Family dynamics: Divorce, custody and a Maine coast island battlefield

“BRIDE ISLAND,” by Alexandra Enders, Plume, 2007, 276 pages.

In a “Note to Booksellers” in a review copy of Alexandra Enders’ first novel, her editor states that “there is an evergreen audience for this type of paperback women’s fiction.” Plume, a member of Penguin Group, is counting on that audience’s hunger for fiction dealing with family and home.

It would be a shame if potential readers were discouraged from reading “Bride Island,” however, if booksellers relegate it to the chick lit shelf and if publicists continue to include it in a category of novels whose characters are one-dimensional (and that dimension Twenty-first Century Saint), whose plots are predictable, and whose suspense never rises above When Will They Do It?

Because Enders has written a book far more complicated than any label will describe.

For one thing, the narrator is no Goody Penny Loafers. Polly is a recovering alcoholic, ever tempted to drink; she relinquished custody of her only child, her daughter, Monroe, when she felt unable to care for her, and sees her only for a brief time in the summer.

Then there’s Polly’s family: her often drunk mother and stepfather; her charming wastrel brother, her sister and conniving brother-in-law. The fourth sibling, Colin, who drowned many years before when all the children were young, haunts Polly, Bride Island, and the entire novel.

The island of the title, somewhere off mid-coast Maine, haunts the novel as well. The chapters that are set there, although few, are written in the present tense – a good choice to indicate how Bride Island informs the lives of its owners, Polly’s mother and stepfather. Her beloved refuge, the place she returns to every year with Monroe, the one stable center of her life – and a sanctuary threatened by family dynamics and her own thorny character.

The novel begins when Polly has already established a pattern that sabotages her every good instinct. We see her alienate her family and her ex-husband (and custodian of their daughter); flirt with an ex-lover, now married; have a one-night stand with an old friend – also married (who chivalrously says that Polly’s ex-husband “‘told me once that you’d sleep with anyone who moved'”). She recounts for the reader her affairs, her addiction, and her single-minded determination to have Bride Island for her own: “I didn’t care what I had to do to keep it, didn’t care what happened to my family relationships. I would gladly sacrifice them. None of those relationships meant that much to me, after all. None of them gratified me the way the island did.”

Having made a life for herself in a town Enders calls Rockhaven (bearing more than a passing resemblance to Rockland), Polly decides to try and get her daughter back at the same time she fights to own Bride Island. Her quest forms the backbone of the plot.

Although Polly’s history is revealed slowly, Enders gets the reader involved immediately in the tangled dynamics of Polly’s family. These are not the Cleavers, and they don’t always wish each other well. Conflicting desires for the fate of Bride Island, as well as conflicting versions of the past, pit parents and siblings against one another. Polly’s path is strewn not only with problems of her own making, but also with pitfalls dug by those closest to her. The arguments that rage over the best use of the island, over possibilities for development of this pristine environment, should ring true to every Maine resident-and especially those who live in areas threatened by rapid change.

Enders constructs a taut plot, controlling her characters and conflicts nicely. She also makes good use of myth (the Demeter/Persephone myth is especially effective), legend, and the stories that Polly makes up for Monroe. One of them involves bravery, and we quickly see that Polly’s own need for courage is a major theme in the novel, as she confronts her addiction, her history, her resentment and anger. The resolution, never entirely assured, has the satisfying ring of truth to it.

Polly’s position at the end of the novel will resonate with many parents, both men and women, who have experienced divorce and problems arising out of child custody. To call it “women’s fiction” is to deny the experience of one half of every divorced couple.