Book Reviews

Tea

Algonquin Books, 336 pp., $21.95

A young girl waits, a cup of tea cooling in the next room, for her mother. A young woman’s hand cups another woman’s breast. An imagined string of lustrous, perfect pearls — the pearls her mother might have given her if she had not swallowed several handfuls of pills instead — dangles in the mind of a woman sitting in a New York diner.

Isabel Gold is the woman sitting in the diner on her 22nd birthday, remembering the mother who committed suicide 14 years ago. It’s history, that abrupt leavetaking, but it’s Isabel’s history, through which she repetitively searches in Tea, Stacey D’Erasmo’s first novel. D’Erasmo has written a lovely but flawed story about understanding what you can’t change, and about making peace with what you can’t understand.

D’Erasmo, a journalist and past holder of the Stegner Fellowship in Fiction, writes with striking economy. Tea tells Isabel’s story in three sections, each one separated by roughly eight years. Isabel’s childhood, her adolescence and sexual awakening, and the culmination of her search for her mother are presented like acts in a play. The spareness of this plot structure echoes the simplicity of her writing. D’Erasmo uses solid words — fleshy, crayons, downward, paleness — and straightforward sentences that begin and end with a gentle decisiveness.

These are sturdy building materials which D’Erasmo uses to excellent effect. Tea, however, has the feeling of a house lavishly decorated but only partially finished. While Isabel is as full and intriguing a character as you could hope for, many of the characters around her are not. Her remaining family, especially, seems opaque. Isabel’s driven father, who compulsively orders his life with to-do lists, and her sister, who loves dogs obsessively, have tics instead of personalities. D’Erasmo hints at conflicts, but these remain unexplored.

The first two sections of the book are rich, the characters detailed. D’Erasmo writes vibrantly, showing a spot-on ear and eye for adolescent dialogue and obsession. But the third section of the story seems somewhat listless. Even Isabel herself appears to have become wan, as if tired of the tight focus that D’Erasmo keeps upon her throughout the book. The entire plot seems hung upon this one character’s shoulders, and as interesting as Isabel is, it is too much for her, not enough for us.

While still beautifully written, the story loses steam here, just short of its hoped-for destination. Tea‘s minimalist plot leaves some crucial questions unanswered. Was Cassie, Isabel’s mother, deliberately cruel, or was she inexplicably generous? What made her, as Isabel muses, “a woman so hungry she couldn’t eat, so tired she couldn’t sleep, so lonely she couldn’t speak?” Perhaps it would be too easy an ending to provide Isabel with complete comprehension of Cassie. We never expect to fully know people, even those we love most, and especially those who left before they could even be properly introduced.

But D’Erasmo’s ending feels somehow incomplete. Certainly the final pages, in which Isabel cleans out her abandoned apartment and begins to select the belongings worth keeping, suggest a woman in the act of reconciliation. But there’s not much here to make this idea more than a supposition. In the end, while D’Erasmo’s finely crafted images and sleek sentences may satisfy aesthetically, as a story Tea is mostly scrumptious appetizer and not enough entree.

This article appears in February 4 • 2000.