Sex and the Sacred

By Lev Grossman

Sue Monk Kidd's first novel was a miraculous anomaly. A wise, tender little coming-of-age tale about a Southern girl finding herself, The Secret Life of Bees unexpectedly found itself on the best-seller lists and went on to sell 31/2 million copies. The heroine of Kidd's second novel, The Mermaid Chair (Viking; 335 pages), has already come of age, some time ago in fact. But her problems are just getting started.

Jessie Sullivan is 42--"just old enough for the bottom to start falling out of things," as one character puts it--and suffocating in a Stepford-perfect marriage. "I lived molded to the smallest space possible," she says, "my days the size of little beads that passed without passion through my fingers." When word arrives that her mom has cut off her index finger in a fit of religious mania, Jessie rushes off to take care of her, back to the tiny island off the coast of South Carolina where Jessie grew up. (She's secretly grateful for any excuse to get out of the house.) On the island she meets a skeptical monk-in-training named Brother Thomas, who has a tortured soul and really nice eyes. Sparks fly. Serious, Thorn Birds sparks.

There's a lot going on here. Why is Jessie's mother so unhappy? Why, after 20 years of marriage, is Jessie suddenly stepping out with a hunky monk? And can doubting Thomas choose between Jessie and his final monastic vows? Secret Life revolved around an icon, a black Madonna. This time it's a chair carved in the shape of a mermaid, a symbol of our spiritually amphibious nature, of the inner depths to which we must descend before we can solve the problems of our placid surface existence.

Kidd borrows liberally from her first novel--a trio of salty, independent island women is reminiscent of the beekeeping sisters of Secret Life--but her writing is so smart and sharp, she gives new life to old midlife crises, and she draws connections from the feminine to the divine to the erotic that a lesser writer wouldn't see, and might not have the guts to follow. "Yes, there was transgression and betrayal and wrongness in it," Jessie says of her affair, "but also mystery and what felt like holiness, an actual holiness." --By Lev Grossman