Tag Archives: women’s lives

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The Radiant Way, by Margaret Drabble

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I dove into this 1987 novel, having long been fascinated by the way Drabble uses the closeup of individual lives to chronicle social history. We begin at a New Year’s party in 1980 with three longtime friends, now approaching midlife turning points, even as Britain itself enters a decade of change wrought by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her cronies.

At the party Liz Headland, a psychologist, finds that her marriage to Charles, long tamed by child-rearing and busy careers, is falling apart. Alix Bowen is becoming disillusioned with her work as a teacher within Britain’s social-welfare network, feeling that the progressive fervor of the previous decades has not accomplished much. Artist Esther Breuer, pessimistic about the role of art in a changing society, contemplates leaving London for good and moving to Italy.

The three had met at Cambridge twenty-five years earlier, their social and academic success there promising brilliant careers. In a nod to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, they are “the crème de la crème” of their generation. However, at this point, Liz is the only one of the three to be financially stable, though even that might change with her divorce. Alix and Esther do piecemeal work and are often criticised for wasting their brains and for lacking ambition.

While wrestling with their own disappointments and demons, they navigate a society that is turning away from the socialism that has helped Britain recover from WWII, to a ruthless capitalism that rewards winners and ignores the suffering of losers.

In much of my reading over the last few months I’ve been looking at how writers balance the personal lives of their characters with the larger events in their world. In some cases, such as Sisters of Night and Fog by Erika Robuck, the correlation is obvious and inescapable. In others, such as Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell, it is more subtle. Here I feel Drabble’s social context—miner’s strikes, social service cuts, a serial killer—sometimes overwhelms her characters’ lives.

I know from reading other novels by Drabble that her style is rather dense, with more exposition and fewer dramatic scenes than we are used to in today’s fiction. That’s okay with me—I search out these novels that call for a little more attention. I enjoyed the deep dive into the minds and hearts of these three women. The other characters are well-drawn and fascinating, not only within themselves but also how they interact with and affect Liz, Alix and Esther.

The novel is a wonderful portrait, not only of these characters, but of a decade whose changes are only now starting to lose steam. I found its paean to friendship between women equally fascinating, especially the way their bond survives even as each of them transforms in the course of the novel.

What novel set in the 1980s have you enjoyed?

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Displaced Dolls and Oviducts, by Marigo J. Stathis

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These are some meaty poems from my friend Marigo Stathis! The cover might give you a clue as to what you are in for, but when you dive in you’ll see these are not so much protest poems as heartfelt support for all women on “the female warrior’s path to self-worth and discovery.”

Homeless angels, naked shepherds, broken Barbies will find a welcome here. So will feisty women who defy fortune tellers and speed limits to sport their tattoos and midnight dance moves. They will find acceptance in these poems and, even more important, proof that their voices have been heard.

Many of these poems are packed with details, a feast for the senses. Your mind scrambles to grasp them even as each one lays bare your memories. Here’s the first stanza of “Clarity:”

This night smells of poetry,
amidst cricket cacophony,
with a climate that quavers
of exhaustion, lust,
and crouched cats with
cutting claws to pounce,
in promise:
prey on the way.

Or this description that begins “Mimi:”

On Sunday mornings,
        we woke to light clinks of the prayer string;
as your spotted, once smooth skin
        touched each bead,
with every psalm,
        I wondered how long
        the cross would remain warm in your palm,
that felt like crumpled velvet
        caressing our small faces.

Stathis also uses rhythm to enhance the mood, whether it’s the nostalgic pebbles of memory in “shrewd games of Scrabble. // Pink bubbles, bursting;” the ominous opening “An eclipse was promised that night;” or the “thrashing thoughts, ionic tumble, / altered orbit—stutter, stumble—“ of an “ardent love-storm.”

These poems are full of love, the kind that links arms with you and walks beside you in a world where often justice is missing and others are constantly trying to shape you. Be yourself, these poems urge. I’m with you.

What poetry collection have you read that felt like a feast?

