May 1, 2011

Alone in the Classroom by Elizabeth Hay

I found myself paying attention to sentences in Elizabeth Hay’s latest novel Alone in the Classroom. To the ones that, for me, sparkled with resonance, finally articulating thoughts so often muddled in my brain. Complex ideas, like the assurance of  “a glimpse of a past as promising as my own future seemed to be”, or “When words avoid you, or continually cross you, you have no escape from yourself.” A description of a schoolteacher, such a perfect image: “She scratched her head with the point of a pencil so frequently that you could see scribbles all over her scalp.”

I paid attention to the way her sentences were either staccato short, or long, long, long, the clauses only near-linked by a comma. And by how the narrative took on the same pattern, not progressive, but rather an assemblage of ideas, of stories. How these stories circle around their centre, though it’s not clear what the centre is for some time.

But the circling is not aimless. Just enough is held back that you’d never accuse this book of being plotless, and the plots involve a schoolgirl murdered near Ottawa during the 1940s, another one who had died in a fire in Saskatchewan years before, the creepy teacher linked to them both, the teacher-turned-reporter who brings these stories together, and tells them to her niece who is the novel’s narrator. Connections abound here: former residents in the prairie town re-encounter one another in the Ottawa Valley, on the same train years later, relationships are incestuous, patterns are repeated: “It’s possible that a hidden symmetry is often at work as we stumble our way through life.”

I adored Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air a few years ago, and was so pleased to find that this follow-up met all of my expectations. It’s a similar book, circular in shape, concerned with the past and with memory, full of moments where characters find that “[w]hat I had known about collided with what I had never been told”, and these collisions can shocking and powerful. Like Late Nights…, I imagine that this won’t be a book to everyone’s taste. Critics will delight in pinpointing what is wrong with it, lacking the understanding and imagination to see what is so right.

It’s an unsettling book, whose story goes where you don’t think it will, and doesn’t answer all its questions. Whose clauses, sentences, ideas and stories are strung together, one after another like random beads on a string, and it’s hard to find the pattern, that hidden symmetry, when you regard each bead individually. The key is to take in the whole, of course, the string of beads itself, its cumulative effect. In nature, there is no such thing as a straight line, and neither is there in a good story.

April 7, 2011

Better Living Through Plastic Explosives by Zsuzsi Gartner

There are no innocent bystanders in Zsuszi Gartner’s mind-blowing short story collection Better Living Through Plastic Explosives. A car shoots down the street in the title story with a “fifteen year old future ex-con at the wheel”, white trash is skewered along with the middle class in “Summer of the Flesh Eater”, you start to believe the Marmot that the parents of the kidnapped child had it coming in “Investment Results May Vary”, and even the tragedy at the end of “Better Living…” is a kind of quid quo pro. Gartner’s stories in third-person (and in first person plural) take on “types” of people, and no one escapes the bitter scrutiny. Her first-person narrators examine their surroundings on the same level as everybody else, down in the trenches, were the trenches the whole world.

(One moment of grace: the Japanese exchange student appearing riding out of a ravine on the back of an ancient tortoise. Twice. But then I have a thing for literary tortoises.)

The stories document moments on the edge of the apocalypse, a Vancouver I recognize from Douglas Coupland. Apocalypse is fitting for a city on the edge of the world, whose houses perch on the edges of mountains (which keep devouring the houses in one story). The collection begins with “Summer of the Flesh Eater”, about what happens to a suburban cul-de-sac when a piece of prototypical white trash moves in, puts his truck up on blocks, and starts to make the neighbourhood women carnivorous. Narrated as field notes after the fact, by the men whose wives are all now pregnant and straddling motorcycles, the story traces the cul-de-sac’s descent after the throwback appears in such an evolved population.

(“From time to time he’d wave to us with a monkey wrench or soldering iron. ‘Now that he’s discovered fire,” Stephen quipped one morning while squeezing into Patel’s Mini Cooper with those of us who didn’t telecommute or weren’t on paternity leave, ‘maybe’s trying to reinvent the wheel.’)

