I Am Clarence, the first novel by Elaine Kraf (1936-2013), was originally published in 1969. This rediscovered classic was ahead of its time with its wrenching, kaleidoscopic account of a single mother struggling with mental health and raising a child with a disability.
The lion's share is narrated by this unnamed New York City woman, a would-be poet and devoted caregiver to Clarence, who has frequent seizures, poor eyesight, and aphasia. The woman has had many lovers, including Clarence's hematologist and a violinist. She considers them all "Clarence's fathers" but regrets never settling down with Ferdinand, the tattooed circus performer. Memories from her time spent traveling with the circus blur into those from her two years hospitalized with psychosis. Images of elephants and masks abound. How much is real?
It's all deliciously off-kilter. Kraf (The Princess of 72nd Street) complicates the picture by presenting vignettes out of chronological order, supplementing them with poems and letters, and inserting a variety of first- and third-person perspectives on mother and son. The novel pushes the envelope through experimental form and passages voiced by those including the woman's brother, her doctor, a post-lobotomy patient, and a dead character. Readers must piece together the fragments--and question the woman's competence.
Novelist Sarah Manguso's astute introduction praises the "unnerving funhouse mirror" Kraf has created. As brilliant as it is unsettling, this story of desperate maternal love threatened by mental illness is a hidden gem like The Shutter of Snow by Emily Holmes Coleman and The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader and blogger at Bookish Beck