Pinkerton's Sister - Softcover

Rushforth, Peter

2.91

112 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0156031868 ISBN 13: 9780156031868

Publisher: Mariner Books, 2006

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Trapped in a suffocating life of convention and party chatter, Alice Pinkerton has turned to the liberating worlds she finds in literature. Like a character from one of her favorite novels, Alice holds a biting, eccentric, but expansive view of life; she wears only white, has a stutter, and knows her peers call her a madwoman in the attic. Various period cures-hydrotherapy, hypnotherapy, electrotherapy, a sanitarium-fail to turn this thirty-two-year-old, highly imaginative, caustically funny woman into one of the silly damsels of 1903's New York Society. Hauntingly, beneath all this lies a dark family secret.

Pinkerton's Sister is a novel for readers, who will thrill to recognize a kindred in Alice's references to our most beloved literary characters: Jo March, Jane Eyre, Leo Bloom, and Hester Prynne, among many others, grace these pages. This intertextual, playful work certainly qualifies as "the ultimate book-geek's guilty pleasure" (Creative Loafing Atlanta).

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Review:

Within the bounds of realism, a more fantastic or original novel than Peter Rushforth's Pinkerton's Sister would be hard to imagine. Alice Pinkerton is a New York spinster of 1905, raised to join the middle-class matrons in her respectable, status-conscious neighborhood, but cursed from childhood with the gift of seeing through humbug. Her ecstatic immersion in English literature has only made things worse, so that by the age of 30, she is too clever, quirky, and dark-mustached to be anything but an object of scorn in the eyes of her peers. When not submitting to her psychologist's latest enthusiasms (she suffers his passing fancies for phrenology, massage, hot water immersion, cold water immersion, dream interpretation, cloud reading, and hypnosis) Alice occupies herself with word games and arabesques, indulging in lengthy fantasies of gender-reversal, spontaneous ballet, and other embarrassments for the doctors, clergymen, merchants, and matrons who patrol the social boundaries that keep bluestockings like Alice locked away as "madwomen," rather than writing and selling books.

There's very little in the way of plot in Rushforth's second novel (the first, Kindergarten, appeared to acclaim about 25 years ago), except for the piecemeal recollection of her childhood friendship with a black servant named Annie. Not much older than Alice herself, Annie was a worthy playmate who tried to protect Alice from her father and the never-spelled-out abuses he and a friend inflicted on them both. Alice's hatred of her father burns even hotter than her love of Annie, and she remains convinced he was responsible for Annie�s disappearance and probable death. These passions--and a handful of other childhood memories--hold together an otherwise loose, disorderly sequence of satirical jokes and verbal flourishes and sometimes overly long frolics. Don't expect the rustling skirts and repressed emotions of a Merchant Ivory film. Pinkerton's Sister reads like an absinthe-fueled, all-night collaboration between Edith Wharton, Angela Carter, and Monty Python. --Regina Marler

From the Back Cover:

For Alice Pinkerton, trapped in a suffocating life of convention and party chatter, 1903 New York Society is enough to make a woman mad?or at least a madwoman in the attic. So Alice escapes through the looking glass of literature, finding companionship and inspiration in Shakespeare, Wilde, Hawthorne, Stevenson, Poe, Austen, and the rest of the literary pantheon of her day. Like a character from one of her favorite novels, Alice holds a biting, eccentric, but expansive view of life, and through it all provides a tremendous portrait of her society?at once heartbreaking and wildly funny, intelligent and dazzling in its range.
Pinkerton's Sister is a true celebration of the imagination and a mesmerizing example of the saving power of fiction. Most of all, it is the quintessential novel for readers.

"Something of a cross between Harriet the Spy and Jane Eyre? Rushforth weaves Alice's often fastastical musings together with bits of the classics, popular novels, doggerel, and even advertisements for dentures and corsets. An epic inquiry into literature's role as an engine of interior life." -- The New Yorker

"Ambitious, intricate, moving." -- A.S. Byatt

"A gorgeous conundrum, the result of a lifetime of close reading-- and some 25 years of close writing." -- San Francisco Chronicle

"Pinkerton's Sister is a work of rare beauty and (rarer still!) genuine wit." -- The Believer
Peter Rushforth is also the author of KINDERGARTEN, which was published to much acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. A schoolteacher, he lived in North Yorkshire, England.

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