Book Review: Sistering, by Jennifer Quist

Jennifer Quist. Sistering. Linda Leith Publishing, 2015.
Reviewed by Shelah Miner.
In her second novel, Sistering, Canadian author Jennifer Quist draws on her personal expertise as the oldest of five sisters in a book that is as much about the ways that a group of sisters see themselves and come together as a family unit as it is about the accidental death at the heart of the plot.
Quist’s first novel, Love Letters of the Angels of Death (2013) was serious and poetic. It won the Alberta Lieutenant Governor’s Emerging Artist Award, was long-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and was a finalist for a Whitney Award. The Montreal Review of Books, said, “This book is that rarest of literary portrayals, the story of a genuinely happy marriage. . . . This radical empathy is one of the book’s joys.” It told the story of a young couple and their experiences with the deaths of people they love. While neither novel is overtly Mormon, the main characters in Love Letters display signs that tip off their religion to an LDS audience. The same is not true of Sistering, where questions of faith and afterlife take a back seat to what is happening in the here and now.
Despite differences in tone, the two novels share the characteristic of vibrant domesticity tinged with a lurking spectre of death. Sistering opens in a hospital, where the sisters gather for a birth, but on the very first page, Suzanne, the book’s protagonist, considers death, as she watches her sister take an exaggerated hop over the threshold of the elevator “over the space where a black, empty crack drops four stories that might as well be oblivion beneath us.” One sister is a mortician who “devastates devastation every day. Death has a thousand yellow-grey faces she can know, features for her to set in peaceful poses. My sister takes death by its hands, lifts it, turns it, drains it, and fills it.” Another of the five is an ICU nurse who has “seen death countless times in a hospital, as a professional. In intensive care units like mine, rolling out a green sterile carpet for death to strut in on is what we do. I’ve seen death happen, watched it dawning over everything.” These characterizations make it not too surprising when a death occurs. Quist has spent the last hundred pages subtly preparing the reader with lines like, “This is me—the eyes of the family, the watcher, the haunter, the ghost that will see everything but probably won’t do anything.”
Sistering is narrated by each of the five sisters, in alternating chapters, until the final chapter, which is narrated by all of the sisters in a collective voice. While Quist clearly identifies who the narrator is at the beginning of each chapter, she does such a nice job differentiating their characters that once we’ve heard from each sister once or twice, the tags become superfluous. While each sister has her own preoccupations and side stories, there’s a forward momentum to the narration. One sister picks up right where the other leaves off. And while it’s not immediately clear which story will be the central one (Meaghan’s upcoming marriage? Tina’s cheating husband?), I enjoyed the time Quist takes to let us get to know each character. I began to worry by page 98, when no clear conflict had emerged. Quist delivered two pages later, when the story takes a turn, with death coming out from his lurking around the edges. When perfect Suzanne’s perfect mother-in-law, May, meets her end in a purely accidental way (falling down the stairs), Suzanne reacts by hiding the body and pretending it never happened, changing the nature of the story from a character study to a caper.
One could empathize with Suzanne briefly losing her mind. May’s death is so unexpected, and Suzanne has spent the first hundred pages telling the audience how she is the perfect daughter-in-law, so it seems strangely logical that Suzanne might not want to sully that perfection with something as sordid as having May’s death on her hands (or at least on her stairs). This death is where the novel becomes, as the publisher called it, a black comedy. Suzanne’s reaction feels so absurd, and all of the adults who get drawn in aid and abet her almost without question. The ridiculousness of the situation creates a disconnect with the reader, but ultimately the sisters’ cooperation reinforces the idea that the sisterhood is where the primary and most meaningful relationship is.
One of Quist’s greatest challenges here is creating five fully-developed sisters, which seems to be what the title demands. Quist acknowledges how easy it would be to reduce her characters into caricatures when Suzanne says, “Poll any large family and they’ll agree there can only be one sister recognized as the pretty one, or the smart one, or the crazy one. And there can only be one perfect sister. Our perfect sister has to be me.” Each sister then spends much of the novel trying to define her own character.
Quist spends so much time developing the characters of the five sisters that there’s not much room for the other people who inhabit the book. The husbands can all be reduced to one or two words: “police officer, charlatan dentist, wealthy philanderer, pot-smoking yogi.” Meaghan, the only unmarried sister, meets her eventual partner and tries to characterize him. “You can’t be solid cliché; It’d be way too easy if you were one of those video game store clerk tropes.” It turns out that he fits five of the six tropes she names.
If the husbands are mere clichés, the parents and children are just shadows. Their father is a long-haul trucker who is rarely in town, and their mother “doesn’t do anything she doesn’t want to do anymore.” Tina describes her as a “bottle propper” while Suzanne says, “When our mum . . . comes across town to visit my house, she’s greeted as an honoured guest and met with freshly cleaned bathrooms, tense grandchildren, and the best food I can cook.”
Quist’s treatment of the large family in Sistering reminds me quite a lot of Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House (2015). Flournoy’s novel, a finalist for the National Book Award, is about a family with thirteen children, but its central focus is on just two of the children. The others only flit in and out of the story. While Quist attempts to give all five sisters equal billing, Sistering is really Suzanne’s story, or maybe Suzanne and Meaghan’s story, much in the way that Pride and Prejudice is Lizzie’s story, or maybe Lizzie and Jane’s story. Suzanne and Meaghan are the only characters who change as the narrative unfolds. Suzanne progresses from perfection to despair to a kind of acceptance: “I admit it. Hiding May’s death has saved nothing for me. I failed her, defiled her, destroyed the final traces of the faith she once had in my perfection—the faith that made perfection viable and real for me. It’s over. . . . The smoke from May’s pyre is the only thing left inside me, wafting through the vessels where my blood used to flow.” Suzanne’s strong voice opens and closes the story, and is at the heart of its central conflict.
One of the biggest surprises of Sistering is its description of how a group of women navigate their relationships with each other. Early in the novel, they seem to navigate a careful dance: “Much of the peacekeeping in our family is no more than maintaining pace and momentum. No one stops for too long on anything awful. We propel ourselves forward with steady revolutions of patience and forgiveness, around and around, word by word. If we coast too far, we’ll fall to the ground.” Later, gathered around their mother’s bedside, all five of the sisters reveal that they’ve all felt like outsiders. This admission seems to bring them closer, to make it safe for one sister to reveal her abortion and another her decision to hide the bones of her mother-in-law in the backyard barbecue. As Tina says, “No one has any secrets—not for real and not for long.”
Sisterhood trumping all—husbands, children, even criminal activities—is the lasting message of Sistering. The plot, entertaining as it can be, sometimes feels as an artificial device for Quist and her audience to enjoy seeing the relationship between the five sisters unfold.