I would like to have been in the publishing meeting where this novel was proposed. "So, Curtis Sittenfeld, bestselling author of American Wife and Prep, wants to write a book about psychic twins…" Tumbleweed. It's a tough sell. But that's only on the surface. Because any Sittenfeld novel is something unusually excellent. Plus, her dexterity as a writer swiftly allows you to forget that you are reading about two sisters with psychic abilities. And it becomes about much bigger things: family, trust, betrayal, forgiveness.
"Sisterland" is the nameplate on the door of the childhood bedroom inhabited by identical twins Violet and Kate. As they grow up in St Louis, they slowly realise that they both have "senses" – the gift of seeing into the future. Or maybe that's not really what it is exactly, it's more of an intuition about people and places and things that may be about to happen. Sittenfeld is clever with this: she describes Violet and Kate as having something special about them but she describes it in such a way that anyone could imagine having that feeling and so it does not feel weird or supernatural, it just feels like enhanced instinct.
The twins' childhood is blighted by their mother's depression (she rarely leaves her bedroom) and their father's emotional distance. But they have each other. And Kate manages to extract some social currency out of being able to predict stuff. As they hit adolescence, however, the two have to make a decision: are they going to use their senses or not? Vi, the maverick, drops out of mainstream life and becomes a medium. Kate, the conventionalist, "goes straight" and forges a life as a "normal" wife and mother, ignoring her premonitions. Although the two try to leave St Louis, they are somehow drawn back and end up living near each other.
Everything changes when Vi has a vision that an earthquake is coming and she decides to go public with it by making an announcement on television. Kate is horrified. It's obvious that Vi is going to be the centre of a publicity circus in the run-up to the date of the prediction. And it's not easy to hide the fact that you have a twin sister. What Kate is most afraid of is that people will know that she too has visions, a fact she has concealed for years. Now, increasingly, the "senses" are returning. Haunted by her mother's mental illness and struggling as a new mother of two toddlers herself, this is what Kate fears most: having a premonition of something that may or may not happen to her children. And driving herself mad with fear.
Sittenfeld handles all this with humour and a light touch. She's at her best when depicting everyday life and, especially, the internal monologues of adolescents (fans of Prep will be in heaven) and neurotic new mothers. I don't think I've read better passages on parenting small children anywhere (or, indeed, many passages at all). Sittenfeld has really nailed how to write about childcare in a way that is not sentimental or cloying or too brutal. The relationship between Kate and her stay-at-home daddy friend Hank is beautifully drawn, the two spending long days doing nothing (ie everything) with their small children. Meanwhile, Kate's husband, Jeremy, and Hank's wife, Courtney – the breadwinners – have a professional life and a "we work, you know?" connection that the stay-at-home parents purport to envy but really don't. The dynamic between the two couples is electric, with Kate and Hank both knowing too much about each other's marriage.
Although the story is told from Kate's perspective, it's a generous, thoroughly enjoyable portrait of the twin sister, Vi, who Kate wants to think of as a loon but secretly envies. Violet is a great character: she eats too much, shows off about her psychic abilities and somehow manages to stumble into a lesbian relationship without meaning to. Kate's supposedly the one you can rely on. But, the reader senses, Violet, with all her flaws and unpredictability, is the one who's for real.
Although this isn't a thriller, it is a work of psychological genius and has a wonderful twist at the end. Sittenfeld has crafted a literary page-turner masquerading as a feud between two sisters. In reality it's about the politics of marital life and the difficulty of out-running your own childhood. It has all the best qualities of Tom Perrotta's Little Children and all the fine, up-close detail of Ann Patchett's work. There's a fizzing, daring originality to Sisterland that draws you in and takes your breath away. When it comes to tearing apart contemporary American family life one microscopic fibre at a time, Sittenfeld is up there in a class of her own. If I wasn't so obsessed with Lionel Shriver's Big Brother (another unflinching portrait of family life), I'd call it the book of the year.