In “Once, We Were Swedes”, Peter Pan gets literal as a burnt-out foreign correspondent hits early menopause when her husband regresses to adolescence, all against the backdrop of an urban wasteland. In “Floating Like a Goat”, a failed-artist-turned-actuary writes her daughter’s teacher after teacher chastises daughter for failing to have her people’s feet touch the ground in her drawings. “Investment Results May Vary” is narrated by the unhinged and desperate, one being that kidnapping marmot I mentioned earlier.

In “The Adopted Chinese Daughters’ Rebellion”, said daughters disappear leaving footprints in the snow (and here, like the last story, is another parable about wanting what you can’t have). I become semi-hysterical with laughter upon the thought of Susanna, the natural-born little sister (Oops!) who wants “to be a Chinese daughter more than anything else… And in the evenings, while her father diligently quizzed Huan Yue at at the kitchen table about Chinese history… Susanna was banished ot the den with Betty and Veronica Double Digest and a mug of Ovaltine”. And then that image at the end, “little Susanna tumbling end over end across a snowy lawn with stunning alacrity, an illuminated Catherine wheel, her bare heels and tail spitting sparks”. Oh my.

“What Are We Doing Here” is a Toronto story, about an obnoxious woman drunk on her fabulousness who finds herself at a party that isn’t what she promised everyone it would be. “Someone is Killing the Great Motivational Speakers of Amerika” is the story I had the most trouble with, but upon rereading it, it had a new poignancy, knowing what I knew. (And yes, there is poignancy. It’s not just the girl on the tortoise. Gartner is scathing, but her world is also painful in its loveliness). “Mister Kakami” is a riff on Heart of Darkness. “We Come in Peace” is angels on a mission to earth to discover the experiences of the senses, inhabiting the bodies of five teenagers on another cul-de-sac.

And yes, it is fitting that suburban dead ends recur throughout the collection, and Sponge Bob underpants, and I even found myself positing connections between the Lucy in the first story and the Lucy in the final. These are not connected stories, but they fit together in a way that creates something altogether new as a whole.

I’ve got two conflicts of interest here. The first is that my husband is currently working on a project with Zsuzsi Gartner, so there was one reason I was hoping to like book. Second (and more pressing, to me) reason was that I read the final story “Better Living Through Plastic Explosives” last year in The New Quarterly, and it blew me away. I’d never read anything like it before, and I’ve been wanting to read this book ever since. And I’ve been wanting it to measure up to my amazing expectations.

And it has. And now let me tell you about “Better Living Through Plastic Explosives”, which I reread tonight and finished stunned and stuttering expletives. (No, but first, let me tell you that whatever these stories are about doesn’t half tell you what their impact is. That Gartner’s stories start with premises, but they deliver. She holds nothing back, writes fearlessly, and goes where you can’t quite believe she will.)

“Better Living…” is the story of a recovering terrorist, member of the support group (and it’s absurd, I know, but it’s perfectly executed) who is fighting her urges as she tries to play by the rules, taking on city hall bureaucracy on install traffic calming devices on her street. Because she is thinking of her son, how speeding cars violate that sanctity of the life she’s made: “She loves this crazy kid so much it actually physically hurts. This love does devastating things to her intestines that only something like listeriosis generally does to saner people. Or is she confusing love with fear? For all her past-life bravado, she finally understands what it means to be willing to do for something, or rather, someone. He is her ur-text, her Gospels, her Koran.”

We see the recovering terrorist in her three guises: suburban mother, host of a militant call-in gardening show (“Gardening is like warfare, and it’s time for you to call in the troops”), and 12-step groupie. And when worlds collide, as they do, there is the inevitable explosion, and it ripped my heart out, both times. And then I immediately wanted to read it again to find out exactly how Gartner had made it happen.