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The Testament of Mary, by Colm Tóibín

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There are some authors whose every book is a must-read for me. Tóibín is one, ever since I picked up a battered copy of The Heather Blazing at a used book and tool sale in a market town in England twenty years ago. I persuaded my book club to read it as well and they’ve gone on to enjoy other novels by him. You’ll find several of his books in my blog: Brooklyn, New Ways to Kill Your Mother, The Empty Family, Nora Webster, and The Magician.

Not having been raised Catholic and a longtime feminist, I’ve given little thought to the culture that has built up around Mary, aside from discarding the stereotype of her as docile and obedient that many people hold up as the ideal toward which all women should strive. As a mother, I could feel her horror and grief at the death of her son, but that made me dislike even more the priestly glorification of human sacrifice. Well, I guess they would say half-human.

However, this first-person narrative captured me immediately, giving me a new and completely plausible image of an historical Mary. Here, she is older and alone, living in Ephesus, a city known for its Temple of Artemis, located in what is now Turkey, thus far enough away from Rome to offer safe haven from her Roman pursuers. There, she is visited by two of her son’s disciples who watch and support her even as they question her repeatedly about her son’s life to bolster their own narratives. She says:

They think that I do not know the elaborate nature of their desires. But nothing escapes me now except sleep . . . They are too locked into their vast and insatiable needs and too dulled by the remnants of a terror we all felt then to have noticed that I remember everything. Memory fills my body as much as blood and bones.

She considers those who followed her son a “group of misfits he gathered around him, men who could not look a woman in the eye,” and judges herself with the same brutal clarity. In this slim novella, she tells us her story, the one she holds in every part of her body.

And it is an utterly credible story. If there truly was an historical Jesus—his name is never mentioned in this book—then this portrait of a happy, playful child grown into a cold and distant man is one I can believe. It is the story of too many men, and a few women, who have embraced the portrait of themselves they see in others’ eyes and the power that comes with it.

It is not the story that has come down to us; that’s the one crafted by his followers, the one she disputes. It is still an enthralling one. A mother, telling us about her son—her son. She discounts the stories she hears about his so-called miracles as exaggerations by the crowd that follows him. Even her glancing acquaintance with the results, such as meeting the undead Lazarus, are ambiguous.

Tóibín has crafted a tender and agonizing book that has changed my view of Mary and her son.

What novel of Colm Tóibín’s have you read? What did you think about it?

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The Years, by Annie Ernaux

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Writing guru Donald Maass—writer, agent, and writing teacher—reminds us to include what’s going on in the world in our stories, partly because our characters will probably be thinking about current events and reacting to them. Mostly, though, because including specific details and big-picture events helps make the world of our story seem real to the reader.

In this book, Ernaux has gone further, focusing on the larger life of a society and placing the life of one woman within that.

. . . the idea had come to her to write “a kind of woman’s destiny” set between 1940 and 1986.

Ernaux’s genre-bending experiment adds a new dimension to the field of life writing. She goes beyond memoir—a subjective view of events in the author’s personal life—and autofiction—a reexamination and fictionalisation of those events—to create a new form that melds both of these with sociology and history. She has captured the sweep of the lifetime simultaneously with that of a person and a generation.

Everything will be erased in a second. The dictionary of words amassed between cradle and deathbed, eliminated. All there will be is silence and no words to say it. Nothing will come out of the open mouth, neither I nor me. Language will continue to put the world into words. In conversation around a holiday table, we will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless, until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation.

Time is the only narrative structure in this collage of private memories, public events, photos, songs, brand names, television, advertising, headlines. There’s no plot, no protagonist, no story question. Instead, we are given “abbreviated memories” spun together, some personal and some common.

It will be a slippery narrative, composed in an unremitting continuous tense, absolute, devouring the present as it goes.

I especially like the way Ernaux, looking back on a long life, refers to the past as a series of “palimpsests.” It’s an effective way to describe the veils that layer over each other as we try to recall how we were.

At first, I felt overwhelmed by the flow of historical events, popular culture, and experiences. I could barely grasp each fragment before it was replaced by another, perhaps because I was listening to the audio version, beautifully performed by Anna Bentinck. Eventually, though, I began to recognise how artfully they had been assembled to create a continuous narrative.

