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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
RECAPTURING THE SUBLIME a review by Lisa Wenger Bro Marly Youmans. Glimmerglass. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2014.
LISA WENGER BRO has a PhD from UNC Greensboro; her dissertation was on Asheville writer Sarah Addison Allen. Bro is an Associate Professor of English at Middle Georgia State University specializing in postmodernism and American literature, particularly magical realism and fantasy. The author of poetry and fiction, MARLY YOUMANS’s latest novel is Maze of Blood (Mercer University Press, 2015). The author was born in South Carolina, grew up in North Carolina, among other places, and now lives in Cooperstown, NY. Learn more in the interview with her in NCLR 2004.
A native North Carolinian who now resides in the Northeast, Marly Youmans takes reader and protagonist on a journey of mystery and self-discovery in Glimmerglass. This novel is a verbal painting that creates a mental image akin to that of contemporary magical realist painters such as Tomek Setowski or Michael Cheval, delving into a world of vibrant colors where the magical intertwines with the fantastic and mythological to create an idea that is hauntingly real. The novel’s protagonist, Cynthia Sorrell, is, in fact, an artist whose life and art are both watered down, not only physically, after a marriage to an abusive, alcoholic husband, but also literally, through the commercial watercolors she creates solely for money, having abandoned the vibrant oils and passion of her youth. Arriving in the fictional town of Coopers Patent, a town that lies on the edge of Glimmerglass Lake, Cynthia is a middle-aged, broken woman. In the vein of magical realist works by authors Katherine Vaz and Stephen Millhauser, Glimmerglass, at its heart, is about reconnecting with that childlike wonder and awe that the world inspires. It’s about the beauty, the spirituality, and the mystery often denuded from adult lives and the cost of that loss. In fact, when Cynthia first comes to Coopers Patent, she fears “that she had given over all chance of looking with infant sight at a world made new. And what was that but the beginning of art?” (9). In a sense, Glimmerglass defies genre in that it is not purely magical
realist and it is not purely fantasy, but a seamless blending of both. The novel offers a fantastic setting, a town that current resident and native Louisianian Lydia Hale proudly claims is “‘the most eccentric place I’ve ever lived’” (14), a place where “[n]early every street . . . claimed a haunted pier glass or a room enchanted to cold or a picture that could not be moved without upsetting a poltergeist” (51). It is also a place that, through small hints, is vaguely situated in the Northeast. The town’s location, much like Cynthia herself and the truth behind the town’s past tragedies, is a puzzle to be pieced together. The reader is introduced immediately to the fantastic elements: the griffins at the entrance to the gatehouse that Cynthia might rent, the house itself, a fairytale cottage with seven doors situated in a natural setting that evokes “Snow White,” and the “wizened” Isabelle “Iz” Hix, a “creature . . . [who] looked as though all its bones had been broken and then carelessly reset” (3), who greets Cynthia at the door. Yet Glimmerglass also offers realism in the layered descriptions of the town and its inhabitants and most poignantly through the portrayal of human emotions, both light and dark. One of the characteristics that makes the novel so magical, in fact, is Youmans’s ability to intertwine allusion with the psychological depths of human emotion, allusions only giving added depth and understanding to the characters they reference. The magical also abounds. In the first part of the novel, “The Gatehouse,” there’s the apparition of a