In Another Country

by Susan Kenney

Sara, a woman whose life has been marked by tragedy--her father's death, her mother's madness, and her husband's illness--finds new strength and understanding in her roles as daughter, wife, and mother

Genres: Fiction, Novels

176 pages, Paperback

First published July 2, 1984

Reviews

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

The strength of this first collection of stories and the amount of people in high critical perches praising it, would have led you to believe that Kenney went on to a distinguished career as a writer, racking up the plaudits and the prizes. The truth is a bit quieter, and that's almost entirely fitting. This book is filled with a number of stories that trade heavily on just that quiet twist, the silence of the blade going in, cold as ice, as natural as a drink of water.

Told by the same character, featuring the same cast of characters, this is a story collection that could be a novel if it were a novel told in snapshots. It's most obvious literary relative is Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women in that it is all about family dynamic as a character grows and is shaped by her relationship to her mother and the ever-present ghost of her father who dies early in her life.

But each story has an almost frightening scene of intensity that could be completely normal but that throbs with a menace and threat of the unknowable what-next.

In one remarkable scene, the narrator Sara has brought her two kids to visit her mother. Her mother has been off and on with medication for bipolar disorder among other things and the relationship between daughter and mother is not great. Late in the week of their visit, Sara finds her daughter Linnie crying and when she asks why, Linnie relates how "Grandma slapped me in the face...for no reason" When Sara confronts her mother about this, her mother's account is quite different: "She came up and started punching me in the stomach. I tapped her lightly across the face. It was a reflex, automatic. Self defense."

What follows:

I sit down at the table with David [Sara's other child], who looks at me curiously.
My mother put the potatoes in a pot on the stove, starts past me. “I’ll be right back,” she says. “I just have to go to the bathroom.”

I hear her go upstairs. Then David asked me to read him some of the funnies. It’s a while before I realized that my mother has not come right back. I hear the bed creaking upstairs in the room Linnie and I share. I get up from the table and go quickly, silently up the stairs and when I reach the doorway of our room my mother is sitting on the bed, holding Linnie’s arms, struggling with her, shaking and pushing her, pinning her to the bed. Lenny’s eyes are fixed on her face, and they are wild and panicky with speechless, uncomprehending terror. My mother is saying quietly, “I just want to wrestle with you, get rid of some of that excess energy, show you a little self-defense. Come on, push me away, try to push me away.” Her voice sounds gentle, but I can’t see her face, and Linnie can, and she’s afraid. Then Linnie catches side of me and she takes a huge sobbing desperate breath; her eyes flood with relief. In one step I reach the bed, push my mother out of the way, and snatch Linnie up in my arms, safe. She winds her arms and legs around me and buries her head in my shoulder with a trembling sigh, and I walk out of the room with her.

It's there, just at the threshold of a threat. Is her mother just slightly misguided and doesn't know how to relate to children or have a warped idea of how to behave around children? Or is there a danger here? The scene trembles on the edge and there is no actual confrontation, because what has happened? The slap and the fright to be sure, but why did any of this happen?

The stories are full of such quiet moments and such menace hidden in an embrace. The relationships are fraught and there is a tension that cuts through the stories separate even from the main events that transpire.

It is the last story that really manages this unsettling horror of domestic suburban familial life, the aptly titled "The Death of the Dog and Other Rescues" and it swims around Sara's husband's cancer returning and what happens with a family pet. It's all telegraphed in the title but it doesn't even remotely play out the way you think it will. This story yanks the rug out from under you, and the rug under that rug, and the rug under that rug until it's final pull and with the last three words of the story what yawns beneath is the chasm of regret and sorrow under all things. I read those last three words and felt like I'd been slugged in the stomach with a block of ice.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

At the age of twelve, Sara Boyd loses her forty-year-old father. For herself and her younger brother and sister, his death is their first brush with tragedy. This is an event which will stay with them for the rest of their lives, and his loss will ultimately affect all of their future relationships in one way or another.

As an adult, Sara realizes that her father's early death is actually the catalyst for her mother's frequent bouts of madness; and in turn, each of these manic episodes increasingly disturb Sara's own life - unduly straining both her marriage and family. When her husband subsequently becomes seriously ill, Sara draws on her past experiences to find the renewed strength to carry on.

I enjoyed reading this book very much; I found it to be a very poignant, well-told story. This book has been described as six interrelated short stories, but I think it would be far more accurate to describe them as six short vignettes in Sara's life. Each vignette is gut-wrenching in its own way, but doesn't necessarily seem to me to be excessively maudlin. I give this book an A+! and would be very interested to read the sequel, Sailing, if at all possible.

[Marcus Roberson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intertwined stories that yield a complete story. Loss and how loss looks from the inside. If you rent moved by this book, you can't be moved.

[Arnie Kahn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this hiding on a bookshelf. I bought it used about 30 years ago. It's a set of 6 short stories that make up a short novel, told from the perspective a girl, 11 and 12 in the first 2 stories, an adult in the last 4. The first 3 stories are incredible, with the 3rd winning the 1982 O. Henry Award for best short story of the year. All the stories deal with her relationship with family members. I'd have given this 5 stars on each of the first 3 stories, but only 3 stars for the last three stories. It's a fine book.

[Steph · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were some things about this book that I loved. The characters of the mother and father were both interesting to me - the father because the girl loved him so much - the mother because of her vulnerability. I like how Kenney was able to carry the theme of loss through all the vignettes. So many different kinds of loss. Describing separation from people as being in another country is a lovely notion. Perhaps people who believe in Heaven might hold the hope of someday joining a lost loved one in another country. That is such a beautiful notion. I wish I felt it.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book I own, one I read years ago. It's a collection of linked stories that feel almost autobiographical, they come together so vividly. The stories center around loss in many of its forms, and there were times I felt as though it was too much of a downer. But the narrator's voice is tough or maybe resilient is the word. And my own story of growing up is very much a story of loss, so the stories felt resonant.

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this series of six interconnected short stories about death and dying years ago. The theme consists of the protagonist’s memories of her father who died when she was young and how to go on living when someone you love dies. The book is no longer in print.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

A woman recalls tragedies (death of her father, her mother's mental illness, and her husband's illness.)

[Raghad Khamees · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have never read a novel as boring as this one