More importantly, I came to feel a part of the story, engrossed in the passing decades and fascinated by the ways my own life interacted with this collective story, merging and sliding apart, only to merge again and again slip away. I began to feel as though she were telling me the story of my own life, with occasional diversions.

Perhaps I should have first mentioned the unique point of view. Unlike most life writing, there is no “I” in the book. Instead—and fittingly for the story of a generation—it is narrated by “we,” as though by a chorus of voices. Apparently, in the original French version, the pronoun used is “on” which is the generic he/she that English is lacking, though it could be translated as “one.” The translator, Alison L. Strayer, has chosen instead to use “we,” which works brilliantly to capture the voice of the collective sections.

Some parts are about a specific woman, spoken of as “she.” As she nears the end of life, she begins to write this book to defy death’s erasure.

By retrieving the memory of collective memory in an individual memory, she will capture the lived dimension of History. This will not be a work of remembrance in the usual sense, aimed at putting a life into story, creating an explanation of self. She will go within herself only to retrieve the world, the memory and imagination of its bygone days, grasp the changes in ideas, beliefs, and sensibility, the transformation of people and the subjects that she has seen.

I plan to delve into other books by Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature. I can see why this particular book was longlisted for the 2019 International Man Booker Prize. Without getting into the controversy over whether it qualifies as fiction (a requirement for the Booker), I have to rank it high on my list of best books ever. To reach into my own past: it blew my mind.

Have you read a book by Annie Ernaux? What did you think about it?

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A Thousand Ships, by Natalie Haynes

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It starts with fire—after the muse has her say about the poet’s invocation, of course. Creusa, wife of Aeneas, awakens to find the Citadel, the highest point of the city of Troy on fire. Her husband and five-year-old son missing, and the fire is rapidly spreading throughout the city.

The city is falling. But that’s impossible. Troy has won the war. Just a few days earlier, they had seen the ships sail away, the Greeks finally giving up after ten grueling years of war without winning back Helen, who had started it all. And yesterday for the first time in all those long years, the gates of Troy were opened and its citizens walked out, only to find a magnificent offering to the gods left by their enemies on the beach: a huge wooden horse.

Haynes deftly slips in this background as Creusa frantically tries to escape the burning city. This outstanding book is a reimagining of the events around the Trojan War through the eyes of the women involved: Greeks, Trojans, goddesses, muses, Fates. As the muse Calliope says:

There are so many ways of telling a war: the entire conflict can be encapsulated in just one incident. One man’s anger at the behaviour of another, say. A whole war – all ten years of it – might be distilled into that. But this is the women’s war, just as much as it is the men’s, and the poet will look upon their pain – the pain of the women who have always been relegated to the edges of the story, victims of men, survivors of men, slaves of men – and he will tell it, or he will tell nothing at all. They have waited long enough for their turn.

Even with a multitude of voices, the reader is always firmly grounded: only one narrator per chapter, with the name and often some explanatory information as the chapter title. Plus there are subtle clues in the beginning of the chapter to explain who the woman is. For example, here is the first paragraph of “Theano, wife of Antenor (advisor to Priam) mother of Crino:”

Theano, wife of Antenor, mother of four sons and one daughter, bent over to light the candle and blinked in its small, smoky flame. Mother of four sons who would not bury her, when her time came. Four sons who had not survived the war. Sons obliterated by the folly of another woman’s son. Her tears came from the smoke, and also from the anger which burned at her core, like the wick of the candle she carried to the table and placed in its centre. Her husband sat opposite her, his head in his gnarled hands. She had no pity for him: the war was raging through its tenth year outside the city walls and he was too old to fight. She would have given his remaining life – lived uncomplaining as a widow – to spend a single moment with one of her dead sons.

The through-line of the book follows the women of Troy from the night of Troy’s fall through what happens to them at the hands of the Greek conquerors, while weaving in events from the past and future. For example, there are several letters to Odysseus from Penelope. As she waits the long ten years for his return after the fall of Troy, her tone becomes increasingly barbed.

