"Alice Sadie Celine" a novel by Sarah Blakley-Cartwright
In her new novel “Alice Sadie Celine,” Sarah Blakley-Cartwright imagines a constellation of women and, in placing them in a variety of combinatory friendly, familial, and romantic relationships, reveals how the titles and roles of the relationships themselves – friend, mother, daughter, grandmother, lover – restrict the way each woman understands the other by the predetermined rules of engagement each relationship title inevitably carries with it. Cartwright innovatively places a bomb in this nexus of women when she contorts one of these relationships, more specifically the relationship a mother has with her daughter’s friend, in an unexpected way: she throws the two female characters into a love affair.
Over the course of the novel, Celine, Sadie’s mother, is working on a new academic text in which she writes, “To jettison the categories of Mother or Woman or Friend or Lover is to inhabit the skin of Life itself” – it is a book about “slipping out of all the roles and living Free.”[1] She is a professor of women’s and gender studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a renegade woman; her claim to academic fame is a seminal text that deconstructs covert gender binaries. Celine’s daughter, Alice, and Sadie are childhood best friends. Apart from being a study of the beauties and limitations of each of these kinds of female-to-female relationships, Cartwright’s novel also pays close attention to interrogating how our most intimate relationships alter us as people and alter the perceptions we hold about ourselves. After the first intimate encounter with Celine, Alice asks herself “What type of person was she, she wondered now, and when would she know?”[2] The short-lived affair has tremendous ramifications not only on Alice and Celine but also on Sadie’s personhood, and later, we come to find out even on that of Sadie’s daughter, Jane, whose account of discovering the entanglement between her grandma and mother’s best friend years later, closes the novel. But the magic of Cartwright’s bizarre, intimate interruption of conventional female relationships is in the way the interactions and exchanges between Alice and Celine provide the reader with new information on Sadie, new facets to her personality and character that otherwise would not have been divulged. Cartwright writes, “Alice had always felt that Celine was the ultimate key to her friend, that if she could penetrate Celine, she could understand some essential part of Sadie.[3] To put this another way, Cartwright’s idiosyncratic posturing of these two characters here illuminates the dark corners of a main protagonist that otherwise would have remained a mystery.
The novel carries a unique form. The story is separated into chapters which encompass third-person narrations from each of the three female protagonists, and an assortment of combinations of the three. These third-person narrators are very externally descriptive, of the setting and context of the story occurring, but also sufficiently internal, and each narrator seems to speak from a place in the characters’ minds that is only partially accessible to their full range of thoughts. In the final section of the work, the narratorial voice curiously switches from third-person to first-person. The timeline of the story is expansive and covers decades.
Cartwright’s prose is manifold with figurative language; there is almost not a sentence that goes by without it. While Simon & Schuster markets the book as an adult novel, and it is one considering the content, Cartwright’s style makes light of what otherwise veers at times towards heavy subject matter; the writing, which is very verbose (but not to its own detriment depending on who you ask), appears to nearly bounce off the page.
In her review of the book, Chloe Sevigny points out the abundance of popular culture references that Blakley-Cartwright uses; I was surprised by the sheer amount of these as well. I have never encountered a work of literature that so shamelessly references the real world, and in that way, becomes participatory in it. With that being said, there was a point in this novel that I had a difficult time completely believing: I feel like Alice and Celine’s romance happens so quickly that it is jarring to the reader, and thus a tad implausible. The pace and manner in which their relationship progressed from an acquaintanceship to love almost seemed like it belonged in a fantasy novel and not realistic fiction. I commend Sarah’s bravery with the erotic scenes – what would art be if we shied away from the truth. Cartwright writes, “Only a priggish moralist would deny that mothering was tantalizing, even erotic.”[4] She tests the boundaries of love that these different kinds of female bonds and relationships typically carry, and in doing so makes meaning from the absences the characters feel in their traditional roles as, for instance, friend, mother, daughter, lover. From a recent Harper’s Bazaar profile on Blakely-Cartwright and the novel, Libby Flores writes that the book asks two surprising questions: the first being, “How does a woman like Celine fail her own daughter, Sadie, in so many ways, but foster and afford so much intimacy to her lover Alice?,” and the second, “How does Sadie in turn learn to mother herself in the absence of a model?” These questions that Flores suggests the novel is asking are indicative of these kinds of new meanings that it makes.
The most prominent feature of Cartwright’s narrative is her laser-focused attention to character development. In that sense, Cartwright’s style is literary albeit bright. Most of the novel is spent outlining the main characters, their personalities, redeeming qualities and deficiencies, their intentions and motivations, so much so that I felt like I was missing out on more opportunities to see them in context. This work proves Blakely-Cartwright to be a skilled writer with vibrant, fluid prose and the capacity to successfully spread a single theme – that of females being liberated from the confines of relationship-specific etiquette – over the entire canvas of her novel. From start to finish this is a difficult task to execute.
[1] Blakley-Cartwright, Sarah. Alice Sadie Celine. Simon & Schuster, 2023, pg. 198.
[2] Blakley-Cartwright, 117.
[3] Blakley-Cartwright, 88.
[4] Blakley-Cartwright, 150.
Star Rating: 6.5 / 10
Purchase here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Alice-Sadie-Celine/Sarah-Blakley-Cartwright/9781668021590