Kaye Gibbons is a young American writer and [Sights Unseen] is her fifth book. It is a portrait of a manic depressive mother, by her daughter, and it reads like autobiography.

Madness may be a dramatic subject for fiction but it can also be a closed door, so that although the focus of this novel is on Maggie Barnes and the details of her breakdowns, she stays foreign, unknowable to her daughter and to the reader. There is a sense that if it were possible to climb into the madness more, to let us experience something of what Maggie Barnes was going through or to attempt to understand her psyche, the novel would have more depth. As it is, Maggie seems like a pastel version of a Tennessee Williams character who depends not on the kindness of strangers but on her brutish father-in-law (a tartar with the rest of his family). We seldom hear from Maggie directly—there is little dialogue. At first, the novel seems like a sensitively written freak show: Mother and her latest stunts.

But it improves and it is perhaps not surprising that the description of electric shock treatment is one of the best passages in the book. It is exceptionally well done: careful, horrified but not sensational and, most importantly, it is as close to Maggie Barnes as we are going to get. Equally good is the account of her changed appearance in hospital (the shock of an unbecoming hairstyle which seems to sum up the whole of her awkward, amnesiac new self) and the slow convalescence that follows treatment. It is also affecting and convincing that the daughter should hold on with such tenacity to the hope that, one day, her mother might become a real mother.

Kaye Gibbons writes with great facility and poise but there is not enough material here to sustain a novel (even if it contains enough lunacy to wreck several lives). Sights Unseen is itself an elegant straitjacket.