Isabel Out of the Rain
What Samuel Beckett achieves in so many of his works through the exploration of “absence,” Catherine Gammon in Isabel Out of the Rain also achieves but through presence, accumulation, excess. I am always suspicious when someone describes a work as poetic, always wondering why then the work isn’t a poem. Gammon manages to be poetic, while never sacrificing the story at the center of Isabel’s (and thus the reader’s) voyage from out of the rain, into safety, and back out into a changed world.
—Rane Arroyo, The Pennsylvania Review, vol. 6 no. 1, 1994
Praise from the jacket, 1991
Catherine Gammon is that rarest of entities, a gifted prose stylist with vision and high moral purpose. Her work is intense, penetrating, and about as ephemeral as the Himalayas. Brilliant is a term at risk of fading from overuse; we must all be careful not to devalue it any further by declaring a new writer of brilliance every other week. With that in mind, I hereby spend one of my extremely limited stock. Gammon is a brilliant writer, and an important one.
—Michael Cunningham
Catherine Gammon's novel has the mesmerizing quality of rain—
Illusive yet intensely physical,
Haunting yet somehow comforting,
Familiar yet consistently brand new.
It cleanses.
It melts time.
It washes away that which is not true.
—Eve Ensler (now V)
It's a marvelous book. Its life and its range take my breath away.
—Michael Burkard
From Publishers Weekly
Gammon crafts a solid psychological mystery with Oedipal undercurrents that arise from a mist of confusion and nightmarish flashbacks—of Vietnam, of sexual abuse—becoming clear only at the finish. Sometimes the prose in this first novel is thick, asking more questions than it answers. But the conclusion strikes with force owing to its stealthy, veiled approach.