Kindergarten, Peter Rushforth’s unswerving, unsentimental first novel, came out the year I was born. I’m now reviewing his second novel.
If only more writers could be so patient. Pinkerton’s Sister, a work of rare beauty and (rarer still!) genuine wit, takes place in the mind of one Alice Pinkerton, the archetypal “madwoman in the attic” of Gothic literature, as she watches the twentieth century dawn outside her window. This should seem confining—a huge novel taking place in a single day, never leaving a single point of view, and almost never leaving a single room. But Alice’s mind is enormous. What we read is an expansive, subtle polyphony of her sensations, memories, imaginings, and most especially her readings—the plays of Shakespeare, lines and lines from other poets, and those Gothic novels that mirror her own situation.
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—Dan Johnson
