Janique Vigier at Bookforum:
OPEN ANY BOOK BY CAROLINE BLACKWOOD and you will encounter the same woman. Articulate, adrift, callous, cosmically self-absorbed. She’s in the middle of her life, a retired actress or model, once striking and sought-after. Her misery has a predatory quality. Decisions made idly and capriciously she now clings to as essential facets of her “character.” She rebels continually against the restraints and privations she inflicts upon herself. She behaves as though she were onstage, thundering dramatic monologues of deceit and self-justification. What’s clearest is her anger: pure, whole, just beneath the surface, like a calcium deposit under the skin.
Blackwood’s women are loaded with rage. And why not? Their marriages are loveless, their husbands shirks, their children ingrates, their mothers domineering, their friends useless, their careers faded. But her anger transcends circumstance; it is existential, the kind breakdown can’t allay and catharsis can’t purge.
more here.
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