Wintering Book

Wintering, a novel of Sylvia Plath by Kate Moses, received glowing accolades from enough newspapers and reviewers to fill several pages at the front of the novel. Praise is heaped on the lucid intensity of the prose and the ability for Moses to give insight into the last several months of Plath's life. I'm going to be in the minority in not loving this book, mostly because I am of the opinion that if you want Plath, there is plenty about Plath by Plath. Between her journals, her letters home, and her collected poems, there is no shortage of access to the writer herself. Yes, Moses writes in a Plath-like voice, but that is the flaw: it is only like Plath, it is not actually Plath. If you want the real deal, go straight to the canon. There is no need for an intermediary, not even one as talented as Moses - especially when Moses takes what was written in legitimate first-person and puts it at a third person remove.

Wintering's format is taken directly from Plath's intended layout for Ariel. Each chapter is named for one of the Ariel poems, and the content follows suit, tying together events from the poem, journals, and other sources. The format lends an interesting ebb and flow to the recounting of Plath's story. The details are shown in a fevered, stop-caption motion that disregards any sense of chronology and shatters the sense that this might be a conventional biography written from an unconventional perspective. The movement of the story through time keeps the reader unbalanced in a way that emphasizes the sense of imbalance Plath herself seems to have felt during the tumultuous and emotional time period.

I would have been smitten with this book if it had been written as straight fiction. There are many beautiful scenes that felt straight fiction written by Moses, and not Moses-imagining-herself-as-Plath. If you need one reason to pick up Wintering, Chapter Six: Barren Woman is it. The intensity of Assia's interest in acquiring Sylvia's life is breathtaking and unforgettable. The breakfast where Assia dresses like Sylvia and repeats a dream she knows will attract Ted is taut, storytelling perfection. Moses has an unparalleled talent for describing the emotional landscape of a shattered woman trying to rebuild herself. More than anything, I would love to read a story by Moses that isn't fictionalized biography. I bet that would be a book I could love without any reservation.