reviewed by Dina Di Maio

Every once in a while a book comes along that puts the creative back in creative writing. Now that book is Carrying the Body by Dawn Raffel (Scribner 2002). Raffel, the executive articles editor of O, the Oprah Magazine, is no stranger to fiction. She was fiction editor of Redbook and published the highly praised collection of stories, In the Year of Long Division.

Her follow-up, Carrying the Body, deserves praise as well. It is one of those can’t-put-down books that has the reader happily working through Raffel’s mesmerizing prose to piece together the story of this depressed and fallen family. The family consists of two sisters, one Elise, and one called "the Aunt," the father of the sisters, Elise’s son, and the oft-alluded to dead mother. The story opens with Elise returning to her childhood home with her new son who is very sick. Her sister, the child’s aunt, never left home and dutifully cares for her ailing father—though not without resentment that she eases with gin. Elise was the restless one who left for a lover. She returns to search for an heirloom of her mother’s hidden in the house. What she does with it when she finds it and what happens because of that only compounds the tragedy for these unfortunate characters.

Though Carrying the Body is a tragic tale, it’s an enthralling read because of Raffel’s masterful use of language.

For more on Dawn Raffel, check out her interview here.

Dina created this site.