cover image Light Sister, Dark Sister

Light Sister, Dark Sister

Lee Walmsley, Amelie Walmsley. Random House (NY), $20 (293pp) ISBN 978-0-679-41455-1

Wistfully, sensitively, this low-key first novel set in New Orleans circles around its theme of two sisters--one sick, one sound. Radiant Bobbie Maubry, a brainy acting student whose manic brilliance veers ever more into psychosis, commandeers all the attention, while her lackluster sister Gray loiters ``inconspicuous and gray, a moth on the wall.'' Gray initially struggles to throw off her self-image as Bobbie's dimwitted shadow and move toward autonomy. With Bobbie growing more erratic and suicidal, more ``glittery-eyed'' and unable to distinguish reality from mirage, Gray's next task is to talk herself out of the duty to be her sister's keeper. The girls vie for parental esteem--from volatile Max, their architect father, and Mudie, their arty, moody mother. Both are viewed as childish egotists, indulging their destructive whims: Max runs around offstage with his mistress, Mudie cowers in her room and sculpts obsessively. Though heavy blame falls on Max and Mudie for their daughters' problems, both parents seem more bland than sinister. Absent is any sense of smothering horror as Bobbie, in and out of institutions, hovers as Gray's doppelganger, often posing as Gray. The several literary allusions to Antigone and Ismene (Oedipus's daughters) obtrude self-consciously. While the two-sisters theme gets its ruminative due, what the novel finally lacks is a vibrant forward drive. (Mar.)