Jessie nearly ruins four lives – her own, her husband’s, her daughter’s and her lover’s – because she is selfish, bored and greedy. She doesn't fight to keep this monk at all so he's clearly NOT the greatest passion of her life.
Especially since SPOILER she ends up going back to her all-too-forgiving husband (who frickin’ takes her back!) at the end. But don’t have an affair because you’re bored – and claim it’s the greatest passion of your life. Go home and rebuild your relationship with your mother. See a shrink/massage therapist/acupuncturist. Throw yourself into the art you already create or try something new. But my god, this character Jessie doesn’t have a fulltime job and is fully financially supported by her husband – she's got all the freedom and time in the world, and she chooses to have an affair at a moment's notice to figure out what she wants to do with her life? Ugh. And finding your life stultifying is completely identifiable. I can understand a mother losing her center when her child goes away to school.
This illicit relationship ultimately fails but in its wake Jessie finds herself a new woman: mending fences with her mother, coming to grips with her father’s death decades earlier, reveling in new artistic creations. While there, away from her devoted (if slightly predictable) psychiatrist husband, Jessie indulges in an affair with a handsome monk who is about to take his permanent vows. When Jessie’s estranged mother starts exhibiting erratic behavior, Jessie returns to the lush South Carolina island of her childhood to care for her mother. Jessie, married for 20+ years, a fulltime homemaker/part-time artist, finds herself adrift in her life when her only child heads off to college. The Mermaid Chair is lazy, irresponsible storytelling with a greedy, selfish protagonist at its center. “…a quite powerful feminist statement … a multidimensional pleasure.” – Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “Kidd draws connections from the feminine to the divine to the erotic that a lesser writer wouldn’t see, and might not have the guts to follow.” – Time.
But in reality, even just sitting here now and reading the rave blurbs on the covers is pissing me off even more: “Soulful in its probing of the human heart.” – San Francisco Chronicle. It’s not supposed to have done that - it’s fluff. The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd is the first book that’s pissed me off in a long while.
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