The Ice Garden immediately sent me to the Bible. I had to check something. Thankfully, I’m only forbidden to covet my neighbor’s wife, servants, house, and animals; reading between the lines, I am still free to envy Moira Crone’s prose with abandon. This is lucky for the state of my soul, because she writes lines like “[The piano teacher] was from Ireland, which was very far away… Ohio, when she encountered it, was something she was incapable of having anticipated. North Carolina, even worse.” I would kill to have written that, or this one: “[Cheryl] had chronic bronchitis, which we both knew was possibly her second greatest possession, after her looks. She could throw a coughing fit and get out of anything … .” This eloquent, wry, resonant prose tells the story of a true domestic tragedy: heartbreaking, frightening, with an end result as inevitable as the grave. The Ice Garden can hardly be overpraised, but I’m going to try.
Claire is ten in 1961 when her mother gives birth to Odile, immediately nicknamed “Sweetie.” (Southerners choose names based on how good they will look on headstones, but don’t necessarily use them.) Her mother, Diana, is already flighty and fragile, and the strain of the birth and chores surrounding the new daughter push her behavior toward strange and alarming extremes. Modern readers will recognize her condition as post-partum depression, but the characters, trapped in a less clinical time, must approach the subject by euphemism or misdirection, when not avoiding it outright. The incapability of any character to say, baldly, “Diana is as crazy as an outhouse rat, and we have to address that somehow” is the fuse that burns throughout the novel, and it works because to some extent the experience is universal. Everyone has, at some point, been unable to just say it: You’re hurting me. This is irrational. I have to leave. The tongues stay tied, and Claire does double duty, caring for Sweetie and watching her mother. This is untenable, and we know something will crack; but when it does it’s still a kick in the teeth.
I grew up with a seriously mentally ill parent. Either Moira Crone did too or she has the most elegant, finely tuned sensitivity this side of mind-reading because she describes it with the deadly accuracy of a sharpshooter. Several times I paused in my reading to take a deep breath and look out the window when a scene, a line, an image had sunk home with an understated ferocity that sent me back twenty years. To live, especially as a child, with the uncertainty that such a situation engenders is akin to siege warfare: trapped in a world you know is not normal, not right, but you can’t say how, and at any moment the cannons may fire and what little you’ve built may crash down and maybe—probably—you along with it. I’ve tried to write that feeling and come close, but Crone lands it dead center: “‘What do you know? You are just a child.’ What a thing to call me.”
The supporting characters are my favorite kind: archetypes made flesh. Anyone who reads novels, especially regional ones, has met The Bad Girl with the Good Heart, The Colorful Aunt from the City, and The Maid Who’s Practically Family (Even If She Is Black) (Not That That Should Matter, But of Course It Does). Crone takes these stock characters and makes them into Cheryl, Aunt C, and Sidney, actual people with clear, understandable motives and lifelike details. We’re not privy to their inner lives, but we can tell they have them. Sidney, especially, stands out as real. While she cares about Claire and gives her some beautifully expressed tough-love common sense late in the book, she’s not painted as a mammy-to-be who sacrifices herself for the white family she works for. Even as she tries to help, she resists making the family’s troubles her cross: she has her own. Sidney lends realistic perspective to this household in crisis: events that are life-defining for Claire and her parents will, someday, be part of a story Sidney tells about a family she used to work for back in North Carolina. We panic, struggle, and die, and the people around us go home to their own problems.
The Ice Garden is just, hands down, an amazing book. It won’t be for everyone—it’s the opposite of escapism—but if you’re ready for home truths wrapped in some of the best writing this side of Faulkner, pick up The Ice Garden and some snacks. You won’t want to come up for air until you’re done.
