“A Cupboard Full of Coats”
By Yvvette Edwards
(Amistad)
“A Cupboard Full of Coats,” Yvvette Edwards’ first novel, was good enough to crack the long list last summer for the Man Booker Prize. So why is it only now crashing ashore here? Beats me, but I’ll predict it makes waves now that it has.
Maybe the subject matter explains the delay. Set among London’s Caribbean immigrants, “Coats” is the backward-looking story of a battered woman and three people who played a role in her death: the two men who loved her and the daughter ― appropriately named Jinx and now 30 ― who has spent much of the ensuing 14 years hating her.
As the novel begins, Jinx is divorced and also estranged from her 4-year-old son, who lives with his father and is afraid of her. Sheathed in an “armour of indifference that I’d been enveloped in for years” and convinced that “the only person I could ever truly depend on was me,” she lives alone.
Things quickly change after she opens the door one Friday and finds the 50-something Lemon on the doorstep. Friend to Jinx’s mother, Lemon also is best friend to Berris, the man jailed for her murder. Jinx lets Lemon in ― along with all the baggage from the past that she has tried so hard to bury.
During the ensuing weekend, Lemon helps her unpack it, intermittently taking charge of a story that he and Jinx unravel together, in deftly interwoven first-person accounts.
“Most stories are like that bowl of soup you eating now,” Lemon tells Jinx, as she devours one of the many Caribbean dishes he serves up, each of them reminding Jinx of her mother. “A whole heap of ingredients” must be “put together at the proper time.”
Edwards practices what Lemon preaches in bringing her own rich stew to a simmer.
“Coats” travels back to the impoverished Montserrat beginnings that Lemon and Berris endured as well as the more sheltered childhoods of Jinx and her mother. These flashbacks share time with the present, in which Jinx tries to make sense of the mess she has made of her life.
It’s hard to forget Lemon’s unique voice, refracted through his patois and laced with a humor that always eventually gives way to melancholy, as he reflects on all the mistakes he has made and how badly he now wants to put them right.
But I was even more taken by Edwards’ ability to toggle between the 30-year-old Jinx and her memories of what she was like as a 16-year-old girl: Fascinated and repelled by sex. Adoring her mother and jealous of her mother’s beauty. Center of her own and her mother’s universe ― making it all the harder to accept how everything changes, once her mother falls for Berris.
Edwards’ novel has its shortcomings. Jinx’s mother remains a cipher, enshrouded in a naivete that isn’t always credible. The writing ― lyrical, evocative and generally a real strength ― occasionally shifts into overdrive. The feel-good ending is much too neat.
But one could cast each of these stones at Dickens, a fellow Londoner with whom Edwards shares far more than setting, including expert plotting, a flair for the dramatic and an ability to create characters both vividly idiosyncratic and classically archetypal.
The result is a story that is both grounded in the everyday and able to transcend it, offering more broadly applicable and spot-on psychological insights. About adolescence and sexual awakening. The difficulties and guilt that go with being a single mother who has her own needs. How physical and emotional hunger can spawn all-consuming jealousy as well as love.
I’d have liked to watch Edwards spread these themes across a larger, Dickens-size canvas ― a luxury few first-time novelists can afford. All the more reason to eagerly await the next book, from a novelist who will make her second journey across the Atlantic with plenty of wind in her sails. (MCT)
