For 16 months in the mid-1970s, America’s clocks sprang forward and never fell back.
Every other weekend between 1988 and 1998, I became, as my fourth-grade teacher christened me, Miss Pan Am, jetting between Boston’s Logan Airport and LaGuardia’s Marine Air Terminal. I was born in New York City, and that’s where my father remained when my mother relocated to the north, where she grew up; Newburyport, Massachusetts, would become my adopted hometown.
A life like that sees a lot of repetition. For me, much of that trip played out on a strip of U.S. Route 1, all neon signs and strange attractions, when I sat as a passenger on the 48-minute drive between the airport and my mom’s home. But what’s still the most fascinating in my childhood memory is a gargantuan, totem-festooned restaurant called Kowloon, located on Route 1 just 10 miles north of the airport in a town called Saugus.
In “The Last Confessions of Sylvia P.,” Kravetz uses narratives told by other women to create the latest incarnation of Plath, who, like Virginia Woolf before her, has become, beyond the author of her poetry and prose, a character in her own right.
This novel is a portrait of the artist as a monster, and for readers undeterred by the grand tradition of middle-class domestic realism, it’s a fine and haunting book.
Today, like other days of my conscious
existence, my tongue is at war with a new language —
I wake to the sound of my neighbors upstairs as if they are bowling.
And maybe they are, all pins and love fallen over.
I lie against my floor, if only to feel that kind of affection.