Sometimes the structure of a novel so suits its content, so fully allows characters to inhabit the page, that it’s hard to imagine any other arrangement. So it is with Susan Conley’s twisty, absorbing new novel, with its brief urgent chapters that read like dispatches from near and far ... Readers may come away from this book marveling at the small miracle they’ve just witnessed – this feisty blur of a woman, caught in the grip of her many demons, hellbent on pushing everyone, and everything, away. Still, she – and her marriage – manage to emerge, like the pieces of a broken self, reassembled into a recognizable whole. Elsey is that rare creation that evokes real life, defies predictability and disarms us at every turn. Conley has taken a jittery pile of loose ends and made a thing of beauty.
This is rather a thin story in a thin book, yet it tells an uplifting tale ... Much of the book is also a bit of a ramble in the hills with long digressions ... Yes, it’s quite a nicely baked short yarn, rather than a novel, but written a bit like a soufflé, rising in the oven but when eaten there isn’t that much substance.
That reviewers have praised the Beijing setting as exotic may say more about the reviewers than the book. Those familiar with China and Hong Kong might feel the author has tossed in every possible controversy: the plight of factory workers, abortion-as-birth control, dissident artists, disappeared activists, and kidnapped Hong Kong booksellers. I wonder if the story would have read more fluidly without some of these editorial asides.
As Elsey sorts through the memories of the yoga retreat and the year following, as well as older hurts and losses, Conley's slim novel illustrates the power of storytelling as a process for healing ... What entices and endures here is the voice: dreamy, meditative, hypnotic, and very real.
Probing questions about how to balance motherhood, a career, marriage, and a drinking problem resonate throughout Conley’s excellent novel ... Conley hits the mark on a story line that feels both high-stakes and fine-tuned. But it’s the raw desperation of Elsey’s inner dialogue that elevates the novel, making for an honest and astute depiction of the human psyche.
