Blue Sisters is about four sisters–except Nicky, the youngest, is dead, and Avery (the eldest organised lawyer one), Lucky (the beautiful model and self-destructive drug-addled party girl), and Bonnie (the sporty one), are flailing, a year on. There is some nuance here–Avery is a former heroin addict about to blow her perfect marriage and house in Hampstead Heath apart; Lucky plays guitar. Bonnie, most intriguingly, is a boxer, and Mellors’s descriptions of her physicality are some of the best passages in the novel:
Your knuckles, said Pavel, tapping her hands and pointing up. Always to the sky. Now tuck elbows.
He instructed her to balance her weight equally between her front and back foot, then check her stance in the mirror. She could not know it at the time, but he was giving her a more useful lesson on gravity and the body than she had ever learned in school. When she was set up, he pushed her shoulder with his finger again. She didn’t budge. He circled her, nudging from different angles but, with her feet planted as he’d shown her, Bonnie could not be tipped. Pavel crossed his arms and nodded.
Now, you are solid.
Bonnie looked over at her sister in delight. She had found, for the first time in her life, her feet. (38)
I don’t even like boxing, but this feels embodied, real. I liked this book; I didn’t love it. Mellors loves a simile a little too much for my personal taste: “They were sitting near the playground, the sharp cries of the children lobbed like shining arrows toward the bench where they sat” (318)–this is the kind of thing where your mileage may vary, but for me it diffused the intensity of the encounters and emotion and atmosphere rather than enhancing it. The phrasing is also a little early Taylor Swift sometimes (and I love Taylor Swift, this isn’t a knock on Taylor Swift, but I think the novel form has space for more): “She was back in New York. City of sirens, city of secrets, city of sisters….She was home, the only one she knew, not because she’d always lived in it, but because it always lived in her” (105).
But what of the actual story? As one blurb on the back observes, this is a “contemporary Little Women“, though I can see this being said about any story about four sisters. I don’t know. Nicky’s death has left a void–how to come to terms with that? How to look backwards and move forwards at the same time? This is a worthy and age-old question for literature to ask, and Blue Sisters sometimes comes close to etching some sort of truth across its smoothly filtered surface of sentimentality. There’s never any real doubt about how things will end here. It’s far too aesthetic for that.