Adventures in Lesbian Fiction:

Tea

by Stacey D'Erasmo

Review byThe Plaid Adder
Comments:plaidder@mindspring.com

Disclaimer: Some of these reviews will contain spoilers. All were generated after discussing the books in a lesbian book group to which I belong. However, the opinions represented below are my own, and nobody else connected with the group should be held responsible for them.

Stacey D'Erasmo's Tea is probably the best-written and most intriguing lesbian coming of age novel I can remember reading. The book follows the career of its protagonist Isabel, who based on her age and the setting must have been born in or around 1960. The novel is divided into three sections dealing with three different phases of her life: "Morning," which focuses on the period before, during, and after Isabel's mother's suicide; "Afternoon," during which the adolescent Isabel discovers first love and an interest in theater at the same time; and "Evening," which shows the twentysomething Isabel living the bohemian life in New York in the 1980s with her partner Thea. Isabel is a good character--sympathetic without being overly idealized, and introspective without being pretentious and annoying--and although her naivete is pretty palpable all the way through it doesn't undermine her intelligence or the validity of her emotions.

The narrative actually does a very good job of reminding you what it was like to be young and idealistic. For instance, during the third section, when Isabel thinks about the cutting-edge avant-garde feminist film that she and Thea are supposed to be making together, you as the reader can tell that this movie is never going to be made and would be truly awful if it were, but at the same time you absolutely understand why Isabel believes in it the way she does. Liza and I both liked the middle section best, because we both really liked the way her first relationship develops. Isabel falls for a woman named Rebecca who stage manages a low-budget avant-garde theater group doing a production of Equus, and although Rebecca is somewhat older and also much more initiated into the whole being-a-lesbian thing, Isabel is the one who decides to mount an organized campaign of seduction, and it's very satisfying when it finally works.

The other thing that I really liked about Tea was the way it handled Isabel's mother's suicide. It does overshadow everything Isabel does, but it doesn't become melodramatic, and it doesn't doom Isabel to permanent misery. There is no representation of the death itself, the funeral, or any of that; it's all just about Isabel trying to live with it later. The most interesting thing about the book, really, is the way that loss grows and develops along with Isabel. In the third section we find out that Isabel has been observing a private ritual every year on her birthday, where she imagines a gift that her mother would have given her if she were still alive. The description of how that works for her felt very real to me, as does the description of what happens that year when she gradually discovers that in fact her imagination and her memory really can't keep her mother with her, because she was never really there to start with.

It all sounds very serious, and it pretty much is, but there is also a sense of humor to it; Isabel's earnestness does become amusing although it's never mocked, and in the third section there is a great subplot involving her work at a New York arts foundation which is both funny and very touching at the same time. I don't *love* the book the way I do love some books, but I'm glad I read it, and I give it two contemplative but satisfied thumbs up.

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