Quickening, by Laura Catherine Brown.
New York: Random House, 2000.
$23.95 - 336 pages.

Mandy Boyle leads a narrow, restricted life, a life as full of troubles as the Saturday night dance floor in a country-western bar. Her mother is crazy, a hypochondriac and wickedly intimidating manipulator who constantly misunderstands her daughter. Mandy’s father, an amateur student of philosophy whom Mandy loves deeply, has his problems as well; Frank is obese, drinks too much and can’t hold a job. Mandy suffers through high school, waiting for her life to reveal itself to her.

In Mandy’s mind, that new life involves college, and so off she goes, both eager and nervous about making new friends, meeting new people and embarking on a true adventure. Barb, her roommate, quickly dominates Mandy, introducing her to bong hits, drinking, sex with guys and cutting classes.

Despite all these new experiences, home and the old life follow Mandy. During Thanksgiving break Mandy meets Booner, an older man who works as a laborer and truck driver. Booner quickly wins her heart, then calls her at school. Even more significantly for Mandy, her father dies just days before Christmas, leaving her to help take care of her mother.

After resisting her mother’s pleas to stay with her, Mandy returns to school. She begins taking more drugs, misses days of classes because of her depression over her father’s death and meets Booner for overnight get-togethers. Soon Mandy follows Booner to New York City, where he works on a garbage truck. Mandy finds work of her own, develops an interest in photography (her father had talked of becoming a photographer), becomes pregnant with Booner’s child, has an abortion and finishes her story by deciding to leave Booner. Recovering from the abortion, she thinks:

Good-bye was a clear, hard word, the first in a long procession of vague ones I had spoken. I floated up into a shimmering opal, where my voice unfolded and fell slowly softly through the air. My heart pumped a steady rhythm, one heartbeat only. It drowned out the TV, engulfed the sound of Booner walking across the kitchen floor. My heart beat a pattern for my life, enveloping me in its own unique rhythm until nothing else existed, and I knew I would follow my pulse to a strange, different universe, where pictures gave birth to life. There was no other place to be. I would wake up there and face myself.

This is the plot of Laura Catherine Brown’s Quickening. Her portrayal of Mandy as she attempts to make the switch from her life in high school to life in a university will strike most readers as both realistic and strangely endearing; Mandy is not a perfect heroine, is not really a heroine at all, but someone who is like many of the young — wanting friends, wanting a new life in a new place, yet often weak-willed and afraid to speak out for herself. Mandy is dominated first by her mother, then by Barb as she tries to fit into college, and finally by Booner as she seeks a replacement for her father’s love.

There is in Quickening an ineffably sad quality, a sort of feeling that no matter what Mandy does, her life will never be quite right. A part of this feeling stems from Mandy herself, who is so influenced by others - as are, I might add, a great number of teens - that even at the end I was left wondering whether she would ever really gain control of her destiny. Her obsession with herself, with her own desires, seems like a deep wound, which will always leave a scar.

Part of the sadness of the book also has to do with the idea of quickening itself, which is that stage when the fetus begins to move and makes itself felt. Mandy has her baby aborted, yet it would seem that Brown intends us to view her year in college and her abortion in particular as Mandy’s own quickening. Are we to conclude that the aborted baby gives Mandy her freedom? Are we to compare Mandy, who is beginning a new life, with the baby whose life is ended?

Finally, this book is both sad and disturbing because it gives us a view of ourselves to which, I suspect, we rarely pay much attention. There are many Mandys among us: weak people, drifting, searching without a specific destination. Many of us - perhaps most of us - have some small part of Mandy’s fear and insecurity tucked away within ourselves. Brown’s ability to write so painfully well of this particular character quality has given us a pain-filled book.

(Minick owns Saints and Scholars Bookstore on Main Street in Waynesville.)

 

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