IF Goodreads is anything to go by, there are a lot of people out there who thought Sisterland by Curtis Sittenfeld was a rubbish novel. I made the tragic error of actually spending time flicking through the commentary on the site, and while I regret that I will never get those 20 minutes of my life back, I’m glad to be able to say that you shouldn’t pay any attention to them. Well, not much, anyway. Hardly any, as a matter of fact.

Sisterland is the story of two ... wait for it ... sisters. Twin sisters, actually, who are almost polar opposites. One is Kate, a happily married, devoted mother whose life is centered around providing her family and loved ones with a normal, stable environment. The other, Violet, is a manic on-again, off-again lesbian with an utter lack of regard for anyone besides herself, a sense of entitlement so engorged that it practically deserves a novel unto itself, and a burning desire to be noticed — to be anything other than normal.

This would probably not be terribly interesting as the central conceit of a novel were it not for the fact that both sisters share not a twin-bond, but instead, are gifted with what Kate, our protagonist, chooses to call “senses”. In short, they’re psychic, and while, as you can imagine, Violet revels in her abilities, holding séances and making any number of predictions, Kate has managed, through sheer force of will, to shut down any access to her clairvoyant talents.

Towards the beginning of the novel, the sisters have the first of many arguments to which readers will be introduced. Violet has just informed Kate, with no small degree of self-satisfaction, that she has begun to date women. Kate, trying to raise her concerns over this without coming across as unsupportive, points out that this may complicate her sister’s chances at having children. Never one to be left at a loss for words, Violet defiantly snaps back: “Children are nothing but a problem people create and then congratulate themselves on solving.”

A mother of two, Kate is understandably underwhelmed by this comment. But as Sisterland unfolds, it returns, again and again, to the idea of self-fulfilling prophecies and the consequences of self-created problems. Otherwise steadfastly prosaic in tone and content, Sittenfeld’s book leverages the idea of psychic abilities as a metaphor for the to-and-fro between how much of life is choice and how much destiny.

But of course, the central trauma informing this story is from an awful experience as a teenager, in which Kate begins to realise that she somehow knows which of her classmates are going to die, and whom are cheating on each other. Caught up in a spiral of guilt and an oddly believable sense of psychic shame (perhaps partly informed by the fact that Violet is one of the cheating parties), Kate starts trying to suppress her abilities. She comes out of high school convinced that her powers are, at heart, malignant — that they only ever alert her to what’s wrong in the world — and that she may suffer for even acknowledging her gift, let alone actively using it.

Self-loathing is always a powerful motivator, and by the time Sisterland opens in 2009, Kate is married, and living the sort of humdrum, terribly suburban life that is the complete antithesis of everything she has feared while growing up. And then, one morning, Kate wakes amidst a minor earthquake. Not a metaphorical one: everything is fine at home — the kids are happy, her smart, thoughtful husband is still gainfully employed and her friends are all A-OK. But Violet, her sister, has capitalised on the (literal) stirrings of the tremors and gone public with a prediction that there will soon be a bigger earthquake, one that will devastate the region.

Kate’s husband, who is a geophysicist at the local university, scoffs at Violet’s psychic flim-flammery, but Kate herself feels that something is brewing. As Sittenfeld fleshes out her novel, we begin to see how the stress of “agreeing” with her husband while internally sharing Violet’s premonitions begins to have an effect on Kate. Although it is easy to dismiss Violet’s prediction as a commercial gambit — to grow her fledgling, erratic business as a professional clairvoyant — Kate soon starts to feel that something bad is coming her way; torn between loyalty to her husband and to her sister, and most of all terrified that her family might in any way come to harm, she begins to think back to her childhood, rifling through her memories and past experiences to figure out, once and for all, whether her “senses” are innately good or evil.

As Sittenfeld ratchets up Kate’s anxiety levels, she also fleshes out the twins’ back-story with flashbacks to their shared adolescence, which includes a depressive mother and an affectionate-but-distant father. In the present day, memory meets reality as Kate tries to take care of her immediate family, her now elderly father, and (like it or not) Violet. The only non-family member with whom she interacts at any length is Hank, a stay-at-home dad whose wife works with Jeremy, Kate’s husband, at the university.

Sisterland could easily have slipped into the quicksand of boredom, a tepid mass of turgidity that explored the mundane complexity of a frustrated housewife. Sittenfeld avoids this, despite only having Kate as a protagonist, by providing us with frequent peeks into Violet’s life-less-ordinary. This is not to say that Kate is any way dull; on the contrary, she is a perceptive, smart woman, but one who is crippled by her own fears and insecurities. How much of that is due to her own perception vs. reality, is something we start understanding only as we see how she starts spiralling into a pit of self-fuelled panic, a state that verges on the delusional and leads to rampant flights of terrorised fantasy.

In general, this makes for a fairly compelling story, but Sittenfeld does, I think, struggle to actually make Kate empathetic. There are times when, tired of an endless tale of panic, you may find yourself itching to reach into the pages of Sisterland and shove a Valium down her throat, if only to shut her up for a few minutes. If it weren’t for the far less timorous wee beastie that is Violet, the novel could easily become tiresome. Violet can undoubtedly be annoying, but at least she embraces who she is, rather than burying it under an avalanche of neuroses. The tension between Violet’s ‘I am who I am, who the hell are you?’ and Kate’s ‘Let nothing disturb me!’ attitudes towards life provides energy and imparts essential momentum to the story. This is fuelled by the essential opposition in which each of the sisters lives, relative to the other: whether it’s body image, sexuality, or life-plan, they are constantly recreating and repositioning themselves in the lens of what the other will find most aggravating; it’s the kind of passive-aggressive sibling rivalry that almost everyone will either have experienced first-hand or encountered at some point in their lives.

Although Sisterland isn’t a thriller per se, it does manage to combine the gut-stirring tension of that genre with a fine sense of familial drama. It would have been very easy for this novel to become stale; the subject matter of Kate’s family, which comprises the vast majority of the novel, can sometimes verge on the tepid. Sittenfeld manages, however, to delicately dissect not only issues of contemporary family life, but also to throw in a couple of twists from outside the core remit of the plot. The twist that is the capstone to Sisterland is well-wrought, although ultimately the conclusion of the novel is somewhat deflating — but in keeping with her topic, Sittenfeld hasn’t actually failed to write a satisfactory novel, but instead to mirror life with only a mild distortion.

Sisterland

(NOVEL)

By Curtis Sittenfeld

Random House, US

ISBN 978-1400068319

416pp.