Danielle Valentine's novel, "Delicate Condition," is a harrowing tale told in first person by Anna Alcott, an actor who, after 20 years, is finally getting attention for her role in an Oscar-bound indie film. At the same time, though, as her biological clock ticks on, she's
…more desperate to get pregnant. As the story opens, after much stress and pain of multiple failed IVF treatments, she and her husband Dex are trying again.
When Anna becomes pregnant, mysterious sinister forces converge--some realistic to this reader, some tinged with magic and superstition. Strange occurrences involving her husband, friends, her doctors, people at the fertility clinic, and strangers who pop up and disappear spark her paranoia. Symbols and talismans threaten like dark messengers coming to warn her. Or is she imagining it all?
Valentine is skilled at raising tension, burying clues and misdirects. Psychological perceptions and physical changes make Anna feel like she's crazy yet she's almost sure she knows what she's seen and felt. Anna's journey toward motherhood is, according to the Author's Note, "intended to be hyperbolic," although the author says her symptoms are rooted in "real things that happen to women's bodies." And indeed, Anna's strange behaviors, her fears of pregnancy and giving birth are well drawn. She doesn't know who to trust.
Valentine intersperses random short chapters recounting horrendous birthing stories of fictional women from the 18th to the 21st centuries. I found this distracting, although the author made a good attempt at the end to provide a payoff for their inclusion.
As a reader I vacillated between believing Anna's perceptions and then suspecting she might be an unreliable narrator. I needed to know: was she going off the rails or was she a victim? This is one reason I raced to the end of this (little-bit-too-long) 410-page book. (less)
