THE LAST SANE WOMAN

A flailing young London sculptor obsesses over a cache of letters, the legacy of an artistic forerunner.

Linear thinkers may find themselves frustrated by this prismatic novel centered on a trove of letters housed in the musty Feminist Assembly archive (presumably a fictional analogue of London’s real-life Women’s Library). As the editor of an avant-garde arts journal, the author clearly knows the territory; however, the narrative is needlessly overwrought—a mosaic akin to an artfully shattered and reconstructed pot. The biggest impediment is a plethora of points of view, perversely scrambled—sometimes in the course of a single sentence (the reader must constantly recalibrate). The present-day tale of Nicola Long plays out in the past tense, where her artistic ambition appears permanently stalled. She works at a nursery school and spends her lunch hours lying on a bathroom floor; her boyfriend helpfully suggests hairdressing school. Nicola is obsessed with the letters of Donna Dreeman, who died, presumably by suicide, in the 1980s. Her story surfaces in epistolary excerpts that quickly segue into present-tense scenes. Also accorded her own voice is the letters’ addressee, Susan Baddeley, Donna’s supposedly dull childhood friend, who bridges both eras. There are riches to be found here: exquisitely described physical details (the library’s “fuzzy lemonade light”) and smart takedowns of artsy pretension. Still, the overall message seems to undercut the artist’s mandate: to create something new out of nothingness. A few flights of fancy apart, this is fairly well trodden ground. Sadly for the reader as well as for the protagonists, both artists’ pasts prove singularly joyless, tripwired as they are by self-doubt.

An overly complex structure mars this otherwise astute and timely examination of the challenges facing women artists.