February 15, 2011

More on the motherhood narrative

Lately, reading Susan Olding’s book Pathologies (and in particular, her essays about infertility and her daughter’s adoption) and Charlene Diehl’s Out of Grief, Singing (as recommended by Alison Pick), I was struck by how various is the motherhood narrative. And yet the universality of these stories– these women, with their extraordinary experiences of motherhood, managed to articulate so much that I’ve only been gesturing toward since I became pregnant two and a half years ago. Partly because the writing here is so remarkable. This might also be because I’m self-absorbed, and project myself onto everything. But still, how these stories resonated, and also taught me new things about the motherhood experience, added the possibility of additional dimensions to my journey.

I also can’t help thinking about how I would critique Diehl’s memoir if it were a novel– during most of her daughter’s brief life in the NICU, Diehl was suffering from a variety of post-birth complications and hardly saw her before she died. In a stupid workshop, I would insist on moments of connections, on the impossibility of these parallel storylines (mother and baby both in physical trauma), it doesn’t unfold like a story (but then, from what I’ve heard, death rarely does). We have to bend life a certain way to make it work in fiction, but real life doesn’t bend, does it. And how Diehl makes something so beautiful of it still, the unbendingness of real life. There is such generosity in her story, such grace, and though I’ve sobbed off and on today as I’ve read her book, so often I’ve been crying because of the joy.

January 12, 2011

Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book ed. Sean Manning

For two days this week, I was swept up in the pleasure of Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book, which is edited by Sean Manning. A celebration of the book as object, of general bookishness which is a catch-all term including, “the tactile sensation of turning a page, the sight of my bookmark inching closer to the finish, then finally closing the book, hearing the whomp… the sense of accomplishment that brings” (from Manning’s introduction). I was certainly this book’s idea reader, but I loved it for more reasons than that I was simply predestined to do so.

This anthology was made by its diversity. The effect of this, however, was that it always took a few paragraphs to settle into each essay, each one so distinct from whatever had come before. These jarring entrances aside, it was always a pleasure to discover something new– writers male and female, old and young, an ex-solider and an ex-mobster, and even two essays in translation (yes, yes, yes! In particular because these are from China and Iran, and books as objects in these places have their own kind of stories to tell). Each essayist approaching their subject matter different, where the book itself had come from, how they brought their essay around to its point. Some of these were books lost to time or history, or books still cherished; books that had been read to death or books never read at all. Many essays begin with a portrait of the essayist as a young reader, perusing her parents’ bookshelves, and the books come to delineate family relationships, broken or otherwise. For some writers, the book in question is the only one they’ve ever kept, or else it’s just one in a vast library that fills entire houses (or two, in the case of Francine Prose).

I hadn’t heard of most of the 30 contributors to this anthology, and I knew of about as many of the books they’d brought, and yet this did not diminish my reading experience one bit. The essays were that good, and the subject matter so universal that it all resonated with me, familiar or otherwise. Some of the more notable contributors included Ray Bradbury, of course (whose piece, truthfully, was one of the weaker in the bunch), Francine Prose, Joyce Maynard, Elissa Schappell, Karen Green (who is the widow of David Foster Wallace, which I wouldn’t mention, except that it’s what her essay is about), and Karen Joy Fowler (who wrote the Jane Austen Book Club).

I loved Francine Prose’s “Andersen’s Fairy Tales”, which is about tracking down a disappeared book from childhood, about “the real book” as opposed to its impostors (which are available for sale on the internet, of course). Joyce Maynard’s “The Bible” tells her father’s story via a book she never read and doesn’t have now. And oh, I could go on and on about Julia Glass’s “Roar and More”, which is decades long– the first book she ever asked her parents to buy because she saw it read on Captain Kangaroo, and it so stayed with her that she wrote it into her own novel, and her quest for permission to quote the material introduces her to the book’s author, but only for a fleeting moment. Glorious, Anne Fadiman-esque, which is the highest compliment to be bestowed to this sort of thing.

