Unfinished Desires (Random House Reader's Circle) [Paperback]

This is a mature, adult book about adolescent girl behavior. Not since Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye have I read such a powerful novel about teenage feminine conformity, coercion, betrayal, jealousy, secrets, and love. Godwin creates a labyrinth that begins with a simple layer and gradually builds to a complex and knotted snare. I was pulled in from the opening pages as this rich, multi-generational tapestry is woven as if from the loom. The book never loses steam, and the lyrical rhythm amplifies as the story builds. Godwin designed an absolutely beautiful brocade of a book. She sublimely and organically explores the conscious, unconscious, and subconscious layers of the human mind and all its dark and light attributes while she braids a tale of intrigue, desire, and loss from the fabric of memory.

The central narrative is the school year of 1951-52 at a Catholic boarding school, Mount St. Gabriel's, in the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina. Mother "Suzanne" Ravenel, age 85, is reaching back and writing her memoir in 2001 of her time as a student and then headmistress of the now defunct school. She is plagued by events that occurred that one year, especially after her freshman girls staged the annual spring play and brought buried secrets into the performance. She feels stuck and unable to write about that time. Memories--how they are interpreted and relived and revived by the people who remember them--that is the primary theme that this intricate web and convoluted story is built upon. Their unfinished desires, a key element of each person's intimate story (and of course the title of this book), is subsumed and sometimes emotionally tampered by various interpretations of past events.

Godwin uses several narrative devices with ease. Developments are non-linear and yet not confusing, and she uses several perspectives, along and within the third-person voice, to tell the complete story. There is Mother Ravenel at her tape recorder or walking with other nuns at the retirement home, contemplating her past and receding into her future. Interspersed with that is the story of that "toxic" year and the girls at the boarding school--shy and recently orphaned Chloe, who talks to her dead mother and draws pictures that explain mysterious incidents; Maud, the enigmatic, elusive and beautiful daughter of a broken home; and Tildy, the assertive ringleader and undiagnosed dyslexic who switched best friends that year from Maud to Chloe and added tension to the clusters of girls.

Tildy's sister, Madeline, animates the narrative with her grounded and giving nature. Their acid-tongued mother, Cornelia, a former classmate of Mother Ravenel, adds history and a fiendish dose of doubt and a wicked but droll perspective. She is contemptuous of Suzanne and imparts her derisiveness to her daughters. Cornelia's twin sister, Anotnia, was Mother Ravenel's best friend when they were students at Mount St. Gabriel's, and their shared history is the source of many of the secrets and future scorn by Cornelia. Then there is Mother "Kate" Malloy, the young teacher and protégé of Mother Ravenel. She is pale, beautiful, and empathic, and a fortress for the teenage girls. She claimed her vocation at an early age, but she also identifies with the tumult of her students.

A handful of the male characters are also dimensional and integral to the story. In any sprawling novel there will also be a few paper-thin walk-ons or mere vehicles for some larger purpose, and Godwin's is no exception. Often, she mirrors the scope and tone of Dickens, especially with her male characters.

We also move forward in time through some epistolary passages, which add a surprising twist and intrigue to the tale. As Godwin switches perspectives, we are carried effortlessly through the story. This is a difficult task for many authors to pull off, but Godwin engages us instantly from moment to moment, even as she changes time and perspective and narrative mode. The story deepens as the pages turn. I found myself in a kind of wonderment when the story was about 2/3 of the way through. I realized that this initially straightforward story, a story that could have become a sappy melodrama in lesser hands, had evolved into this monster of an organism with knotty, knuckled tentacles that surround and imbibe the heart. What is outward about this story is also latent and hidden. There are many submerged facets of this tale that pour into your psyche with a subliminal but fierce gusto.

Unfinished Desires is a dense but very accessible novel. It is not a "quick read" kind of book for the beach. It is a novel you savor and read as it is intended--closely and with its gradual, exalted rhythm. It is a quiet squall, a subdued tempest. The driving action is mostly psychological. It is masterful but not perfect. The last few pages, although revealing, felt a little tacked on, without sufficient roots. However, it doesn't weaken the overall novel, which delivers a sterling tale of humanity, warts and all.

