by Poppy Adams.

Knopf. 275 pages. $23.95.

BY MANDY TWADDELL
Special to the Journal

The novel opens with these provocative lines: “It’s ten to two in the afternoon, and I’ve been waiting for my little sister, Vivi, since one-thirty. She’s finally coming home, at sixty-seven years old, after an absence of nearly fifty years.”

What happened to her? Fortunately, Poppy Adams’ prose compensates for the roadblocks, detours, and roundabout paths on the way to answering that tantalizing question.

The author is a documentary filmmaker, and perhaps that explains her focus on the visual. Lush language evokes pictures of the crumbling stately home of the Kendal family, once wealthy and renowned for its expertise in the study of moths. Decay, procreation, and metamorphosis are emblematic features of their subject as well as the Kendals themselves.

The great house is “. . . iced in Gothic extravaganza and topped with castellated turrets, an observatory, . . . and mock-Elizabethan chimney stacks that rise above the peaks and valleys within the immense landscape of the roof.”

A family of four dwells within: Clive is an eccentric, “a misfit among misfits” so attuned to the world of insects that he overlooks the disintegration of his beautiful and engaging wife, Maud, a worsening alcoholic. Clive is lovingly portrayed. The scene in which Maud presents him with a new contraption to attract and catch his specimens is masterful.

There is Ginny, the scientist daughter who works with her father, and Viva the handsome younger sister. Most of their story is told through Ginny in a series of flashbacks. Viva marries Arthur, but because she cannot have children, she asks Ginny to bear Arthur’s child. The sisters will raise the offspring together at Bulburrow Court, their common home.

Adams notes that before fertility clinics, this arrangement was not altogether rare. A relative would be chosen as a surrogate and children were conceived the old-fashioned way. In the case of Ginny and Arthur, their first attempt fails. A series of follow-ups take place, and one wonders if emotional attachment comes into play along with conception, pregnancy and childbirth. There are no steamy passages; Ginny’s effort to propagate the Kendal clan is as erotic as the copulation of moths.

When the story returns to the opening scene and the reappearance of Viva, the two sisters are old, decrepit, and demented. Ginny and Viva have conflicting memories of their parents, and I will not spoil your reading by revealing the climax of their reunion. The Sister is an ideal book for discussion groups, because it prompts analysis with a surprise ending that is both stunning and ambiguous. THE SISTER,

jimandy111@cox.net