And yes, “The Portable Dorothy Parker” by J. Courtney Sullivan, about all the girls just like her who show up in New York wanting to write like Dorothy Parker but have a different kind of life. And oh my, Rabih Alameddine and “The Carpet Baggers”, which was a novel he had in his childhood home in Lebanon– the book is lost when the house is destroyed by war, but he connects with it a few more times in a brilliant case of book fatedness. Finally, Jonathan Miles’ “Ship of Fools”, which had belonged to the mother he did everything to break away from, and then she was lost to him for good through Alzheimer’s Disease.

Books as objects are never just about the books, of course, and so this anthology encompasses the whole wide world. My only criticism of it would be the essays that plead their cases too hard against e-books and e-readers– such defensiveness is unnecessary, because the essays make the point without even trying. A book is a book, and there’s nothing else quite like it.

January 5, 2011

Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson

Confession: I’m not especially crazy about Jackson Brodie, the sometime-PI of Kate Atkinson‘s exceptional crime novels. I mean, I’ve got nothing against the guy either, but that I’ll automatically read any book he appears in has far less to do with the man than his creator. Kate Atkinson is one of the best contemporary novelists in the English language, I only turned to crime (fiction) when she started writing it, and her crime fiction is as good as anything she ever wrote, including my favourite of her novels, the award-winning Behind the Scene at the Museum. The latest in her Jackson Brodie series, Started Early, Took My Dog, definitely doesn’t disappoint.

The novels in the Brodie series definitely stand alone, though first-time readers will find themselves wading through some treacherous back story. Jackson Brodie is the link between the books, not so much as the solver of the crimes in question, but as a magnet for incident, and co-incident. Stories have always happened around him, beginning with the murder of sister in childhood, which becomes his most formative experience.

In Started Early, Took My Dog, Jackson is living even further than usual on the fringes of the law, still recovering from the fraudster wife who stole his money, still pining for Louise Monroe up in Scotland, still connected to Julia who knows him better than anyone, and striving to be a good father to his children in spite of everything else that has happened.

But of course, his story remains on this novel’s periphery. At its centre is Tracy Waterhouse, a  retired police officer who, in a moment of weakness, ends up with a child that isn’t her own, and then suddenly finds herself pursued by a variety of unsavoury characters. One of these characters is Jackson Brodie, who’s trying to track down the origins of Hope McMaster, a woman who’d been adopted thirty-five years before whose story is vaguely connected to Tracy’s through a social worker’s file. As in all of Atkinson’s novels, the past and the present are impossibly intertwined. Who was Hope McMaster? Who is the child in Tracy’s care? What are the Leeds police force still trying to hide after all these years?  And who is the strange man who appears to be on Jackson’s trail?

I find reading Kate Atkinson to be a most intoxicating experience– her immersion in her characters’ thoughts, and how she does twists and turns like nobody’s business, and just when I think I’ve got it figured out, she twists it around again. She works coincidence in this way that makes me marvel at the world– not relying on it as a plot device as bad writers do, but instead coincidence is her entire preoccupation, her books are an examination of it. Her books are funny, smart, never saccharine. And they are dark, unflinching in their assertion that the world is a dangerous place to be a woman, the stories violent, gruesome at times, highlighting injustice, but then Atkinson’s narratives culminate in their own kind of justice– goodness triumphs.

So Jackson Brodie lives to fight yet another day, but even more importantly, Kate Atkinson lives to write another book, and how fortunate are we for that.

