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OPEN ME Issue #32

By Sunshine O’ Donnell (MacAdam/Cage, $23, 225 pages)

By Ling Ma
Published: June 1st, 2007 | 12:00am

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The title of Sunshine O’Donnell’s debut novel is taken from the note that the narrator’s great-grandmother leaves behind after she dies. “Open me,” it reads, and after her belly is dutifully sliced open, her children find swallowed valuables (spoons and brooches) accumulated over a lifetime that the powerful matriarch hoarded to ensure her family’s survival in the New World.

Open Me is about the generational secrets and traditions passed along a secret society of Wailers whose line stretches back as far as Julius Caesar’s funeral. Purveyors of the “funeral arts,” the Wailers are professional mourners who make an illegal living crying at funerals. Their performances are often paid for by the deceased’s loved ones. The novel focuses on Mem — or Mirabelle, as she’s known to the Unprofessionals of the outside world — who is born into the family business and raised to cry alongside her mother at Pennsylvanian funerals of the 1970s and ’80s.

It’s an exciting, original, and fittingly grandiose conceit. Artfully crosshatched with fact and fiction, the story is filled with enough bright, baroque trinkets to fill up a curio cabinet, and O’ Donnell classes it up with some lovingly pored-over passages. Such as: “Mem was the secret name, an ancient word that came from an upside-down tree with roots reaching up to the sky, a head of old fingers stirring the cosmos like soup.”

Here’s the sad part. Despite such an auspicious beginning, Open Me doesn’t quite get past the novelty of its own trappings. As a novel, it doesn’t seem to know what to do with itself, and after sputtering around for a while, finally settles on explicating the obvious: the emotional drain of crying as a profession. Long passages devoted to Mem’s emotional state begin to read like filler a few chapters into the book.

There are more interesting ideas that O’Donnell half-pursues here: the sadomasochistic relationship between mothers and daughters, the sole delegation of women as professors of emotion, and the pornography of sorrow against the spin culture of America. Unfortunately, it’s hard to see most of this clearly through the veil of tears that O’Donnell has concealed much of her story with. There’s another story here somewhere, but the one in front of us has never seemed so, well, morose and hand-wringing.