Family Fantastic
I devoured Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. I sat down and read it and did not get up for anything. This book is great. Estep’s charming and down-dirty story about lucky and plucky Alice, her clumsy sister Eloise, and their dog-rescuing, ex-junkie mother, presents the hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking ways people intertwine, overlap and just plain run over each other in the acts of love, friendship, sex, and gambling — and all other acts of resistance.
This book is wonderful because of its fabulous characters and delicious plot, all sprung from Estep’s original and uninhibited mind. The people of this novel are maybe not wholly believable but I took them as mythical members of the wild and crazy New York universe and went willingly along on the spin-of-the-wheel ride of their lives. Free will — and these women are wilful — meets those little flips of fate that round out into destiny, or sometimes just a one-night stand. The struggle facing our characters is the age-old mandate to connect (“just connect”) and the obstacles they face are the tried and true Guilt, Pleasure, and Duty.
The characters didn’t need the catalyst of the mother’s big secret to get moving. They are never static and their movement brings change: forward marching, then retracting, then forward again, they lurch on, rapacious and certain, then stop, regroup, become subdued and questioning. All three of them face their own crisis of the heart and confrontation of the soul. I admired them (I loved them) for being forced to look into the mirror and reacting so very honestly to what they see.
Estep is adept with words. Her sisters and their mother are each narrator of different chapters and they all speak with distinct cadences and linguistic choices: we know them as well as by their rhythms and words as by their actions. Estep’s physical descriptions are right on and perfect: “The sky over Aqueduct was the color of dead television.” She is often hilarious: “Her eyes were bright and her big curly hair had, I swear, gotten bigger and curlier. She was verging on looking like Malcolm Gladwell.” Estep can write great one liners, real Oscar Wilde zingers, like my favorite: “She has led an unconventional life and it has agreed with her.” I wouldn’t mind that as my epitaph.
Read this great book about sisters and mothers and friends and lovers, and sex, dogs, food, and gambling. It will leave you reaching out and grabbing hold of someone or some dog or some idea. You’ll bake yourself a cake with white icing, you’ll commit to skinny dipping at least once a summer, and you’ll never, ever bet on a race unless you’ve done the homework. Alice Fantastic will inspire you to take the gamble of your life and run with it.
