Tea

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Tea

When we first meet Isabel Gold, the heroine of Tea, Stacey D'Erasmo's debut novel, it's 1968 and she and her mother are house hunting near Philadelphia. In one house, they sit in an upstairs bedroom and eight-year-old Isabel admonishes her mother for opening a desk drawer. They chat a bit, then "[H]er mother was quiet for a minute.... 'You know, Isabel,' she said, 'sometimes I want to die.'"

It's a dramatic start to a disturbing book that traces Isabel's coming of age after her mother's suicide. D'Erasmo -- a former editor of the Village Voice Literary Supplement and a recent recipient of a Stegner Fellowship in Fiction at Stanford University -- breaks TEA into three sections, "Morning," "Afternoon," and "Evening." "Morning," the shortest and strongest section of the book, includes the suicide, which occurs "offstage" a month after the visit to the house. As Isabel remembers, "When her mother finally did it, she did it at the hospital where she worked, locking herself in a supply closet with a vast amount of pills, as if to say: This is the size of my hunger."

In the novel's first 50 pages, D'Erasmo uses original, specific details to create a rich portrait of the troubled Gold family. Cassie, Isabel's mother, is mysterious yet larger than life. "In the afternoons, she was dreamy and distracted, like someone floating on a lake. The sofa was her afternoon raft...surrounded by her chipped glass of what she called her afternoon tea, though the tea was always cold." Isabel's father, a dry cleaner, "was pale, from being in the store all the time. As always, his hair was precisely parted, with exact comb marks." Obsessed with dogs, Jeannie, her younger sister, "had a multicolored collection of puppies, stuffed animals, who lived in a plastic princess castle...puppies crowded at the windows, reclined on the turrets, and were half-stuffed by their back legs down the chimneys."

In "Afternoon," Isabel is 16 and lives in a Philadelphia suburb called Springston. Alienated from her father and sister, Isabel divides her time between working at Pier 1 and hanging out with her best friend, Lottie, sunbathing and listening to Joni Mitchell. She breaks from the suburban summer routine when members of an avant-garde theater group from the city arrive at Pier 1 one day looking for props. Soon, drawn to the group's stage manager, Rebecca, Isabel begins volunteering at the theater and takes part in a production of "Equus," playing a horse decked out in a silver costume. Isabel has notions of being an actress -- it was her mother's aspiration as well -- but her connection with the theater focuses more on the people than on the art. By the end of "Afternoon," Isabel and Lottie have stopped speaking to each other; more importantly, Isabel discovers her attraction to women -- specifically Rebecca, with whom she has a brief encounter.

Jump to "Evening," and 22-year-old Isabel's settled in New York, on the Lower East Side, with her girlfriend, Thea. Recent college graduates, they aspire to make a film together, though Isabel works a day job at an arts foundation. "Evening" bogs down a bit with details concerning the film and the relationship between Isabel and Thea -- who never fully takes shape. Later in the section, when the narrative returns to Isabel's memories of her mother and sends Isabel home for Hanukkah, Tea fulfills the promise of its first 50 pages.

Back in Springston for the holiday, Isabel re-enters the house her father and sister, who now works in the dry-cleaning business, share with half a dozen dogs. In one pivotal scene, Isabel sorts through old trunks of her mother's possessions, searching for clues, only to find that "even unwrapped after so many years and laid out around the attic, the things she left behind didn't explain anything." Yet, remembering the day she and her mother went house hunting, Isabel realizes, "It was wrong; it was the wrong thing to say to a child, that you wanted to die."

Indeed, D'Erasmo's writing is most compelling when she focuses directly on Isabel's loss: "Cassie Gold settled into the floorboards, stood before the window, sat in all the chairs, like someone who never went to work." And Isabel is most sympathetic when she allows herself to miss her mother, as when she eats a solitary lunch of rice and beans and tries to imagine what her mother would have given her on her birthday.

Tea is a quiet book. D'Erasmo doesn't offer Isabel a miraculous breakthrough that leads to a grand, happy ending. Instead, she travels slowly toward a guarded reconciliation with the past -- and the prospect of moving forward, lighter and freer, into adulthood.

—Abby Tannenbaum

Dennis Drabelle

Stacey D'Erasmo's first novel, Tea, is divided into three parts, each of which presents a literary snapshot of Isabel Gold, the daughter of a Philadelphia dry cleaner and his frustrated wife. The first picture, which shows Isabel at age 8 or 9 in the late '60s, is the best -- a funny and charming portrait of a kid who is both knowing and naive. She picks up a volume of Anais Nin's self-besotted Diary but puts it down after observing that the writer "didn't seem to have any friends." Accompanying her mother on a tour of a house the family might buy, Isabel decides that the messy occupants are "poor, and not nearly as smart as the Romans, who built aqueducts." Along with the cleverness, however, comes a sense of foreboding. Isabel's mom tells the girl that sometimes she wants to die, and soon enough she does, by her own hand.

In the second section, Isabel, now 16, hangs out with two friends who are sleeping together, listens to a lot of Joni Mitchell records and tries to make sense of her mother's death. One tactic she adopts is getting involved in the theater -- her mother had chucked a fledgling acting career to marry Isabel's father. Isabel approaches drama in a roundabout way, first volunteering backstage at a local little theater, then letting herself be drafted to play one of the horses in Equus. By this point she is beginning to realize that she is a lesbian.

