Another Review at MyShelf.Com

Publisher: HarperCollins
Release Date: 03/30/2004
ISBN: 0061093343
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Format Reviewed: Paperback
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Genre: Fiction
Reviewed: 2004
Reviewer: Allie Bates
Reviewer Notes:
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Fault Lines 
By Ann River Siddons

     Fault Lines is about as Southern as it can get and is full of symbols. Take the heroine’s name for example: Meritt Fowler. She is indeed meritorious, going way beyond any vision of the call of duty of the contemporary homemaker. Moreover, things in her life are fouled up. Caretaking, she declares of herself “is my hot button. The smallest allegation of moral slipshoddiness was my Achilles’ heel.” Caretaking is what her life is all about, so much so, that she loses her “self”. So Meritt’s merit is in her caretaking, until the day it all becomes too much, taking care of the live-in-Alzheimer-suffering-mother-in-law, neglected runaway daughter Glynn, the dumping out of the rats from the humane traps set by her husband . . . (wait reader, is that another symbol to examine?) So if she is like a rat in the humane traps set by her husband, and she is setting them free, what will she do about her own problems, which stem from the trap her own life has become? On the other hand, are the rats (which Pom had once poisoned to die in the walls and rot) symbols of the ugly problems she ought to be secretly liberating?

     Merritt’s husband Pom is a physician-fund-raiser out to save the world but he is married to his job, his patients, his fundraising activities and relies heavily on Merrit to save him. After she raises her little sister Laura, they have an uber-battle (not sure what this means?) and eventually Laura becomes an actress in Hollywood; she repeats a similar conflict with her daughter, who runs away to Aunt Laura. Merritt has no choice but to go after her into the earthquake territory where Laura lives. Which of the fault lines are important here? The fault lines in the earth, or the ones in Merritt’s life. Moreover, if the Teutonic plates in Merritt’s life settle, how will things be then?

     Siddons presents an acutely emotional melodrama about a family in crisis, about a woman in crisis when something just has to give. Deeply Southern in flavor and in sense of place and voice, Fault Lines lays bare the Southern woman’s intimate view of “leading lives of quiet desperation.” This reviewer found Fault Lines to be quite as emotionally exhausting as any Faulkner or O’Conner story ever read, and quite as tragic. Beware—it should be read with a generous supply of freshly ironed white lace handkerchiefs.