TITLE: The Fainting Room
AUTHOR: Sarah Pemberton Strong
GENRE: Fiction
PUBLISHED: June 3, 2013
RATING: ★★★★ 1/2
PURCHASE LINKS: Amazon
MOBILISM LINK: Mobilism
Description: Ray Shepard is a wealthy architect who has mystified his friends by marrying Evelyn, a woman who works at a nail salon. Evelyn, in turn, hides a secret past about her former life in the circus, her ex-husband’s mysterious death, and the colorful tattoos she carefully conceals under her clothes. When Evelyn starts to cave under the pressure of living in Ray’s rarified world, she suggests they take in Ingrid, a 16-year-old girl with blue hair, a pet iguana, and no place to stay for the summer.
As Evelyn and Ray both make her their confidante, drawing her into the heart of what threatens their marriage, Ingrid increasingly adopts the noir alter ego of "Detective Slade"—fedora and all—in order to solve the mysteries that engulf all three characters.
Review: As soon as I saw the cover, and read the reviews, I was dying to read The Fainting Room. This novel had most of the ingredients I like: a great cover, a great title. But what is a "fainting room"?
"...Why's it called a fainting room?" Ingrid asked.
"That's what the Victorians called it. Some of the houses from this period have a room like this on the second floor. After climbing the stairs in tight corsets," Ray smiled, "breathless ladies would go into the fainting room to sit down and sniff sal volatile to recover themselves..."
We readers meet Evelyn & Ray Shepard, and Ingrid Slade. These three are really the only characters in The Fainting Room, but even the minor characters who walk in and out of the novel for a few moments are people I'd like to know. Yes, this is definitely a character-driven novel, and each of the characters is so well-drawn and compelling, that any of them could carry the story to it's conclusion by themselves. But to have all three of them together with such great chemistry is really amazing.
At first, Evelyn seems like she has the perfect life with her husband, Ray, but she has a colorful past. Evelyn was born into a circus family, and although she tried, she never showed any particular talent in the circus arts. Evelyn's personality is not only colorful, but her body is as well. She is also blessed with flaming red hair, but is also covered with brilliant tattoos her former husband (an abusive drunk named Joe, now deceased whom we meet only in flashbacks) inked on her himself. Ray, her current husband, is a more staid and settled man: an architect with a secret desire to write pulpy crime fiction. While at a party, an offhand remark by a school administrator acquaintance of theirs leads them to volunteer to meet a lonely and odd 16 year old girl who needs a place to stay for the summer. (Her father has dumped her at boarding school, and is busy with work and his new family.)
[Ingrid] followed Mrs. Shepard inside and looked around. There was hand-carved scrollwork on the post thing at the bottom of the stairs, a very old mirror built into more carved paneling beside the front door. The antique brass door hinges with an inlaid pattern of fleurs-de-lys. Old things, well made. Whoever had built this house had cared about what they were doing, had intended it to last a long time. Through an archway Ingrid glimpsed a living room filled with books, a fireplace and a worn brown velvet sofa with wooden legs that looked like lion’s paws. She imagined stretching out on the sofa after everyone else was asleep and reading. The image pleased her.
“This is a cool house,” she offered.
“Let me just see where Ray is,” Mrs. Shepard said. “Why don’t you go on in the living room there. Here, take off that sweater, and I’ll get you a towel.”
Ingrid hesitated, then peeled off her sweater. Beneath it she wore a black Minor Threat tee shirt whose collar and sleeves she’d cut away with some very dull scissors. She felt Mrs. Shepard’s eyes on her and wished for a moment that she’d worn more regular-looking clothes. Then she shook away the feeling and wished instead for a cigarette—if the Shepards weren’t going to like her, it was better to find out now.
After a brief interview, to Ingrid's delight and Ray's bewilderment, Evelyn volunteers to let Ingrid stay for the summer. Is it a good idea to invite a 16 year old girl into your troubled, restless marriage? We cannot help but watch the entanglements begin. We never learn if Ingrid is homosexual, or just experiencing a crush, but from the very beginning, Ingrid is attracted to Evelyn. Ingrid's fascination with Evelyn starts when Ingrid recognizes a fellow oddball, someone with secrets, someone with a dark, damaged past...
Evelyn pulled the rubber band free from the tucked-over sleeve of her blouse. Drum roll, please, she was doing it, she pushed the blue cotton up over her elbow and there, laaadies and gennntlemennn, an orange Japanese-style carp swimming through turquoise water and dark green lily pads.
Ingrid sucked in her breath. Let it out.
