I read about The Folded World, by Amity Gaige, in Entertainment Weekly. Here is the review:
Bookworm Alice and idealistic Charlie fall in love, marry, and in short order, they’re the parents of twins, living on Charlie’s meager salary as a psychiatric social worker. In The Folded World, her exquisitely written second novel, Amity Gaige explores the ups and downs of a fragile, mostly joyful young relationship: Charlie’s overcommitment to his mentally ill clients; Alice’s fleeting attraction to a bookstore clerk; their infant daughter’s first, tentative steps. The bitterness and disillusion of marriage have been thoroughly plumbed in contemporary fiction; Gaige is one of the rare novelists who is more interested in its potential for happiness and grace. A-
In researching this post, I just learned that Amity Gaige is a fellow Brown alum. Very exciting! Here are some excerpts from a Providence Journal review (the full review is here):
The Folded World is an artfully-rendered portrait of Charlie and his wife, a meditation on love, relationships and responsibility, and an exploration of what exactly constitutes the dividing line between sanity and madness. … Gaige was a playwright before she was a novelist, and that experience is in evidence with the precision of the language and the pace of the story. But the beauty of her prose and her joy in wordsmithing suggest that The Folded World might just as readily have been written by a poet.
The Curled Up With A Good Book blog has an interview with Amity Gaige here, and a review here. The blog says this about the book: "Gaige writes of these strange, private worlds so intricately folded, her characters constantly challenged in their perception of happiness. The novel is about the tangle of invisible threads that we weave throughout our existence, ‘connected and vibrating, alive with a billion transmissions.’"
Here’s what I think: this book doesn’t look dark enough for me. I need some edge, some tragedy and some sarcasm. This looks too uplifting for me.
Has anyone out there read it?