Cecily's Reviews > Foster

Secrets and shame

Adult emotions can be hard to fathom when you’re a young child, especially if the reasons are hidden from you. Some families explicitly have secrets, others claim to have none.

“There are no secrets in this house… Where there’s a secret… there’s shame.”
When adults keep secrets from their children, they usually say, even to themselves, that it’s to protect the children. Often, it’s to hide the parents’ shame.

Sometimes secrets are by omission:
“You don't ever have to say anything… Many's the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.”

We’re told it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. I’m not sure that’s true of romantic love, let alone any other sort of love. What about mild poverty and neglect: is it better for a child to stay in the familiar family home, with parents and siblings, or to have a taste of something better? When the story stops, everyone has had glimpses of ease and happiness, but I think they are all sadder as a result. Was it worth it?


Image: Illustration of the girl running, by Simon Pemberton, for the original short story in The New Yorker (Source)

Ireland now, back then

This novella is told with the breezy immediacy of the first-person present tense. It’s about a little girl being sent to spend the summer with relatives she’s never met. It’s set in a small town in SE Ireland, probably around the 1980s. The town is real and named; the child is nameless and seems to be about seven or eight. Her mother is pregnant with yet another child they can’t afford, but this girl is the only one sent away. She doesn’t know how long for, or why, though her father jokes about the expense of her appetite. Back-to-front Irish syntax in the dialogue roots it in the Emerald Isle.
“It’s only missing her I’ll be when she is gone.”

Time to care

“This is a different type of house. Here there is room, and time to think. There may even be money to spare.”
The Kinsellas are not wealthy, but they have wondrous things like a washing machine, freezer, vacuum cleaner, and a deep bath filled with hot water. There are chores, but fewer and less pressured than back home; there is time and space to teach her to do things properly. They are kind, gentle, and generous, and there are tender and understated scenes with the Kinsellas separately and together.

Such kindness exposes her divided loyalties: when Kinsella holds her hand, she realises her own father has never done so.
“My father has never once held my hand, and some part of me wants Kinsella to let me go so I won't have to feel this.”
The girl realises money doesn’t buy happiness, despite the joyful extravagance of being given a pound to spend in a seaside town. She sees the shadow of sadness in the Kinsellas long before she has any understanding of its cause.


Image: Silhouette of the girl and Mrs Kinsella in a field, from the film. (Source)

Who’s talking?

“I feel at such a loss for words, but this is a new place, and new words are needed.”
The bewilderment, gratitude, and blossoming of the girl is delightfully, plausibly portrayed. But there is an inherent problem: how much is the narrator’s adult hindsight skewing her analysis? For example, when she thinks of her sisters throwing clay against the gable wall, which will turn to mud in the rain, she muses:
“Everything changes into something else, turns into some version of what it was before.”
Her parents are not given to that sort of abstract talk.

Quotes

• “This way men have of not talking: they like to kick a divot out of the grass with a boot heel, to slap the roof of a car before it takes off, to spit, to sit with their legs wide apart, as though they do not care.”

• “In a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be.”

• “He is given to lying about things that would be nice, if true.”

• “God help you child. If you were mine, I'd never leave you in a house with strangers.”

See also

• This book is an expansion of a much shorter story in The New Yorker. You can read that version HERE.

• After reading, I watched the film. Inevitably, there are a few things you won't know or might not notice if you haven't read the book, but I thought it really good in its own right, and as an adaptation. It’s mostly in Irish, is called An Cailín Ciúin or The Quiet Girl, and has been nominated for Best International Feature Film at next week’s Oscars. It is explicitly set in 1981 with a 10-year old girl and filmed in the sort of muted tones Wes Anderson uses. There are lingering shots of dimly-lit interiors, the landscape, and the farm, with little need for words. Dialogue is sparse, and mostly taken directly from the book. See imdb.

By chance, this was my third consecutive book about children being sent away. It made for interesting comparisons, as the three are very different:

• Being sent to single-sex boarding school aged 11. I wrote about my experience, in lieu of a review of Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s Terms & Conditions, HERE.

• A 16-year old is sent to a mental institution for more than 60 years, for trivial and wrong reasons. It’s fiction that is close to many real cases, and, remarkably, it’s not a depressing book. Maggie O’Farrell’s The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, which I reviewed HERE.