Sights Unseen

by Kaye Gibbons Narrated by Kate Fleming

Overview

The bestselling author of Charms for the Easy Life reads "her best novel since Ellen Foster."

Kaye Gibbons' award-winning novels of Southern family life have won rave reviews coast to coast. Now, she tells the "story of family dislocation and crisis in restrained prose of unflinching clarity, with a honing eye for the small domestic details that conjure a time, place and emotional atmosphere." (Publishers Weekly)

To the people of Bend of the River Road, Maggie Barnes is "the Barnes woman with all the problems." To her family, she is the unpredictable wife, elusive mother, and adored daughter-in-law, and to her maid, Pearl, she is the mistress who must be cared for like a child.

Between the suicidal lows and delirious highs, young Hattie Barnes struggles to find a place in her mother's heart. She observes her mother's vain attempts at normalcy, and then watches as she is driven off to the hospital psychiatric ward. Only later will Hattie discover the deep-seated hopes and fears of the woman she loves unconditionally, and her inevitable connection to her family's past.

In heartfelt and potent prose, through Hattie's hushed voice, Sights Unseen tells the story of a troubled relationship and the courage it takes to see it through.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

``Both forgiving and healing are true arts,'' says Hattie Barnes, the narrator of Gibbons's moving novel; readers will be thoroughly in thrall to her clear, true voice and to the poignant story she tells. In flashback, Hattie describes the summer and fall of 1967, when she was 12 and living in Bend of the River, N.C., and when her beautiful, psychotically volatile mother, Maggie, was temporarily committed to the psychiatric ward at Duke University. A near-miracle occurs: for the first time in nearly two decades, Maggie becomes stabilized on medication. And, for the first time in her life, Hattie experiences a mother who relates to, touches and cares for her. Gibbons tells this story of family dislocation and crisis in restrained prose of unflinching clarity, with a honing eye for the small domestic details that conjure a time, place and emotional atmosphere. She conveys the hellish condition of a home where one parent is delusional and dangerous to herself and others; where the other is a full-time caretaker; and where the children, Hattie and her older brother Freddie, are lonely, anxious, bewildered victims. The fifth member of the family is the grandfather, Mr. Barnes, a manipulative bully who protects and spoils his daughter-in-law, and indulges her every manic whim from his ample wallet; he is the truly destructive element in the Barnes family's lives. The dynamics of this dysfunctional group, their balance precariously maintained by the calm ministrations of their black housekeeper, Pearl, are spelled out with tender understanding. Gibbons is equally sensitive when conveying the aberrant wiring of Maggie's jangled brain. This is her best novel since Ellen Foster, a haunting story that begs to be read in one sitting. BOMC and QPBC featured alternates. (Sept.)

Library Journal

The illustrious Gibbons burst onto the literary scene with her award-winning first novel, Ellen Foster, which was "written with the freshness of a child but the wisdom of an adult" (LJ 4/15/87). One hopes this will live up to that debut.

School Library Journal

YA-A story that chronicles the devastating effects of growing up in a dysfunctional family. Hattie's mother, a manic depressive, experiences erratic mood swings and irrational outbursts. She is incapable of nurturing her daughter, shopping, talking, or providing a role model for something as basic as cooking. Narrated by Hattie, the book is permeated with sadness and disillusionment because of her constant disappointment over the lost opportunities for bonding, her fears and embarrassment with peers, and her lack of mothering. The minor characters emerge as shadowy figures who must tiptoe around the mother's moods. Readers witness violent verbal attacks on Hattie's father and experience her brother's protective response of staying in his room. The entire family is grateful for the respite provided by the mother's institutionalization. The novel will elicit empathy in most YAs, providing information to those who have never experienced this type of family situation and reassurance to those who have.-Barbette Timperlake, R.E. Lee High School, Springfield, VA

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170480906
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	01/03/2012
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Had I known my mother was being given electroconvulsive therapy while I was dressing for school on eight consecutive Monday mornings, I do not think I could have buttoned my blouses or tied my shoes or located my homework. I see myself fumbling with the snap on my skirt, trying to connect the sides, turning around in a circle like a cat chasing its tail. I was twelve, deemed too young to be told what was happening to her and in fact too innocent to surmise it.

