Using humor to tell difficult truths about ourselves and society’s woes (Murbridge, fictional town in Western Massachusetts, 2019): “The turn of a doorknob, the beat of a heart.” One minute your life is on track, the next it’s plummeted off the rails. That’s the serious premise of Tara Conklin’s new contemporary novel in which she takes on the role of comedian to deliver hard truths disguised as humor.

COVID triggered, prepare to fall under the spell of magical mushrooms and absurdist reactions to traumatic events. On the surface, Community Board imagines a lost soul character in the throes of a nervous breakdown after an out-of-the-blue divorce that devastates twenty-nine-year-old Darcy Clipper’s safe life, setting off two other major life crises: feeling abandoned by her BF parents and job loss. Forty pages – that’s all it takes to destroy one’s sense of self.

The truth is Darcy’s wild tale reflects the emotional trauma of millions, greater than the 50% of marriages winding up in divorce Conklin cites. Technology contributing to the growing sense of disconnect: the loss of the “human touch,” free-for-all breaking norms, wildfire conspiracy theories, our moral compass. Quarantining exacerbated and magnified what’s been happening to how we communicate, affecting so many aspects of our lives. 

Revolving a novel around a fictitious community board app (dozens of real ones, e.g. https://alternativeto.net/feature/message-board/) is a clever, charming, eccentric, and increasingly ominous way to illuminate online life.

Contrasted by the offline, in-person town meetings that also take place in a novel inspired by Conklin’s real hometown in Stockbridge, MA (she’s originally from St. Croix, US Virgin Islands). A 300-year-old New England tradition that “keeps true democracy alive.”

“Hear ye, Hear ye” is the cry of the elected Board of Selectmen gaveling a Town Hall meeting in a small Massachusetts town. It’s also the attention-getting voice of a writer who also assumes the role of social psychologist. Darcy has self-diagnosed her “existential anxiety” and “acute social anxiety,” enabling Conklin to connect those symptoms to the broader context of social distancing and social media in terms of the loss of “emotional intimacy”; how we see ourselves and treat others; loneliness and mental health issues; distrust of others and institutions; and the loss of community. 

Whether you’re a “glass-half-full” type of person or not makes a difference. Darcy’s cup is empty when we meet her. She followed the rules and where did it get her? 

Professionally, her life involved actuarial science, making rational and valid predictions. But when her do-everything-with-husband of eight years springs on her he doesn’t love her anymore and has found another woman, Darcy’s response is irrational except to flee to her childhood “safe house” in the hills of the Berkshire Mountains. Only to get hit over the head again to find it empty. Her devoted, indulgent parents have left for retirement in Arizona. Salvation, her insurance company boss who encouraged her to take six months off for Me Time recovery, her job waiting for her, until he changes his mind. The people she trusted most have betrayed her. 

Darcy turns into a recluse. How many days of “self-imposed isolation and canned food consumption” (think Chef Boyardee stocked in the Clipper’s house since the 1999 Y2K fears) can Darcy take? Does she break free?

Depends on how you define Freedom. Early on, Darcy believes isolating from the “crappiness of other people” sets her free, freedom seen from a broken personal and social perspective. But soon a larger picture emerges about independence, acceptance, resilience, belonging. Freedom has been on Conklin’s mind since her 2013 debut: slavery in The House Girl and unsupervised children running wild in The Last Romantics, 2019.

Consider how many people live alone these days: 37 million in 2021 according to this account. How many are like Darcy, realizing isolation “breeds paranoia”? The longer-you-stay-off-the-horse the harder it gets playing out. For those of us who quarantined for let’s say two years of the pandemic, we know how reentry into the real world felt. Darcy, though, lets those anxious feelings fester to unhealthy extremes.

Ludicrous as they may be, it’s an effective approach to making statements about powerlessness versus empowerment, inclusiveness, risk-taking, and the costs of spreading lies.

To counteract the downbeat, Conklin makes sure she offers the upbeat suggesting ways to reconnect, such as the human-animal bond and an architectural design concept of building bridges, which expands the physical to emotional and sensory. To the importance of play, in childhood and adulthood. To Nature:

Thought-provoking, a lot of questions and issues are raised. Here’s a sample:

1) “How do you know when one time is the last time?” The grabbing opening line.

2) Do you believe “the way the world is structured, it’s the wives who suffer”?

3) When your life is falling apart, do you have friends or a special one who’s there for you? Or, are your friends like Darcy’s who “lacked the desire to understand”?

4) Do you know how to “Be kind to yourself”? Stand up for yourself? “Stand alone”?

5) Do you believe “everyone has the capacity to change”?

