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Morgane Michotte photo<\/p>\n
Susanna Crossman\u2019s novel carries a tone of nostalgia and reflection that\u2019s similar to that of her 2024 memoir, Home Is Where We Start.<\/p>\n
The Orange Notebooks reprises that tone, beginning with the pretense that we are being handed a set of journal reflections written by our protagonist, \u201cAnna,\u201d who herself lives in liminal spaces. She too was raised in England but grew to adulthood as a server on an English Channel ferry, married a dashing Frenchman with an exotic name, Antton (the two Ts a vestige of his Basque heritage) and eventually settled with Antton in a lovely rural French home, both as teachers.<\/p>\n
Anna\u2019s specialty is languages, but her wider sensibilities are all about colours. In these notes in her little orange books, she is forever explaining etymologies but equally and frequently marvelling at individual colours \u2014 and, even more so, the juxtapositions of colours.<\/p>\n
The trick, however, is that Anna is not chronicling her linguistic and esthetic musings in that country home \u2014 she\u2019s doing so in a mental health ward. She and Antton have recently met the worst of all tragedies, the death of their child, six-year-old Louis (known as \u201cBuba\u201d). The story of angelic Buba\u2019s death is finally told near the end of the book, but its details are not particularly important. Its simple existence is the lone, devastating point.<\/p>\n
Anna is not confined to the institution but chooses to stay there for a time, to undergo some kind of conversational therapy, and to attempt to work her way through her abysmal grief by writing about it in utterly eclectic ways.<\/p>\n
She addresses Buba directly, reminding him of what he had done or said or, especially, interrogated; she tells him the story of her meet-cute with his father. She reaches to her days on the English Channel, back and forth, gushing about her exuberant ferry co-worker, Miguel, who regales her with stories of his globe-trotting affairs with worldly men and his artistic tribulations and triumphs, becoming her lifelong confidant and, one day, virtual godfather to Louis. She tries to make more exhaustive sense of the deeper, difficult family biographies of herself and of Antton.<\/p>\n
All this in these notebooks, written in that institution. There she meets and portrays an entire theatre of characters, one of whom, Yann, convinces her to undertake a journey, you might say, with him.<\/p>\n
Greco-Roman myth lurks here from the first page, but by the final act of the book is centre stage. Anna retells, overtly, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice: of how Orpheus dared to venture to the Underworld to retrieve his beloved wife from the eternity of death and won her impossible reprieve with his gorgeous music, only to lose her again because he so stupidly, lovingly looked back at her just as he was edging her to their resuscitated, conjoined bliss.<\/p>\n
This is what Anna herself does. It is strikingly similar, but it is also fundamentally different. Anna does not go alone \u2014 she goes with Yann, her companion but, aptly, also her ferryman, her Charon. She does not go to her lover, her Eurydice \u2014 she goes to her child, her Persephone. She has nothing with which to woo the gods; she simply goes to them, almost naked. She does not perform to persuade \u2014 she acquiesces.<\/p>\n
None of this is magical or supernatural or surreal. It is all entirely realistic, convincing and heartbreaking.<\/p>\n