The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Gone, by Elisabeth Sheffield
Gavin Grant

Elisabeth Sheffield. Gone. FC2, 2003. 268 pp. Paper: $13.95.

Stella Vanderzee is lost and almost alone in upper New York State. She’s looking for a painting, a Winslow Homer, an inheritance from her grandfather that will help her escape the series of dead-end jobs and relationships she is locked in. Interspersed with Stella’s drink-and-drug-fueled monologues are letters from her Aunt Judith—usually to people Judith knew at best peripherally. The letters, which are given to Stella, who almost immediately loses them, are the best part of the book. Judith’s voice is entirely convincing: educated, condescending, and cutting, and filled with put-downs, unverifiable claims, and lightly veiled insults. Judith, however, cannot stop herself from inserting her own story of how she and Stella’s mother, an artist, now dead, grew up together and where, how, and why they separated. Sheffield explores this loss from both sides. Stella’s faulty memory and hazy perceptions and Judith’s unsent letters provide alternating and diverging viewpoints of Stella’s mother and her life. There’s more here than just a comparison of memories—this is no upstate Rashomon-lite. Sheffield’s loser protagonist—searching for an inheritance that was gone before she arrived, losing her boyfriend, her job, her aunt’s letters, even her hotel room—is the archetypal lost person searching for home. Even if it’s only the idea of home, since the actuality is long gone. Stella has repudiated what remains of her family, but in need and desperation, she returns, only to find that her family is truly gone. Where is reliability? How can we go forward without looking back? And we haven’t even explored the sexual peccadilloes yet.