Family’s Stories Piece Together a Fractured Picture of Marriage

WOMAN MADE OF SAND

A Novel in Stories

By Joann Kobin

Delphinium

178 pages; $22

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If we were to crowd all the characters that affect the marriage of Harriet and Phillip, the main characters in Joann Kobin’s novel told in short stories, “Woman Made of Sand,” into the archetypal nuptial bed, characters would be falling out of the sheets, pushing others aside and crawling over each other for space.

To give readers a comprehensive look at this marriage and family, the author of this first novel relies on alternating narrators, all of whom have biased opinions about the family’s happenings. There’s Harriet, the mewling wife who tells of her marriage’s disintegration and the new, if melancholy, life she builds for herself; next to her is Phillip, Harriet’s soon-to-be ex-husband, a weak man whose greatest desire is to be needed by a woman.

Then there are the couple’s two children: Matina, a sharp-tongued medical student who models on the side, and Eric, a budding dancer whose primary role seems to be gathering together his disjointed family.

Crowding the edges of the familial tale are Harriet’s eager-to-please mother, her absent father and domineering grandmother, as well as Phillip’s parents, particularly his mother, Belle, who survives her husband only to be lost amid her own life. After Phillip and Harriet divorce, Phillip’s new family joins in--the youthful and independent second wife, Marianne, and the youngest member of this disarrayed clan, baby Greg.

“Woman Made of Sand” centers on the difficulties of living with family--immediate and extended, those related by marriage and by blood--and all the tricky, prone-to-misunderstanding nuances such relations entail. If it’s true that blood is thicker than water, it’s also true that blood is harder to clean up.

This narrative offers a sad and somewhat bitter take on marital dissatisfaction. We see the bloom of promise in a union’s early days and discover an abiding loneliness that is, in Kobin’s telling, the core of wedlock.

Kobin’s stories follow a curiously jumbled chronology. The first tale, “Rain,” takes place during the funeral for Phillip’s father. As Phillip attempts to grieve, Harriet and their young children dance. It is a dance of recklessness and freedom as Harriet suddenly realizes she can no longer stay married to Phillip.

The next story jumps back in time to Harriet’s childhood, providing the copious back story of her upbringing, while a few tales later we’re catapulted into a future with Harriet, now a divorcee, interacting with her grown children and Phillip’s new wife. This unfolding requires readers to calculate how much time has passed since the previous story, or how far back in time the next story is taking us, a distraction that interrupts the novel’s flow.

The dancing of Harriet and her children in the first story is a theme Kobin uses often. Phillip doesn’t like to dance with Harriet. When other men do, she tumbles into bed with them. “Dancing triggers some biochemical change in my brain,” she explains. Dancing, in Kobin’s world, is a metaphor for the sexual, dynamic energy we look for in a mate. It also represents the deep aspirations we hold for our parents and children.

When dancing is juxtaposed against the mundane realities of family life, the discrepancies between what we want and what we have seem insurmountable.

In “His Mother, His Daughter,” for example, Phillip watches his widowed mother perform in a senior citizens pageant and is enthralled by an older woman whose dancing is hypnotic. How different would his life have been, he wonders wistfully, if his uptight mother could have danced like this sultry older woman?

In “Discipline and Will,” dance pulls the torn-apart family together to watch Eric in a college ballet. Eric, though, performs solely to please his family; the joy of dance has long ago left him. “We were splintered again,” Harriet reflects post-performance, “separate, united only by the table, and the glasses and silverware, and the half-eaten desserts. We loved Eric’s dancing, but the dance was over. And no one could say it was okay.”

Kobin’s characters find in dance and in their imaginations the only consolations for a life rife with disappointment and loneliness. The title story features Phillip on vacation with his second wife and the grown children from his first marriage. Phillip is unable to see in a genuine way the flesh-and-blood family gathered around him, so completely taken is he by the sand sculpture of a naked woman he creates on the beach. “He was in the center of his own world, in possession of his perfect woman.” With his sand woman, he feels complete. Real family life, however, holds none of that satisfaction.