated young woman who claims "various philosophies have confused my life" — is both admirable and nearly fatal. An adoring husband and new father, Charlie risks his own cherished, private domestic world to help Hal, Opal, and others move beyond their haunted inner worlds into the larger world of love and connection.

A collision of extraordinary characters, The Folded World addresses the universal dilemma of love, wherein giving to another can seem like "the death of the world of oneself." With an unerring eye for both the joys and devastations of life, Amity Gaige once again reminds us of the pleasures and depths to be found in her fiction.

 

Review: Charlie and Alice, two individuals who have always felt somehow other in their own families, meet and fall deeply in love. Soon, they're married, with Alice staying at home with their twin daughters and Charlie pursuing his career in social work. Soon, Charlie's empathy has been going too far for some of his mentally unstable clients, while Alice feels adrift navigating life with two infants and trapped in their one bedroom apartment.

 

Gaige tells Charlie and Alice's story with beautiful prose, which is why I was initially drawn into the story. For example: "She had never been forewarned of happiness, so to her it was a complete surprise. She had a husband of the sort she never dreamed existed - gallant and tender and loyal as daybreak. It was as if she had died and gone to heaven, a heaven where you made love to yourself all day and he made love to you all night, and in between, you read" (30). Or the description of a female academic walking home in the evening: "tip-topping back and forth like a teacup full of buttermilk" (113).

 

And yet - at times the writing seemed forced, as if the author was consciously trying to show off how poignant and deep the writing was. For instance, in the opening pages Charlie as a small boy is supposedly somehow cosmically aware that Alice has been born, though they don't meet until they are adults. "The sun pulsed, hot on his blond head, and the paisley of the carpet pulsed, and the room smelled vividly and wonderfully of sun damage, and he felt, all at once, like a struck match, and that was the first time he ever thought of Alice" (4). I also wasn't sure what to make of the strange and violent premonitions Charlie's unnamed grandmother experiences where she imagines Charlie murdered: "She staggered backward from the body, cut as it was, lying as it was, throat cut, the head cocked and eyes staring as if appraising a last loveliness, and once again the grandmother became aware that she was standing in a white room, holding a newborn baby" (25).

 

I did like Charlie and Alice. I liked that Charlie's downfall is his goodness - he can't stop at the rules because he wants to do everything possible to help his clients. I liked Alice and Charlie together, so idealistic and in love in their tiny apartment. And I even liked Alice's sort of unlikeable mother with her "wintry complexion" (4). I also liked how Charlie's clients' lives were incorporated into the novel, since they were such a large part of Charlie's life. Although at time the plot seemed to struggle to right itself, this is about two individuals struggling both together and apart in their lives and how they navigate the early years of their marriage.

 

Stars: 3.5