The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Miniatures, by Norah Labiner
reviewed by Richard J. Murphy

Norah Labiner. Miniatures. Coffee House, 2002. 402 pp. $23.00.

Following up Our Sometime Sister (2000), Norah Labiner successfully funnels her energies into this marvelously layered novel, which sprints in abecedarian fashion across chapter headings from “Appomattox” to “Zion,” lingering over a sense of disaster and loss. In the process, Miniatures raises self-reflexive questions about fiction and reality, these tied to the frame of biography, both in the narration itself and the stories narrated. Miniatures presents the experience of Fern Alice Jacobi, sometime traveler and housecleaner, age twenty at the time of the story and her entry into the writerly Lieb household; she becomes the wife Brigid’s confidante. This couple, resonating with Plath-Hughes and Jane Eyre-Rochester connections, occupies a house “haunted” by Owen Lieb’s first wife, Frances, also a writer, an earlier suicide. Fern’s own biography, as it turns out, parallels that thought to be Brigid’s, who suspects her kinship to a major author, one obsessed with the same themes of writing, love, loss, and disaster as Miniatures. Parallels, perhaps one should say “mirrorings,” abound, and Labiner’s writing, con brio, combines the most literary of allusions to the most worldly—from those early travel books, Genesis and the Odyssey, to the more contemporary Through the Looking-Glass as well as to the horrifically real Nazi extermination camps. Frances Lieb wrote, “I long for the tiny world, when we were miniatures of ourselves”; that simple line contains the undercurrent of determinism that drives the doubling, recurring interplay among characters, texts, fiction, and life, leading to a final uncertainty about Fern’s version of all she “tells” us. This flat, tightly edited response does not convey the excitement and amazement I enjoyed in the reading of Miniatures; I recommend it highly to anyone interested in the games of literature and life.