Evelyn saw something shadowy get up and leave Ingrid’s face, saw the crack of light fall across it instead, saw Ingrid’s mouth open like a door.
“Oh,” Ingrid said softly. “Oh.” She looked up at Evelyn. “They're beautiful.” Her hand made a little involuntary movement in her lap, like a child reaching for something shiny. “Why keep them hidden?”
Evelyn made a snorting sound. “You don’t know the answer to that one? Ray’s friends, and his colleagues, they can’t stand me anyway; they think I’m an idiot. This would really be the end. ‘A tattooed lady, he married a tattooed lady.’”
“It’s not just your arm then? How high do they go?”
Evelyn unbuttoned the top two buttons of her blouse, opened the collar. A rose entwined in thorns, two butterflies holding a banner that read “forever,” and poking up from beneath her loosened collar, the bright orange tips of the sun’s rays.
Ingrid, like Ray, also loves pulpy noir crime fiction beyond all reason and finding his architectural writing desperately boring, offers to set up an office in the fainting room to help him write his own novel. Ray, impressed with Ingrid's own writing skill, is flattered and agrees. Ingrid has an endearing habit of quipping to herself in asides to the reader, as her alter ego (the male Detective Slade), scattering a crime novel that parallels her own feelings and weaving it in with the real story. In her fantasy, as Detective Slade, she is approached by a flame-haired married client looking for her husband, and of course in her fantasy, she gets the girl, but only temporarily.
It started to rain. The rain steamed up the air until it was as muggy as a hot towel in a Turkish bathhouse. Everything on the road slowed to a crawl. Everything except for my heart, which was still doing the crazy tap dance it broke into every time she was near me. She didn’t notice, or talk. She just sat there and did what I told her, which was to look up train stops on the map. At each stop I checked to see if there were any motels. The first two train stops were in the middle of nowhere—no dice there. The next one was in a small town’s idea of a downtown, and a hundred yards past the station was a three-story hotel. I clamped my fedora on my head against the rain and ran across the street and into the hotel lobby and asked the blonde at the front desk if anyone had checked in that afternoon.
“No one’s checked in the last three days.” She kind of grinned at me. “I’m wearing out my fingers playing solitaire back here. You know any card games?”
“Not today, sweetheart,” I said and beat it out of there and tried the bar across the street and found it wasn’t even open.
I got back in the car where the love of my life was still sitting, as wilted as last night’s flowers. She had one hand over her eyes and when I got back in the driver’s seat she looked at me a moment between her fingers but she didn’t say anything.
I smoked another cigarette. I drove another five miles. She sat beside me like the memory of a dream, tangling herself in the sheets of my life. I didn’t ask her to tell me the truth about what had happened to her. She wouldn’t have come clean with me anyway, not yet, and I wasn’t in the mood for any more lies, so I clammed it. There was no sound but the swish of the windshield wipers until it stopped raining and I turned them off again.
The Fainting Room - with it's quirky, damaged, complicated characters who act dishonestly, and includes sexual situations that are dicey at best - probably is not for every reader. But those of you paying attention to my reviews may notice that I delight in novels about the dark and twisted side of sexuality containing fascinating and damaged individuals; novels such as The People in the Trees, Tampa, The Uses of Enchantment, Lolita and more recently, A Little Life - so of course I love this one, which is comparatively much less daring. At it's core, this is an in-depth study of a marriage, but also a brief love triangle between between Ray who falls for Ingrid, Ingrid who falls for Evelyn, both of them are fond of Ingrid (to varying degrees), and both Evelyn and Ray still love each other, enjoying an active sex life. By the end of the novel, one them has sex with a 16 year old child-woman, one of them just shares a kiss - you may be surprised to discover which one. And you find yourself feeling sympathy for all the characters and confused as to who is the victim. But even with all the build-up (nearly the entire story), the lone sex scene in this triad is not seen by the reader. I have read complaints from readers who maintain this love triangle was not only objectionable, but also not believable. However, I think that when you read The Fainting Room, you will see that the characters are perfectly set up for their actions, and everything comes to a logical, inevitable conclusion.
The Fainting Room has vivid, nearly perfectly-drawn characters, setting, and plot. My only complaint is its ending, which is very unsatisfying. (Unless a sequel is planned.) Out of the love triangle, one of the characters just gets on a plane not knowing if she will return, one goes to a previous location, one just stays and is lonely. A reader could argue this is a fitting ending to such an odd and controversial sexual entanglement, but as I closed the book, I found myself the tiniest bit unsatisfied. 4.5 stars.