The third section finds her, at 22, involved with a woman named Thea, not just in a love affair but in an experimental-film project in which Isabel is to play the goddess Diana, wielding bow and arrow. The co-creators' relationship betrays signs of trouble: When Thea asks whether Isabel wants them to be "nonmonogamous," Isabel replies, "Not this second"; and when Cricket, a new friend of Thea's, tries to horn in on the cinematic planning, Isabel reacts stormily.

There is much to admire in Tea. The dialogue is frequently artful, and Isabel's take on the world is slanted and witty. At home with her family for Hanukkah, she joins them in watching the local news, "which seemed to her to have a charmingly flawed, handmade quality." The minor characters are vivid, especially the other Golds. Isabel's younger sister, Jeannie, collects dogs, of which she has half a dozen when last seen, all living in and around the family house, which she shares with their dad. As for him, his passion for dry cleaning recalls the Swede's love affair with glove-making in Philip Roth's American Pastoral.

But D'Erasmo lacks Roth's fire and zeal and ability to persuade readers that a family's history can harbor deep American truths. Her novel's diction is spare (we're on the outskirts of Greater Minimalistville here); the jumps from section to section -- and from one stage of Isabel's life to the next -- leave too many characters dangling; and the question of how Isabel will cope with her mother's death is never satisfactorily resolved. Line by line, D'Erasmo is a talented writer, but a firm sense of construction is not yet one of her strengths. For all its flashes of humor, Tea left me yearning for an infusion of caffeine.
— Salon

Maureen Corrigan

Tea's satisfying taste lingers.
— NPR

Michael Cunningham

Tea is a pure and profound book; a ravishing book. After I'd finished reading it I couldn't start reading anything else for a while--it just didn't seem necessary. Stacey D'Erasmo is, simply, the real thing, and this book is a work of art.
— author of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize winner, The Hours

New York Times Book Review

An unpretentious, muddle-free first novel....

Newsday

Flawless.

San Francisco Chronicle

Intimations of greatness....Written with a strength and daring that makes it a breathtaking pleasure.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In her wry, sensitive first novel, D'Erasmo, a former editor at the Voice Literary Supplement and Bookforum, charts the crucial moments of young Isabel Gold's coming of age before and after the suicide of her mother. The protagonist and her sister, Jeannie, live with their parents in a Philadelphia suburb. Isabel's father runs a dry-cleaning business and her mother, Cassie, runs off to New York to see musicals or stays home glued to the soaps while drinking whisky from a teacup. As a young girl, Isabel studies the ancient Romans and sees her family life as bits of evidence for future archeologists looking for clues. While Isabel observes her mother's fragile state, the narrative follows Isabel's maturation--her teenage friendship with the blonde sylph, Lottie, and Lottie's boyfriend, Ben; her first love affair with a woman, whom she meets at a community theater; and her wrenching first heartbreak. Isabel's mother's suicide takes place offstage, and D'Erasmo reveals how and when the memories of her mother's life and death insinuate themselves into Isabel's consciousness. Punctuated by moments that are radiantly moving (every year Isabel imagines the gift her mother would give her for her birthday) or hilarious (Isabel's childhood friend, playing Get Smart, calls God on the shoe phone), D'Erasmo's tale eschews labels, politics and generalizations. Hers is an intimate story, suffused with irony, humor and a close, sensuous attention to physical detail. Isabel's world opens up generously, providing the reader with the intimate truths and emotional complexity that make this impressive debut unforgettable. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Through three chapters titled "Morning," "Afternoon," and "Evening," the young life of Isabel unfolds from grade school to high school to barely beyond college. This sensitively told coming-of-age story is about a girl who loses her mother early to suicide and who consequently drifts through relationships with family and friends toward an eventual and painful self-discovery. Although Isabel appears tough and even defiantly untouched by her mother's death, questions concerning the unfathomable and final nature of such an act haunt her. Each chapter also features Isabel's ties to a best girlfriend--but some of these narrative threads are cut off without explanation. For example, in the second chapter, Isabel's increasing attraction to a young woman seems significant in that it leads her confidently to lesbian love, but the final chapter, having jumped forward in time, makes no mention of her, leaving the reader to wonder what happened. On the whole, this well-written, intriguing, if somewhat frustratingly unformed first novel by former Stegner fellow D'Erasmo is recommended for large fiction collections.--Sheila M. Riley, Smithsonian Inst. Libs., Washington, DC Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

B Wright

Tea, Stacey D'Erasmo's closely observed first novel, leaves the reader with the hyper self-awareness one feels after seeing a film intensely focused on one or two characters: In the afterglow, you stand up, walk, take a pee, conscious of every movement and somehow distant from it, as if you too were an actor embraced by a bright eye.
—The Village Voice

Gail Pool

In Tea, a first work by Stacey D'Erasmo,...all the elements we expect in a coming-of-age novel are present. But D'Erasmo also provides that crucial element of difference: this is the story of a particular young woman's struggle to understand and move beyond her mother's suicide...This is a difficult story to tell without melodrama, but D'Erasmo succeeds. Understatement helps, as does an eye for the comedy life delivers—in Isabel's young friend Ann, who has been reborn at Bible camp and takes "Jesus with her everywhere, even to the bathroom,' or in Isabel pretentiously describing her feminist film about the goddess Diana to her father's future wife, who persists in thinking it is about Princess Di...Unlike so many novels, Tea ends well. Its conclusion is satisfying, even uplifting, but not sentimental.
—The Women's Review of Books

The New Yorker

Barbed with bitter humor...memorable...

Anastasia Higginbotham

...D'Erasmo's beautiful prose is especially effective. Any reader who has felt both lost and found in the space between straight and gay will be moved by the achingly charming depiction of Isabel coming out.
—Ms.