December 31, 2010

Great non-2010 books read in 2010

1) Old Books, Rare Friends by M. Stern and L. Rostenberg

2) How the Heather Looks by Joan Bodger

3) The Crack in the Teacup by Joan Bodger

4) Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns

5) People You’d Trust Your Life To by Bronwen Wallace

6) Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman (and also At Large and At Small, which I whiled away a sunny cottage day to)

7) The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym

8) The Tiger in the Tiger Pit by Janette Turner Hospital

9) The Essential PK Page by PK Page

10) Touch the Dragon by Karen Connelly

December 12, 2010

Imagining Toronto by Amy Lavender Harris

Amy Lavender Harris’ Imagining Toronto is one of the best books I’ve read this year, blowing my mind with its gorgeous prose, fascinating facts, stunning narrative, and sheer readability– I was absolutely lost inside it. Which is fitting for a book whose author/narrator implores her reader to: “descend until we lose our bearings, until the landscape merges with the base of the bridge, and the sounds of trains, traffic and the river grow almost indistinguishable from one another. We have reached the city at the centre of the map: let us begin.”

Though its bibliography is 24 pages long, Imagining Toronto is no catalogue, or dry academic treatise, but instead it is a story, and the story is a city (and the city is a story, but we could go on like this forever). Harris has not merely written a book about Toronto, but she has written the city itself, from the depths of its ravines to the tip of the CN Tower, 1815 feet up in the sky. Her raw materials are the city’s fictions, and the city is rendered by these poems and stories in glorious concreteness.

Though it was fascinating to realize the volume of literature that has been written about Toronto, to encounter books I’m familiar with (The Robber Bride, Moody Food), books I need to reread urgently (Headhunter), and books I simply must read now (What We All Long For, The Torontonians etc.), the greatest delight of Imagining Toronto was what these fictions had to tell me about the city itself. About its geography– the true location of Cabbagetown, for example. About the infamous Ward slum (finally razed with New City Hall) which Harris intriguingly refers to not as the city’s “other”, but as its shadow. And about the migration of its residents westward toward Kensington Market, and then eventually out to the suburbs. About multiculturalism, which Harris shows through various works is our “creation myth”, suggesting more productive ways to understand our neighbours and negotiate this space we all share. She writes about situations in which fact and fictions fail to gel, in particular with the portrayal of Toronto’s homeless populations in works such as Carol Shields’ Unless and Girls Fall Down by Maggie Helwig, and the virtual silence in our stories from characters who’d reflect the reality of homeless people’s lives.

Harris is utterly in command of her material, her footnotes populated with engaging asides. She leads her readers on a tour across Toronto’s varied topography, through its neighbours, and along its “desire lines” (“despite their lyrical nomenclature, we owe these cartographies of desire not to poets, but to transportation engineers […who] used the term to refer to the informal footpaths worn by pedestrians deviating from paved pathways…”). She writes about “Desire’s Dark Side”, and highlights that missing children are prominent in the city’s history and in its stories– Shoeshine Boy and Barbara Gowdy’s Helpless among others. We are taken to the Toronto Islands (the number of which, I was surprised to learn, is anybody’s guess), and not only learn of the stories the islands have told, but the story of the islands themselves, and of the artists and writers who’ve lived there. In “City Limits”, Harris highlights another disparity between fact and fiction– “The Myth of the Monocultural Suburb.” And what it means that so many places once at the limits of the city have now been absorbed into the city proper.

Just as you have to walk a city to gets its sense, so too do you have to actually read this book to understand its comprehensiveness. References are current to August 2010, and include recent books such as Alissa York’s Fauna. (And though the works within Imagining Toronto seem an exhaustive list, Harris includes an ever more complete Toronto Library on her website.) One gets the impression that this is the kind of book an author could have gone on writing forever (Volume II, anyone??), but reading it is a similar experience. With every page, we discover a new dimension of the city to explore, another book to add to our list to-be-read, and when we reach the conclusion, we realize we’ve been transported somewhere new.

Or perhaps we’ve been here all along, but we’ve only just starting noticing, and imagining. And then we realize that noticing and imagining are so often the very same thing.

UPDATE: See Harris’ piece from The Toronto Star this weekend, Best kids’ books based in the GTA.