7) Is age the key to wisdom, or something else?

8) Do you believe “free play is the antidote to our times”?

9) Do you believe “everything necessary for life can be accomplished on the internet”?

This, then, is a novel about human connectedness in our personal lives; with our community, including activism; and with Nature. Which is introduced early on when we learn about the history of this New England town’s founding – its indigenous peoples, the Mahican tribe better known as the Mohicans, who ate plants that had hallucinogenic properties. In this case, wild mushrooms. Like all the issues tackled, fungi are in the news. Eating fungi that aren’t poisonous can make you happy seems to be the premise of the town’s peaceful establishment. Note the mushrooms on the cover. (The sad expression on Darcy’s image is deflected by the sight of a parrot on her head! As for the fern, who goes by the name of Fred, and the rest of the images, you’ll find out about them in due time.)

The absence of any quotes in the dialogue (hint: Darcy does end up talking to other people) adds to a sense of flow and connectedness.

Most of what Darcy tells us outside of her first-person narrative is revealed in online messages: emails sent and not, and the infamous community bulletin board. Expect anything and everything to pop up! The message Board’s diversity begins with URGENT, FREE, REMINDER, ALERT, WARNING, HELP, WANTED, SUBSTANTIAL REWARD, MISSING, SAVE, ISO (Internet jargon, In Search OF) and FS (For Sure), along with other missives, such as a string of dreamy poetic prose: “When was the last time you smelled 100 tulips”? One of the secrets in this town.

Conklin also shows us she’s a researcher, using old National Geographic magazines to support what Darcy is going through. From the Friedrich Nietzsche February 1981 issue, she tells us he “loved to be alone” to avoid the “mental anguish of caring.” Other magazine issues feature the “solitude, difficulty, isolation, silence” (Pablo Neruda, 1978); the benefits of risk-taking and adventure (Marco polo, 1988) and the dangers (Michael Clark Rockefeller, 1991); and “stepping outside” of ourselves (Chinyingi footbridge, Zambia, 1997).

Does the message board turn out to be a “godsend” like Darcy’s mother claims it is?

Lorraine

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Paying tribute to the Vietnam refugee crisis after the Vietnam War (South-Central Vietnam, South China Sea, Hong Kong and British refugee camps; 1967 to 2023): “Knowledge allows remembering, and remembering is honoring,” says one of the many voices narrating Cecile Pin’s memorable Wandering Souls. They echo her literary mission. 

Stirred by a “visceral need to know” what happened to Pin’s mother’s Vietnamese family when they fled their village in Southeast Vietnam after the Communists took over the entire country, ending the long-lasting Vietnam War. Pin invents a Vietnamese family to reflect her mother’s, part of the 200,000 to 600,000 refugees who were lost in the South China Sea.

By PH2 Phil Eggman
[Public domain]
via Wikimedia Commons

These innocent victims of war came to be known as the “boat people.” A demeaning term that characterizes their only means of escape: overflowing, dilapidated fishing vessels ill-equipped to protect from the perilous seas. The insulting label also signifies the prejudice the Vietnamese refugees encountered.

Pin expects a lot from her slim, 220+ page novel, given the complexity, fog of war, and the enormity of the humanitarian crisis that ensued.

The greatest strength of Wandering Souls is its clarity. Achieved through precision-like, purposeful prose that tells a complicated story by choices made stylistically, mixing genres, and deciding what to tell and what to leave out.

By not relying on a single genre, historical fiction, but using many – narrative non-fiction, memoirist, journalistic, and poetry-in-prose – integrating varied perspectives enables the use of fewer words aimed at providing the scope and haunting of a gruesome war yet to be fully reckoned with. Prose that follows a less-is-more approach, inspired by Joan Didion and Ernest Hemingway.

Brevity allows us to absorb the monumental events and consequences of a highly controversial war fought in jungles, along with a legacy of psychological trauma, prolonged grief, sorrow, shame, and survivor’s guilt. “Why me not them?” the central character Anh asks. Skillful conciseness renders a potency we hadn’t seen coming.

To make sure we understand where Pin is coming from she lays it out: “The truth is, I don’t want to write about death. I want women to live. I want children playing in the fields . . . I want justice and I want peace; I want life and I want delight.” She also wants “magic powers for the armless and harmless,” and a “reckoning.”

Through fifteen-year-old Anh’s survival story, assuming the role of mother and father to two of her younger brothers, Minh (thirteen) and Thanh (ten), after their parents and four other siblings perished at sea, Pin still wants to “focus on moments of joy” rather than the “wretchedness of war.” That’s a lot of forgiveness wrapped up in what she chooses not to dwell on.

