THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 25, 1994 TAG: 9409240158
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: Marcia Mangum
LENGTH: Short : 42 lines
HOUSE WORK
KRISTINA MCGRATH
Bridge Works Publishing Co. 198 pp. $19.95
Like the chore from which its title is derived, author Kristina McGrath's first novel, House Work, is often tedious. As with housework, it is occasionally rewarding but more often repetitious and forgettable.
McGrath, whose award-winning stories and poetry have appeared in such publications as Harper's and Paris Review, is at times poetic in her descriptions of the drab and mundane. But she fails to move beyond the descriptive to develop plot or character fully.
The novel's heroine, if there is one, is Anna Morrisey, the wife of a flamboyant, alcoholic ne'er-do-well and the mother of three children. Despite her devotion to the details of housecleaning and tending her husband, children and father, she musters the courage to kick out her husband and make a life for the rest of the family.
Set in the shadow of the Pittsburgh steel mills, the simple plot is lost in the repetitious images of the scrubbed working-class kitchens, the inadequate yards and the decay of the industrial city. Everything has a color, an odor, a sound, which McGrath describes, often in rambling, stream-of-consciousness thoughts. What works in verse gets tedious in even a short novel.
Even with McGrath's philosophical descriptions of housework - ``Why, some of the best things in the world, she thought, happen like housework, in circles'' - it's hard to tell what the feminist author thinks of the chore, the women who do it or the families that it's done for. Does she respect these ongoing patterns of life, or is she just poking fun? by CNB