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SmallSpiralNoteBook
A MOUTHFUL OF AIR By Amy Koppelman
Reviewed by Katherine Darnell
Julie Davis, the narrator of Amy Koppelman’s debut novel, is a woman holding onto life by a tenuous thread. When we first meet her, she is fresh from a suicide attempt and trying to reclaim her life as a housewife to Ethan and mother to her one-year old son Teddy. She tries to focus on small, manageable tasks to get through each day. Julie lives a life of privilege and relative ease, and it is Koppelman’s task to make this life, which appears perfect and enviable from the outside, real to the reader as something with deeper, darker, more painful realities. Julie’s husband is supportive and loving, and loving, and while midway through the novel an affair
is hinted at, it’s difficult |
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to tell if these suspicions are only in
Julie’s mind. Julie is haunted by a perceived childhood rejection by
her father; she finds it very hard to overcome this early experience
of abandonment. Her mother is presented as self-involved, more
interested in her own plastic surgery and damaged past than the
postpartum pain that her daughter is experiencing. Julie’s problem
seems to be that she got what she wanted from life – she escaped her
tumultuous past and found a stable, successful, attentive husband
with which to have a healthy baby boy – but now that Julie has this
life, she starts to question if she deserves it, and if she was
really ready for it after all. Koppelman’s writing is measured and careful; she employs exacting
language to convey the fragile emotions of her narrator. Julie, Ethan,
and Teddy’s quiet life together is well-drawn, and while not making
strong claims for Julie’s depression, there are subtle hints that the
perfection might feel overwhelming and entrapping to Julie. Koppelman
employs a clever, masterful stylistic trick by revamping the opening
passage at the end of the novel. She utilizes the same words to describe
Julie in action in both places: “She is now to any casual observer
simply another young, tallishly attractive girl . . .” At the novel’s
opening, this is a benign description of our narrator moving through her
day, while at the end of the novel the context has changed dramatically,
and the description is now one of horrifying suspense. By this point,
the reader is no longer a casual observer, and Julie is not “simply”
anything. This is a powerful moment, and one that Koppelman handles
deftly.
One thing that could have enriched “A Mouthful of Air” would be
fuller explanations of Julie’s depression, and more concrete details of
her father’s abandonment. As it is, some of the background feels wispy
and vague, slightly underdeveloped. We spend so much time inside of
Julie’s sensitive, self-involved head that it becomes difficult to parse
how much of her emotional abandonment is real and how much of it she has
created. The hyper-internal quality of the narrative serves to showcase
Julie’s shaky emotional state, but it starts to feel thin and lacking in
enough substance to explain and support what happens in the dramatic,
tragic ending.
Overall, Koppelman has succeeded in writing a solid portrait of an
unraveling woman. What the novel lacks in narrative weight, it more than
makes up for with a strong emotional understanding of the narrator.
Marked by a careful attention to detail and nimble writing skills, “A
Mouthful of Air” is a strong debut.
Read enough? Click here to buy the book online today!
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