Wandering Souls finds the right balance. Literary magic in doing so.

Magical too because magical realism is infused into the narrative through a ghostly voice that wanders between the Beyond and Earth in a poetic format. Brief, three-page chapters based on real-life news accounts also add immeasurably to a broader context on ghostly war propaganda, the ghosts of torture on the high seas, and then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s deceit about wanting to welcome 19,000 refugees in two waves. Like America’s leaders who lied about winning an unwinnable war.

Great human disasters, natural or manmade, put bureaucrats to a test not only as public officials but as human beings,” wrote Richard Holbrooke who served in Vietnam and was instrumental in crafting America’s foreign policy in Vietnam. Lies broke the trust in government we see today. Many argue America was never the same, including Ken Burns in his 18-hour documentary, The Vietnam War. Ending the novel in March 2023 serves to make this fifty-year-old story eerily current in helping us understand America’s struggles to preserve democracy.

Ghostly stories are part of Vietnamese literature. For good reason. Vietnamese culture believes that unless death is respected, memorialized, souls wander like ghosts. Pin choose Dao, Anh’s seven-year-old brother who died at sea as the ghostly voice, rather than her parents, emphasizing the theme of lost youth and innocence. Symbolic of “unsettled” deaths that do haunt, giving rise to the supernatural magic Pin is after.

“I could see the boat from above,

Except now it was sunk beneath the waves,

and bodies were floating all around it.”

It’s not possible to grasp the flight and plight of the two million Vietnamese who fled after the Fall of Saigon. Zooming in on one family and choosing which grim historical events to include or not, Pin whittles down faceless history for us to visualize. The Vietnam War was an extraordinarily agonizing political war that set off a massive, decade-long protest movement in America. Seen up-close and personal, you won’t forget Pin’s story. Her intention.

The global relevancy persists. The UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) estimates 30 million refugees wandering, a featureless statistic skyrocketing with as many as 18 million Ukrainian refugees displaced and separated from their families, including 5 million children. Mind-boggling numbers that don’t include the dislocation of millions of Syrian refugees, and countless others from other countries. We’re numb to these staggering numbers, but not to the suffering and struggles of a few.

Anh, Minh, and Thanh’s sea journey took them to Hong Kong. To two-weeks of quarantine in a guarded, dehumanizing detention center. Then to the Tai Tak Refugee Camp near the Hong Kong airport. “A miniature version of Vietnam,” with 10,000 Vietnamese refugees at the time.

You’ll see why Anh and her brothers never made it to America as envisioned. When the three are finally approved to leave Hong Kong, they’re assigned Hut #23, shared with nine more people, at the Sopley Refugee Camp in Hampshire, England. Living in WWII “brutal and sinister, square barracks made of grey concrete” in another foreign land wasn’t that much better. “Resettlement was a lottery, with winners and losers,” though a Red Cross nurse shines a kindly light and the trio make a few friends. Still, they’re caged up with their fates unknown.

How to rise above the “otherness”? Who among the three does? Who’s so broken they can’t?

Those joyful moments are captured in deliciously appealing Vietnamese cuisine, an important aspect of the country’s regional cultures. Food brings comfort, nostalgic memories of home, and a sense of community with other Vietnamese refugees. Music is also seen as a “refuge.” Joyous too are the efforts made to learn English, and Anh’s persistence in wanting to “settle, not wander.”

The US has yet to realize a National Vietnam Museum. Plans for one are underway in Texas, highlighted in this short video:

 

 

Judging by the 5 million annual visitors who come to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC to pay their respects to the 58,000 Americans who died fighting the Vietnam War, a museum to pay respects to the Vietnamese refugees would fill a void. (The real number of veterans is another 500,000 who bear the psychiatric scars of the war: PTSD, depression, alcoholism, homelessness, suicide.)

“What is the point of opening up the door to her past?” Anh ponders at one point.

The point is the reckoning is not over. “What better way of processing our past, than by rewriting it?” Pin asks and answers.

Lorraine

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Think of the children (England, 1935-1952; New York City, 1935-1939): What’s worse? Separating children from their mothers during wartime or keeping them at home, hearing ear-crushing air raids and bombs, racing to shelters underground?

How will we really know how a mother feels when she’s made the excruciating decision to evacuate her child from war’s harm’s way when digitization erases first-hand accounts shared in war letters?

These two salient questions, the focus of this review, are raised in Julia Kelly’s newest, authentic-feeling historical novel, The Lost English Girl. A vivid example of why WWII fiction never tires, especially when new angles are delved into: Britain’s swift and sweeping evacuation of their children to the countryside, Operation Pied Piper. In the first four days alone, Kelly tells us 1.5 million British children were separated from their families beginning September 1939 when the Nazis invaded Poland.