There was a certain power in her healing that I, as a child, felt was beyond my capacity to comprehend, the way I, as an adult, cannot comprehend the largeness of the universe, the number of its stars, the heat of the sun, or the speed of light. I could not fathom how such a terribly sick woman could get well. Unless the doctors were using some sort of medical magic, I could not understand how pills and a changed environment were helping when her family's love had been of no use. I believe I was jealous of the hospital and her doctors. At home, she had simply endured her life. In the hospital, she began to flourish. She returned home an independent woman.

I worried about my own lack of influence in her life. If I had a little girl, I thought, I would look at her and discover ways to ground myself. I would find reasons to move out of the haze and into the clearing, where a husband, a sort, and a daughter could see me fully and welcome me. If I had a daughter as needy for my love as I was for hers, I could, I thought, will myself to be well for her sake. But Mother did not find that inspiration in me. Her illness, manic depression, was beyond her control. Along with my father, Imourned the inability to change her, to restore her. And I worried that later, when she had been back home with us for a while, the pills and the doctoring would stop working and she would revert to her old crazy ways, and once more, the voicesof my father, my brother, and me would be no more than background noise to her ravings. I worried that her wellness; would not take, the way vaccinations take. Life with Mother, I feared, would again be life with a stranger, a changeable stranger.

Because of her illness, it was impossible for her to be with us all the time. However, I always maintained the notion that I deserved a mother and would someday have mine. Instead of playing solitaire at the kitchen table while Pearl, our cook and housekeeper, fixed dinner, I would deal a hand of old maid or spades with my mother. She would join me in my life. I hoped for that even in the worst of times. As much as Pearl mothered me, she never let me forget for a minute that I had my own mother upstairs resting or in that hospital, and someday all would be well in our household. I am drawn to know why and how I never abandoned the ideal of a mother. She gave me ample opportunity to ostracize her completely. Why did I "turn out"? Why did my brother "turn out"?

Mother was depressed almost always, and her sadness was fractured only by wild, delusional turns of mind, with brief periods of stability that were celebrated and remembered by my family as though they were spectacular occurrences, like total eclipses or meteor showers. Had she not crashed to a halt in 1967, 1 would never have known her. I would have been raised wholly by my father and Pearl, and I would have spoiled my life trying to mitigate the ill effects her absence might have forced on me.

A girl cannot go along motherless without life's noticing, taking a compensatory tuck here and there in the heart and in the mind, letting out one seam or another whenever she is threatened by her loneliness. I could have lurched on ahead to adulthood, straining to be a good girl, not ever learning what to do when my own children were placed in my arms. My instinct might have been to ignore my responsibility for them the way my mother had initially relinquished responsibility for me. The children might have had to wait for me to find my way, as I had had to wait for my mother, and they might not have been as patient. My patience came from a deep longing for an ideal, and had I not pitied my mother, I would have stopped waiting for her, given up on her and ranged about for love elsewhere. But we caught each other just in time, right on the edge of my puberty. She pulled me back from the rim of an abyss. Just when I should have been growing away from my mother, we moved toward each other. When I should have been running out of the house with the screen door slamming in my wake, I was crawling into her arms. Boys, when they finally took notice of me, had to wait for my mother and me to learn each other, to learn our habits and our ways.

Mother died five years ago, right after I found out I was pregnant with my first daughter. She was well by then, bolstered by fifteen years of medication and therapy for her manic depression. My brother, Freddy, and I had gone to help her and my father one quiet Sunday afternoon as they cleaned his childhood belongings out of the Bames family homeplace. My father's father had left the house to his sister-in-law, Miss Josephine Woodward, as a life estate. Although my parents preferred to say that Mr. Bames and Miss Woodward "kept company," my Aunt Menefee, who was with us that day, said they were "involved." Aunt Menefee's husband, my father's brother,...

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