A Review of St. Ivo by Joanna Hershon
Joanna Hershon’s slim, yet layered fifth novel, St. Ivo, takes place mostly during a weekend getaway. Sarah and her husband, Mathew, visit their long-estranged friends, Kiki and Arman in upstate New York. The story, however, is far from linear. There are secrets in the background. There are masochistically overplayed memories and one, looming, life-defining mystery about Sarah’s absent daughter, Leda, that will keep you turning pages, as if you’re reading a thriller, even though you know it is not that.
St. Ivo is a story about one woman’s search for connection. Sarah struggles to connect with others while she struggles to connect her past and present lives because something happened with Leda that cleaved her life in two. There is before and there is after and Hershon’s mastery lies in her ability to show Sarah’s disjointedness, while making her story, as a whole, feel connected and complete.
Sarah lives inside a hardened shell, an all too familiar mechanism. As with Sarah, as with ourselves, the shell stems from pride, from a secret fear of not being enough. To avoid judgement, we keep thoughts, wishes, hopes, facts to ourselves. Habits, money, geography — other obstacles wedge themselves between relationships so that if we don’t make an effort, if we don’t share our secrets, our vulnerabilities, we lose touch. Our shells harden.
This isn’t new information. We know we have to be honest and open to connect with others, but it’s so much easier to digest this fact when we see the world through Sarah’s eyes, when we see how disconnected she is from her best friend, when we watch her seek out hollow connections with strangers because she can tell them lies. The lies provide only a temporary balm, a way to keep her hurt private and intact.
Sarah’s pain defines her and it takes the whole book for her to acknowledge that “Leda’s absence…was the center of her life. She’d chosen to make it so.” Here is the crux of all sustained misery, which Hershon drives uncomfortably yet satisfyingly home — more often than not, it’s of our own making. Yes, some things are out of our control but once the waves pass and we pick up the pieces, we can either choose to move on or we can stay put and polish our shells.
Hershon doesn’t tie everything up with a bow. There are questions left unanswered. There are levels to Sarah that might never be known, even to her, but we are left with hope. We are reminded that the spaces that form between true friends and partners are never permanent — they can deflate after just one, honest conversation because genuine connection breaks down our barriers and allows life, the ebb and flow of it, to come rushing back. In Hershon’s words, “they were breaking apart. They were coming together. They came and went with the tide.”
