Ms. Hen reviews SHELTER IN PLACE

Shelter in Place

Alexander Maksik

Europa Editions           

2016

Ms. Hen read about the best books of last year, and this was on the list, so she decided to read it. She loves reading novels about mental illness, since that is what she usually writes about. She wants to see what is out there in the same category, but she thinks this novel is in a category of its own.

This novel is about Joseph March, a young man who has just graduated from college, whose mother has beaten a stranger to death with a hammer because she saw him hitting his wife. Joe meets a woman during the summer before his mother became a murderer. Joe starts drowning in his mind: he believes there is a bird inside him trapped in tar, and his mother has always been a little off kilter.

Joe’s father moves to the prison town where his wife is incarcerated, and rents a house and makes a life for himself. Joe follows and his girlfriend, Tess, eventually comes to join Joe in the town. Anne-Mare, his mother, becomes a cult hero for abused women; people write to her to tell her of their own problems, and want to know if they should kill their husbands and perpetrators.

The style of this novel is startlingly beautiful. The words are crisp and dance on the page. Ms. Hen does not remember the last time she read such an electrically written book. Most of the time, Ms. Hen takes her time when she reads a novel, but she flew through this one, because the writing is so liquid, and also because she wanted to know what happened.

SHELTER IN PLACE is written in a nonlinear fashion, bouncing between the early nineties when Joe is in his twenties, to the present day, with Joe in his forties. The reader keeps getting drawn back to the time in the nineties when Joe is young, and the characters have ideas and principles and live on the edge.

Ms. Hen thinks that this novel is strange, since it is about mental illness, but it never mentions the name of the illness the characters have. Ms. Hen wondered why Joe never sought treatment for his affliction, which on the inside flap of the novel says is bipolar disorder. Ms. Hen thinks the author did not want Joe or his mother to seek a doctor for their illness because that would make a boring novel. But Ms. Hen felt sorry for the characters. She knows they’re not real people, but she doesn’t think they should suffer through mental illness and not get help. She knows that many people do not receive medical treatment for conditions they have, and not everyone has a support system, but she thinks that life is better for people when they do seek help.

Ms. Hen couldn’t find any chickens or hens in this novel, but it didn’t matter, because the novel was so ecstatically written that she forgives it, and thanks it for having been written. She just wishes that people, fictional and otherwise, would get help for their mental illnesses, even if it would make a dull novel, and some people would think, an uninspired world. A world full of healthy people is one that would please Ms. Hen, because she wants everyone to learn to swim and hold their heads above water.