The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Mad Elaine by Helen Stevenson
Rebecca Kaiser

Helen Stevenson. Mad Elaine. Anchor/Transworld (Ealing: England), 1998. 236 pp. £9.99.

Helen Stevenson’s third novel, Mad Elaine, is a hilarious and touching look at the life of a social misfit. An intelligent and sensitive librarian, thirty-year-old Madelaine Butcher is a little on the heavy side, lives with her parents, and has a mole on her chin with which she has a close personal relationship, because, it seems, she can find no real human contact. Until the day she meets Martin Bradfield, who is able to make her feel noticed and anything but ordinary.

Part attempted romance, part murder mystery, this novel is reminiscent of Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil in its postmodern, postfeminist look inside the mind of a woman—with neither the modelfigure nor future of a classic heroine—who is foreign in her own rapidly changing world. Yet Stevenson’s is a much more sympathetic narrator whose imagination, while as lively as that of Weldon’s Ruth, allows her to escape the pain and humiliation of her life without having to resort to returning the unkindness that is bestowed upon her every day. Madelaine creates a vivid fantasy world—so vivid, in fact, that it’s difficult to be certain whether the last third of the novel is indeed fantasy or reportage—whereby she is able to be at once strong, willful, bitingly funny, and nice. Much like her own personal heroine, Maria von Trapp of The Sound of Music, Madelaine wishes to find the best in every situation, whether the good she finds is real or not, lending alternately to sadly ironic and darkly funny results.

This fast-paced novel (comprised of short, headlined vignettes) offers a witty yet honest look at an abject, unnoticed, and lonely everywoman who may not find a place for herself in the modern world, but certainly tells an intriguing story. [Rebecca Kaiser]