| Vol. I No. II |
December
1999
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The
Danforth Review
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The Plight of Happy People in an Ordinary World Everyone has seen a movie that felt like a play. Here is a novel that feels like a play. Think Beckett: a stage, a tree. In the case of Natalee Caple's followup to her stunning debut (reviewed in DR 1.1), the settings are similarly sparce: a bakery, a barren apartment, a suburban kitchen and a few other nondescript locales. The focus here is on action, dialogue and narrative soliloquay. The novel mines the inner lives of two teenage girls who have been left in charge of the family bakery as they wade into love and sex for the first time, complete with the nervous shocks that accompany those experiences. Love is not sentimentalized. Sex is not glorified or said to be oppressive. Rather, the characters' encounters with their most powerful inner emotions are revealed as ambigous, painful and startlingly real. The plot is thin and a bit rocky at times. Caple's spare writing style is slightly uneven, as the story drifts between something approaching myth and a earth-bound rootiness. The range is wide, the treatment a little wobbly. Nonetheless, The Plight of Happy People is a remarkable first novel from a young woman whose talent is only just beginning to deliver.
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THE DANFORTH REVIEW IS EDITED BY MICHAEL BRYSON.