The Cherry Robbers by Sarai Walker

The Cherry Robbers

by Sarai Walker

I haven’t read Sarai Walker’s first novel Dietland, nor watched the series based on it, but I know it has been described as “genre bending” and as “part-Fight Club, part feminist manifesto”. The Cherry Robbers shows the same enthusiasm for upending genre expectations to convey a strong feminist message.  The novel is, in fact, a send-up of the Gothic novel which incorporates tropes of the genre even while comically subverting them.

The narrator and protagonist in The Cherry Robbers is eighty-year-old lesbian painter Sylvia Wren.  After a career spent in and inspired by New Mexico and its landscape, Sylvia is a respected, well-known – and well-off – figure, even though she lives like a recluse and avoids publicity like a plague.  And for good reason too.  Sylvia has a well-kept secret. She is actually Iris Chapel, the second youngest of six daughters of an arms magnate, brought up in a palatial mansion in Connecticut.  When a journalist threatens to reveal this early chapter in her life, Sylvia/Iris decides to face her past and write down her memories of childhood and youth. 

Albeit largely left to their own devices by their distant father and their eccentric mother (prey to visions of the victims of weapons manufactured by the Chapel factories), the six sisters lead a privileged life in each other’s company.   When the eldest daughter becomes engaged to a dashing young man, her mother entreats her to cancel the wedding, prophesying tragedy.  Hardly anyone believes the mother’s rants, but tragedy does strike, in the most melodramatic of ways, after the wedding night.    History keeps repeating itself for the other sisters, a sure sign that not only is the Chapel mansion haunted, but the family itself also seems struck by a curse.  Will Iris manage to outrun it?

The Cherry Robbers reads like a version of The Virgin Suicides in which the voyeuristic male gaze of that novel’s rather morbid narrator is substituted with the voice of a feisty, self-deprecating, feminist heroine.  Walker’s novel is best approached as a deliberately OTT creation, painted in garish colours, with little attempt at nuance.  The central metaphor of the novel is hardly subtle.  All the male suitors are cartoonish, cardboard figures.  So are, up to a point, the Chapel sisters who readily sacrifice themselves to them.  Yet, the novel is still successful in its combination of comedy and horror, providing a refreshing alternative take on well-worn Gothic tropes.  

Kindle Edition, 400 pages

Expected publication: February 1st 2022