Some children fared better than others. What happens to the lost English girl, Maggie, when her mother Viv decides to entrust her four-year-old daughter, likened to a “dark-haired Shirley Temple,” into the care of foster parents, strangers? How well does she fare? “I love you very much, Little Bear,” twenty-two-year-old Viv says crying while trying to smile as she hugged Maggie goodbye, with a mask hanging on her shoulder, “trying to memorize the warm feel of Maggie’s soft little body pressed against hers.”

Evacuees in Montgomeryshire, 1939
via The National Library of Wales on Flickr

Heart-wrenching, the sadness Viv felt watching a nun board a train with the most important person in her world, to a place unlike anything where they’re from – Liverpool, a working-class port city. Whereas Maggie’s destination was Wootton Green, a centuries-old small village in the county of Warwickshire, “one of the prettiest towns in England.” In one moment – “just like that, they were gone” – one monumental decision changes lives forever. 

Wootton Village
by Nikki Mahadevan [CC BY-SA 2.0] via Wikimedia Commons

Viv’s tangled emotions are magnified over time in a series of heartsick chapters that inject her letters to Maggie’s foster mother, Mrs. Thompson, into the narrative. Tactfully, Viv’s first letter lets her know she wants to visit her daughter. With each polished and outwardly polite reply, the foster mom’s letters keep putting Viv’s visit off, shrewdly and intentionally rubbing it in that she and her engineer husband can provide for Maggie in ways Viv cannot. As Viv grows increasingly frantic, we feel the twisting of an emotional knife aimed at Viv’s vulnerabilities: torn between guilt, resentment, and jealousy that someone else is witnessing the joy of Maggie, her development and milestones, when she ought to be grateful for protecting her. The provocative letters show how complicated substitute mothering should be seen.

War letters were vital communications during WWII, thoughtfully integrated into the broader theme of war’s impact on children. Cinematic prose – scenes that feel like we’re watching an absorbing movie that sticks to historical timelines – ask us to think about the profound implications of WWII separations on today’s displaced children of war in terms of psychological trauma.

A recent survey by the Ukraine Children’s Action Project, launched by co-founder Dr. Irwin Redlener, examined the mental health impact of the Ukraine War on children. “Even if the war ends tomorrow, it will represent a very serious challenge for Ukraine and the rest of the world” with two million Ukrainian children psychologically and educationally devastated. Kelly reflects on the “impossible choice” parents faced to “send their children away without them so they could remain and fight” in Russia’s war in her Author’s Note.

Just as Maggie wins our hearts over, so does Kelly’s storytelling. No doubt the prolific historical fiction writer, with five novels published in the last five years (The Light Over London, 2019; The Whispers of War, 2020; The Last Garden in England, 2021; and The Last Dance of the Debutante, 2022, with The Lost English Girl the longest, weighing in at over 400 pages) – could have certainly dreamed up this twists-and-turns historical drama without a personal connection. But it seems to have contributed to the emotional authenticity of the prose since it was inspired by the author’s great aunt’s story who lived in Liverpool during WWII. “I wanted to know more.”

While we know about the London Blitz, we’re not as familiar with the Liverpool Blitz, the second most heavily bombed British city due to its strategic maritime location. 

Kudos to Kelly for taking on this lesser known evacuation story, as many historical novels have concentrated, rightfully so, on the heroism of helping Jewish children escape from Nazi invaded European countries – Kindertransport. The last rescue operation was carried out when Kelly’s novel opens. Both rescues were endorsed by the British government, but the stakes were so much higher for those who risked their lives to save persecuted Jewish children. Less visible were the psychological dangers of evacuating British children of different faiths from their mothers. In fact, history didn’t fully recognize the psychological trauma until years later.

Music woven into the story appeals to the dreamers in all of us. Viv met her husband Joshua Levinson at a legendary chain of dance halls, the Locarno Ballroom. A saxophonist, he dreams of making it big in New York City’s thriving Jazz Age. 

1950s ad for the Locarno Ballroom
by Stephencdickson, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Viv and Joshua’s history is told in flashback-to-1935 chapters, when they were teenagers. Kelly knows how to get into a single woman’s heart when Viv lets herself go with a handsome man she barely knew. She and her sister were raised in a strictly controlled and deeply religious Irish Catholic home, with a cold-as-ice mother who ruled the roost and a mousy father who never stood up to her. The consequences of being the black sheep of the family kick the story off when Viv becomes pregnant with a Jewish man’s child. Anti-Semitism rears its ugly head within the family, and elsewhere.

