Mavis

by Brenda K. Marshall

For sixty years Mavis Schmidt Holmstead has smoothed every wrinkle, threaded every needle, and cooled every fever in a family of six sisters who grew up on a North Dakota farm. More than their patient, hardworking mother or their hard-drinking, unpredictable father, it was Mavis, the eldest, who was always the parent. Mavis checked their homework, set their hair for dates, and glowed with pride as their babies were born or their books were published. She had the gravitational pull to propel her sisters into adulthood, though she could not have imagined how divergent their lives would turn out to be.
Today Maxine, the second oldest, is a scholar living in Chicago. Judy, vain and restless, goes from one marriage to the next seeking adulation and luxury. Isabelle has found love but has never introduced the woman who has been her longtime lover to her family. Only Janice and Irene stayed in their hometown near Mavis. But Janice's life is drudgery made worse by her brutish husband Norton. And Irene is dead, killed in the fiery crash of a car driven by her drunken husband Jack Carlson.
The whole family blames Jack for Irene's death, and now Jack, too, has been killed, shot in the face at close range with his own rifle.
The confessed murderer is Mavis--widow, mother, grandmother, and head of the family.
The sisters gather around Mavis, not only to support her, but to discover the truth. No one believes Mavis capable of murder. She must be lying, but why? As old rivalries and outgrown roles rend the fragile fabric of family that Mavis has worked so hard to preserve, each sister will have to face responsibility for her own life--although that always seemed to be Mavis's job. The buried secrets and dangerous emotions soon to be revealed will ring more true than Mavis's confession of murder, and the truth will be something that none of them, no matter how resistant, will be able to ignore.
In her wonderful debut novel, Brenda Marshall creates remarkable characters in Mavis and her family, women and men we recognize in an instant, and feel weve known all our lives. Told in graceful prose, in a style both darkly funny and hypnotic, Mavis heralds the arrival of a unique and talented voice in American fiction.

Genres: Fiction

306 pages, Hardcover

First published June 3, 1996

About the author

I was born on a farm in the Red River Valley of eastern North Dakota, and grew up climbing trees, riding my pony and daydreaming under a wide prairie sky. I left North Dakota after college, and have since lived in Colorado, Minnesota, Iowa, Washington, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and for the past fourteen years, Michigan. I have a Ph.D. in English, and teach part-time in the English Department at the University of Michigan.

I have published two novels, MAVIS (Fawcett-Columbine, 1996) and DAKOTA, OR WHAT'S A HEAVEN FOR (North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies, 2010). I also have published a book of scholarship, TEACHING THE POSTMODERN (Routledge, 1992).

My partner and I live in the country near Ann Arbor, with two horses, two dogs, and one cat. When not writing or teaching, I might be trying to improve my nascent woodworking skills, riding horse, working in my garden, reading, exercising at the gym, listening to opera, or planning trips, some of which I actually take. No matter where I am living or what I am doing, I think of myself as a North Dakotan.
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Reviews

[Shay Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Those of you who read my reviews know that I do not give 5 stars lightly. This novel, however, richly deserves them. Before I get into my review, just let me ponder aloud how unlikely it was that I even picked up this book. I found it on a bargain rack at some book store years ago, and it sat on my shelf for ages before I chose to read it. No one at Goodreads.com has even reviewed it, though its publication date is 1996. And yet how beautiful and engaging it turned out to be.

The title character, Mavis, is the eldest of six sisters raised on a farm in North Dakota. As the story begins, the sisters have all reached middle age, and half of them have moved away, but a shocking event brings all of them back home. Six months after their sister Irene dies in a fiery car crash caused by her vicious lout of a drunken husband, someone empties a shotgun into his face on a country road.

Mavis, the strong, no-nonsense, dependable, honest backbone of the family, confesses to the murder, even though no one, not even the investigators, believe she really pulled the trigger. So who did? What is going on here? Well, what is going on in this novel is, surprisingly, much less about a murder mystery than it is about the land, and this family, and the way all of that is tied together forever.

There is an age gap between Mavis and Maxine, the two oldest sisters, and the younger four. Maxine is a college professor in another state, Judy devotes herself to trying to preserve her looks and find ever-younger boyfriends, Janice is the quiet sister who works 9 to 5 locally, and Irene and Isabelle are the youngest, and twins. Isabelle lives in California, with her lesbian partner of nine years. She has never brought Linda home to North Dakota, but now she does. I hadn't realized there would be any gay storyline in this novel at all so I was stoked to find two of my tribe as characters.

Someone said, about Russian author Ivan Turgenev, that each of his stories is like a month in the country. After reading "Mavis", I felt I'd spent a long rewarding time in North Dakota (!) with characters who were real, and human, and whose problems mattered to me. Despite their differences, in age, in circumstance, in sexuality, and even in how they remembered their childhoods, these women all shared something vital, and unbreakable, that I loved being able to be part of as I read this book. Highly recommended.

[Brenda · Rating 4 out of 5]

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