Set in a prestigious girls' boarding school run by nuns in the 1950s, Gail Godwin's novel has a cloistered feel. Not that the action (such as it is) does not often move off campus; many of the main characters are day students. But the girls' families seem just as much a closed circle as the nuns are, a hermetic quality enhanced by the fact that several of the mothers were friends at the same school two decades earlier, and the families have intermarried in complex ways. Read the long paragraph on page 9 that introduces the various characters several times over before moving on, and bookmark it for further reference; you will need it.

I did, however, like it that Godwin constantly switches her time frame over an eight-decade span. The container, set in 2001, is the taped narrative of Mother Ravenel, recalling her years as headmistress of the school, Mount St. Gabriel's in North Carolina, in the middle years of the century. Most of the detail comes from 1951-52, which the headmistress refers to as the "toxic year," when a particular combination of high-school freshmen triggered a chain of events that resulted in scandal and expulsions. There are also memories of the school in the thirties, when Suzanne Ravenel herself was a student, and her relationship with several of the mothers of the 1951 crop may well have sown the seeds for later discord. The last few chapters suddenly plunge into 2007 and 2008, covering fifty years of lives led in the outside world; these are a relief from the glacial pace of non-events in the main narrative, but they come too late.

So what is it that made 1951-52 so toxic? Surprisingly little. The girls, despite their human teenage flaws, are attractive and interesting, and what they get up to is little more than petty acting out. But, given the cloistered atmosphere that Godwin creates, even small events can have large consequences. Especially given the larger-than-life personality of Suzanne Ravenel. Is she a manipulative tyrant, or a wise (though sometimes deluded) woman in honest search of God? The principal strength of the book is that Godwin does not take sides. I learned a great deal about the religious life from this book, and it is impossible not to respect these women who have so dedicated themselves to service. On the other hand, the unnatural world that they create around them, and that Godwin reproduces in such stultifying detail, seems a powder-keg heated in the smoke of incense, just waiting to blow up. As it eventually does -- but after such a long build-up, I could have done with a larger spark and a more satisfying explosion.

Gail Godwin's latest carefully crafted novel takes a close look at a group of girls matriculating through a Catholic boarding school in the early 1950s. There are no cheap tricks or shocking plot twists; rather, this is a tightly restrained examination of the various manifestations of often incendiary relationships between women: mothers and daughters, teachers and students, and the perhaps most of all, adolescent girls.

The novel masterfully straddles the past and the present; the conceit is that Mother Ravenel, the former headmistress, has chosen to write a memoir about Mount St. Gabriel, the prestigious boarding school located in North Carolina. Her memories bring her back to one pivotal moment: an incident that resulted in the expulsion of two students and her own leave of absence.

Ms. Godwin's mastery of the Catholic religion -- minus the preachiness that is often found in some lesser writers -- is evident. Mother Ravenel and her newest hire, the ethereal ninth grade teacher Mother Malloy, partially choose their vocation because of the desire for exemption. "I didn't want to be like my mother raising seven kids and sipping cheap sherry. I wanted to be like a certain nun I admired, standing in front of a classroom teaching belonging to no one but an invisible spouse," Mother Ravenel confesses.

But is her calling really pure? There are hints early on about her love for her best friend Antonia who also wanted to take vows. That friend ended up marrying and dying early; her identical twin sister Cornelia has never forgiven her. Now Cornelia's own daughter is under her tutelage -- Tildy Stratton, the high-spirited and dyslexic ringleader of her class and her sometime own best friend, Maud Norton, a girl who may be growing up too fast. And Cornelia is setting her daughter up to become the catalyst for her own revenge.

The unfinished desires repeat and echo throughout this book: Mother Ravenel's inability to confront the ramifications of her friendship with Antonia or the poisonous barbs of her own mother, Tildy and Maud's own complicated friendship, the ways that mothers and teachers can mold and influence daughters and students, and the results of unrequited love and unrequited friendships and yearnings.

The book could have been tighter still; my belief is that certain ancillary characters could have been eliminated and the ending seemed a little tacked on. Still, this is an excellent book on the reconciliation of past and present.