The bards all sing of the bravery of heroes and the greatness of your deeds: it is one of the few elements of your story on which they all agree. But no one sings of the courage required by those of us who were left behind. It must be easy to forget how long you have been gone, as you bound from one misfortune to another. Always having to make impossible choices, always seizing opportunities and taking risks. That passes the time, I would imagine. Whereas sitting in our home without you, watching Telemachus grow from a baby into a child, and now a handsome youth, wondering if he will ever see his father again? That also takes a hero’s disposition. Waiting is the cruellest thing I have ever endured. Like bereavement, but with no certainty. I’m sure if you knew the pain it has caused me, you would weep. You always were prone to sentiment.

We also get the events that led up to the war and to the fatal night. Haynes’s orchestration of these various pieces is an incredible achievement. Some incidents are slowly unpeeled like an onion, with chapters about other events interspersed between layers. Others are placed just where they will have the most emotional impact or when the reader needs to know about them to understand the next chapter or to see the previous chapter in a new light.

The women are presented so realistically, even the goddesses, that they could easily be people you know. I’ve quoted generously from the book to show how accessible it is to any reader. Haynes includes enough information to orient those who are not familiar with the events described in the Iliad and Odyssey, yet presents all of it in such a novel way that it is fascinating all over again for those who are.

The book reads so easily that I was surprised by the description in the Afterword of Haynes’s extensive research. The historical record of women’s lives from that period is almost nonexistent, so the author really had to dig to find anything about the women in this book, fragments that Haynes could then supplement with her imagination.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is not just a mesmerizing story, one that I could not put down despite knowing how it would all turn out. It is also a textbook for writers on how to reveal information and backstory. And it is a psychological masterpiece, a gorgeous tapestry of women’s lives and ideas and reasons. You’ll never think of the Trojan War—or any war—in quite the same way again.

Every now and then a book comes along that I want to send to everyone I know. What book have you read recently that you’ve recommended to your friends?

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How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House, by Cherie Jones

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This debut novel with an intriguing title is set in Barbados in 1984 where Lala makes a living braiding hair for tourists on the beach. She lives right there in a rickety shack with her husband Adan, a petty thief. Eight months pregnant, she strains to manage the steep, railingless stairs to their home.

When she goes into labor she struggles through the night looking for her husband. Washing up against a gate in the tourist enclave, she rings the bell, only to have Adan himself appear. As they race to the hospital on his bicycle, Lala hears a scream, one that will echo in her throughout the book.

We move between Lala and Mira Whalen, originally a poor white from Barbados, whose wealthy white English husband Peter has been killed in a bungled robbery. The couple has come to Barbados on holiday, Peter hoping to win back Mira’s love after she’s had an affair. Even as the two women highlight the differences between wealthy tourists and poverty-stricken Bajans, Mira’s grief and regret resonate with Lala’s increasing recognition of the mistake she made in marrying the sociopathic Adan.

Jones deftly weaves in stories of Lala and Mira’s mothers and grandmothers and how their lives echo—or not—their daughters’. Jones also brings in other other characters such as Adan’s friend Tone, whose concern for others contrasts with Adan’s violence.

And there is a lot of violence. This is a terrible and devastating story, certainly centering on threats women face, but also touching on men and the things they are driven to do. We move back and forth in time, unearthing secrets buried too long, coming to know all these characters. This book is a brilliant example of how to bring in backstory: only telling us a story from the past when we need it to understand something that is happening in the present.

I listened to the audio book, not sure at first how far I wanted to go into such a story, but found myself riveted by the prose and seduced by narrator Danielle Vitalis‘s voice. It was so soft and lilting, so gentle that I sometimes had to shake myself to remember that these were stories of abuse and injustice and helplessness in the face of danger.

My only quibble with the book is that the ending tied everything up a little too fast and a little too neatly.

If you are willing to face the underside of life on a Caribbean island and recognise that poverty’s insults and injuries aren’t that different even in paradise, this is the book for you. Gorgeous prose, great pacing, vivid characters: this first novel has it all, if you can bear it.

What first novel have you read that you thought brilliant?