Early in poet and playwright Lodato’s first novel, the titular narrator says, “When I was helping put the dishes in the washer tonight, I broke a plate. I said sorry Ma it slipped. But it didn’t slip, that’s how I am sometimes, and I want to be worse.” Young Mathilda is acting out for several reasons, most notably the recent death of her 16-year-old sister (pushed in front of a train) and her mother’s ensuing grief. In the Washington Post, Carolyn See doesn’t think the novel clears its hurdles: “Unfortunately, when anyone writes about an adolescent, he or she runs the risk of getting caught in Salingeresque echoes, and they inevitably appear here. . . . It’s a hard challenge to write from the lips of an American youngster. Added to that, Mathilda is a notoriously unreliable narrator; you don’t know when to take her word for anything. All this is presented as though it’s wry, even hilarious. But I think it’s terribly sad and depressing. I couldn’t help thinking, to what end?” That critique seems potentially unreliable as well, to my mind: Are Salingeresque echoes inherently bad? And couldn’t contrasting a wry voice with depressing events make for something interesting? But similar notes are struck by other reviewers, including Katherine Powers: “There is a portentous, sacramental quality to events” and “the novel never quite delivers on all this fraughtness.”
Mathilda Savitch
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pp., $25.00
