There’s a fine line between love and hate.
For five years, Sally and Clive have been lost in a
passionate affair. Now he has dumped her to devote himself to his wife and family,
and Sally is left in freefall.
It starts with a casual stroll past his house, and popping
into the brasserie where his son works. Then Sally starts following Clive’s
wife and daughter on Facebook. But that’s alright, isn’t it? These are
perfectly normal things to do. Aren’t they?
Not since “Fatal Attraction” has the fallout from an illicit
affair been exposed in such a sharp, darkly funny, and disturbing way: “The
Mistress’s Revenge” is a truly exciting fiction debut. After all, who doesn’t know
an otherwise sane woman who has gone a little crazy when her heart was broken?
Buckle in this one will take you some place ugly and scary
and you will freely fall into all its depressed darkness. Tamar Cohen really
explores the depth of the woman scorned but this time only from the woman’s
diluted point of view. How would you feel if the man you have been allowing to
flood your mind with happiness for the past five years suddenly grows a back
bone and tells you, rather recklessly, that it all needs to stop could turkey? Does “loose it”
and “kill him” run through your mind? Well, you are not alone.
The story itself is unique as it does not follow your
standard of structure in novels. Chapter separations or sections split up by
dates. By doing this it allows us the ability to swim in the misery with her.
Slowing remembering your own past breakups and the versions of you that were
before the you that is. As readers we are addressed as her ex-lover Clive
Gooding. Needless to say Sally Islip,
our main character and the narrator, is not ready to let go just yet.
You know, I
can forgive the fact I begged you to warn me in advance if you were dumping me
and you still let me turn up at that restaurant on York Way Friday with a
jaunty impatience and un-washed hair and only my second-best jeans. I can
forgive the way you told me it was over before I’d even taken off my coat and
then somehow expected we’d find a way of filling the next three tortuous hours,
me with my arm still halfway in my sleeve. I can forgive that awful,
excruciating, pain-ridden lunch while the waitress hovered uncertainly around
the uneaten food, a smile stretching her face as if it might snap, and I tried
not to meet anyone’s eye. I can even forgive you asking for a receipt (even
good-byes it seems are tax deductible). But what I can’t forgive is the way you
scurried off so gratefully when we got outside and I told you to go. You were
halfway down York Way, your laptop bag bouncing insistently against your back,
before I realized you really were going to leave me there crying in the rain.
Pg14
We have all been there
haven’t we? Whether it was years ago or just last week, the evil feeling of
being less than or losing something you felt a comfort with is devastating.
Depending on the level of the investment even maddening, so is it so farfetched
that Sally refuses to let go?
Throughout the story Sally
enters little side notes meant to pacify the judgment of Clive. The journal
entries feel more like letters to him rather than reflections of what she has
gone through. This gives a bit of voyeuristic pleasure to the book. You get to
brew in the danger of a heart break from the safe distance of the pages. And
yet you can’t help have those “No, please don’t” feelings and that “oh no”
regret after she does exactly what you want to warn her of.
She is far from innocent
though. I don’t want you to think this novel is purely the brooding of a woman
left to glue herself back together after being shattered into needle point
pieces. This is so not the case. Sally Islip is a force to be reckoned with.
Her love for the life she could, or in her words, should have pole volts her
into situations that she innocently feels are harmless, though to us, are true
bold stabs at the life Clive so desperately wants to keep safe.
Another aspect that we
don’t see in our own misery during a breakup is the effect our emotions have on
those we love. We are told of a family that once was normal and though timid in
temperature was pure and whole. We see Sally push her husband Daniel, children
Jaime and Tilly away to the point she blames her daughter’s distaste with her
on her daughter’s entering that ever so loved stage of being a teenager.
“Why is your
neck like that?” she wanted to know.
“Like what?”
“You know,
like the top of the curtains.”
Ah, pleated.
My daughter wants to know why the skin on my neck is pleated.
I look at
myself in the mirror and see what she sees –a too-thing fourty-three-year-old
whose skin no longer fits wearing a top that drapes over me like one of those
frilly round cloths on what my grandmother used to call “occasional table.”
Pg.69
This
roller coaster ride of emotion is worth reading. If not to watch the train
wreck of our dear Sillee Sallee, but to watch the vindication that her beloved
Clive gets when his own world is turned upside down. Sally makes sure that all
those promises, romantic whispers, and long nights of being the other woman are
paid in full by Clive and then some.