November 21, 2010

Lemon by Cordelia Strube

A long time ago, I decided that I’d had enough of youthful protagonists, who are always the smartest character in the room, whose ability to control their own narrative is unlikely for a teenager, whose cool detachment from matters at hand never quite belies a author’s conscious attempt to be writing something more than a young-adult novel, who keep being written into novels that have absolutely no subtext and therefore really don’t qualify as full grown-up novels. (I’m looking at you, Blue van Meer, Lee Fiora, etc. etc..) These characters for whom c0mparisons to Holden Caulfield are always invoked blurbishly, because it’s easy, but so inaccurate and positively blasphemous.

But then there is Lemon, narrator and protagonist of Cordelia Strube’s novel of the same name. A misfit in a broken world where all structures of authority have broken down– at one point, she pains at her friend’s mother’s innocence about what her daughter really gets up to. Lemon scoops ice cream in the food court. Her biological mother gave her up for adoption, her adoptive parents fell apart, and the sanctuary she found with a capable ex-stepmother starts crumbling after the stepmother suffers a breakdown.

Lately, the odd time I stumble onto a high school girl’s twitter feed, I can’t help despairing about what kind of world my daughter is going to have to come of age in. Lemon does nothing to assuage my fears, but her articulation of the problem is heartening– what are we going with a spectrum that moves from “princess” to “porn-star”? With her steel-toe boots and baggy clothing, Lemon is written off as a “dyke” by her classmates, exempting her from the mad scramble for acceptance enacted by her best friend Rossi who has sex with anyone who asks her (and those who don’t bother to), who pretends she likes it to make them feel good about themselves. Who feels utterly awful about herself, and then masturbates on a webcam because a Queen Bee asks her to, and when this gets broadcast all over the internet, discovers she’s been set up for a fall.

Lemon remembers her friend, who “used to be an artist before she was a boytoy”. Whose body was used for handsprings and gymnastics, before it became disposible. She remembers when her classmates didn’t pull weapons on each other, and girls didn’t compete to give blow-jobs,  and parents were capable of being a reassuring force.

Lemon is a bleak book, its home and school awfulness augmented by Lemon’s volunteer position in a pediatric cancer ward. Worst of all is that Lemon is simply an onlooker in an age of onlookers, powerless to do anything but just keep walking by, no matter how much what she faces disturbs her. Part of this is also her own survival mechanism– she has numbed herself to loss and pain, determined that by not reacting to anything, she cannot be hurt.

Things get way bad before they even hint at getting better, the narrative confirming all our worst fears about “the world out there”. And yet. Her one critical voice is a kind of beacon of hope, and it’s hilarious, smart and authentic. The world is crumbling around her, but Lemon calls it as she sees it, her point of view deadpan and refreshing. Her point of view is underlined by the books she reads, a gamut from Samuel Richardson to Catherine Cookson. Her mind is stuffed with trivia, which she uses to try to make sense of and provide context for the world around her, and the context is always just a little bit skewed– she’s only sixteen after all, so this youthful protagonist isn’t too good to be true, though a young reader would be less conscious of that then I am (and this is just one of many reasons why this is determinedly an adult novel).

With eight books behind her, Strube is perhaps far enough along in her life and her career to not have her young protagonist be her proxy. Perhaps it takes an experienced author to write young people really well? Though no doubt, there are exceptions to this, and I could encounter them forever, but Lemon is indeed a wonder. It’s deep entrenched in my mind, which is disturbing but fascinating, and I’ll not be forgetting this character any time soon.

Truly, one of the finest books I’ve encountered this year, and ever.

November 4, 2010

Baking as Biography by Diane Tye

One of the best books I’ve read this year is Baking as Biography: A Life Story in Recipes by Diane Tye, which I reviewed for Quill & Quire. The weekend I was reading it, no one wanted to talk to me because I was so frightfully boring, starting all sentences with, “Did you know…?” and “Would you believe…?” and finishing with a fascinating fact from Tye’s book. Of which they were many, as Tye goes through her late mother’s recipe box to reconstruct her life and her times. The book beginning with the most fascinating fact of all– that this woman who baked and cooked for her family for decades once remarked that she didn’t even like baking. It took a few more decades for Tye to understand how interesting this was, and the resulting book explores the history of homemaking, feminism, family and eating, and the complex ways in which we understand all of these things. I loved this book. My review is here.

October 28, 2010

A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert

Kate Walbert’s A Short History of Women has been declared a novel, and certainly it functions with a similar narrative arc, but it’s a novel comprising 15 distinct sections, some of which have been previously published as short stories. The book spans over one hundred years, and four generations of one family, and though there are echoes of her predecessors in each woman’s experience, it is the disconnects between the women that are in some ways more significant. Each woman even disconnected from her own time and place– minds wander back into the past and turn the same pages over and over, all the while the present is overwhelmingly present, but never seems to be the point. The point never the point either– Walbert’s prose is slippery, no sentence or paragraph ever taking you where think that it will go.

If this were a more straightforward book, I’d tell you first that it’s about Dorothy Trevor Townsend, who attended Cambridge University at the turn of the century, but had to get permission to attend lectures with male students (with the promise that she wouldn’t speak), and couldn’t earn a degree, but a worthless certificate instead. She falls in with an Anarchist, but that all falls apart when he quits anarchy to rejoin his class, then fast-forward to fifteen years later when the whole world has fallen in with war. Desperate to give voice to the suffragette cause, which has lost support as the nation turns to the war effort instead, Dorothy goes on a hunger strike, relentlessly, and eventually loses her life.

The heartbreaking postscript to this story being the rest of the story, which is that Dorothy has two children, and they’ve already lost their father. Her son Thomas is sent to live with relatives in America, while her daughter Evelyn makes her own way, surviving WW1 in the wilds of Yorkshire, and then earning a scholarship to study mathematics at Bernard College in New York City. The invisible underscore to the rest of her life being her mother’s sacrifice, which had been her sacrifice as well, but not a willing one. She lives a life that is rich in its own peculiar way, but is also sadly stilted. Her own sacrifice was that she could only ever have one thing or another, and her story ends with a glimpse of a life that could have been more whole than that.

Evelyn never reconnects with her brother or his family, and years later his daughter Dorothy (who grew up estranged from Thomas) is surprised to discover her extraordinary family history. Throughout the book, we see her make conventional choices of marriage and children, and even flirt with second-wave feminism in the most suburban sense, but her awakening doesn’t come until later in life, until after forty years of marriage when she realizes she’s never been who she’s meant to be. Like her grandmother before her, this realization come with its own sacrifices, but there is a freedom with her age, and a world with mechanisms to support her.

Less supportive are her daughters Liz and Caroline, each different from the other but connected by disdain for their mother’s behaviour. Caroline is discovering that her efforts have not culminated in the life she was expecting, Liz is overwhelmed by quotidian demands, and both of their lives are dominated by fear. Both see promise, however, in their daughters– the possibility of hope. But perhaps there is something inevitable, as Caroline writes:

“I find it is the dark of night when you least expect it… regret, perhaps, but not, it is bigger than that, more epic, somehow, padded and full and weirdly historical: this restlessness, this discontent. You’ve done it wrong, again, and you were going to do it perfectly. You’ve lost the forest for the trees.”

A Short History of Women is a demanding book, in which the reader has to create her own space, take some time to find her feet. However, once accessed, the story opens wide with avenues to consider, new questions, connections made. The women’s experiences resemble one another, but not in ways predictable or parallel, and a reader who comes away with conclusions (if she manages to at all) will have had to wholeheartedly engage with the story in the process, with questions of how far these characters have actually come, and where there’s left to travel.