Joshua’s family are seen as more tolerant and accepting. He does what was expected of an honorable man in those days, marrying her. But they never had a chance to find out if they could love each other and become a family when Viv’s Mom offers a nineteen-year-old dreamer an offer too good to refuse. You’ll see how that plays out in multiple storylines.

At the story’s root is attachment theory. A psychological concept associated with groundbreaking psychoanalysts – such as Erik Erikson’s stages of human development; Anna Freud’s (Sigmund Freud’s daughter) child development studies at Britain’s WWII “War Nurseries”; and John Bowlby, Father of Attachment Theory – are key to understanding the psychological risks and damage of breaking the mother-child bond.

This is also a tale about service to one’s country. Viv and Joshua choose different paths, but their choices provide invaluable comradery and friendship. Still, Maggie is the beating heart of the novel. Does she bond with her wealthy foster mother and father in their peaceful estate, indulged with pretty dresses, dolls, a neighbor’s pony she learns to ride? Or, does the bond between a mother-and-daughter prevail over things? How long can a child miss her mother without feeling abandoned? In this case, when too young to understand why she was sent away.

Is Maggie lost to Viv forever? Lost amidst the fog of war? Prepare to get lost in the reading.

Lorraine

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Bravo performance by a virtuoso drama critic’s daughter who played the role of selfless Daddy’s Girl (Manhattan and Connecticut, 1970 – 2018): “Since Daddy left, it seems anything is possible,” writes Priscilla Gilman, who “wished and wished on stars when it came to her father”: brilliant and troubled Richard Gilman, famed dramatic and literary arts “philosopher-critic”; Yale Drama School professor for thirty years; and author of seven books.

“I lost my father for the first time when I was ten years old. In the months and years that followed, I lost him over and over, many times and in many different ways. This book is my attempt to find him,” she explains about the complex man she adored more than anyone else in her world.

Honoring and protecting his legacy while staying true to his conviction that without truth there’s no art a delicate balance she pulls off in grand style, though it took her six years after her father’s death in 2006 to begin a performance of a lifetime. You can’t help but be bowled over by her unwavering devotion to him.

How to navigate treacherous waters when “loyalty is at stake”? Not just to her father, but to her mother: Lynn Nesbit, powerhouse literary agent co-founding Janklow & Nesbit Associates, with a client list a mile long – Joan Didion, Anne Rice, Michael Korda, Michael Crichton, Tom Wolfe, John Le Carre, Henry Louis Gates Jr. (See the full list.)

The sense you get is the drama “enthusiast” for “authenticity” would be melodramatically applauding the authenticity of this exquisitely composed memoir. Well-balancing the “joy and tears” of her profound attachment to a “living, wounded soul” with a “hunger for a larger life.”

Richard Gilman comes through as larger-than-life. Priscilla as selflessness beyond measure – no matter the sacrifices she made to perform the role she’d “been assigned at a very young age”: calmer-in-chief, happy warrior, peacekeeper.

“Without my father, would anyone truly know who I was?” is an interesting question, given the dutiful role she played even when anguished and not being truthful. Ironic for a man who believed the “highest forms of love demands rigorous honesty.” Professionally, yes, but not when it came to his needy, emotional roller-coaster self.

You might assume the commonality between a mother and father’s passion for literature were ingredients for a thriving marriage, yet they divorced when the author was ten. Not then, or afterwards, pretty. The repercussions of a family falling apart are palpable. Excruciatingly devastating for those who couldn’t bear it. Richard Gilman cries, sobs, pleads whereas Lynn Nesbit is a picture of strength, with a “lets-get-on-with-it” attitude.” She seems to have kept the family together until she couldn’t, which the author never forgets.

Richard Gilman could play child as equally well as scholar. A “passionate believer” who “believed in childhood,” he could be so much fun. An avid sports fan too, so the author became one nestled beside him. Nesbit was mostly out-of-the-picture working. Closest with Claire, the author’s slightly younger sister, a “girly girl.” Carrie, the nanny, is credited as a “beacon of stability for us all.”

Nesbit felt Priscilla was “obsessive” about her dad. Her reply implies, how could I not be? “He “made me the thinker, writer, parent, human that I am”? Performing with “preternatural sensitivity,” grace, self-control, and selflessness for her Daddy throughout childhood, adolescence, and adulthood may have suited her well but it seems mother knows best about the consequences she’d pay. Literature, if nothing else, teaches that.

A stark contrast is shown between a nurturer of the careers of writers yet not seen during their marriage. A “fierce advocate of authors” philosophically pitted against a man renowned as a “ruthless arbiter of their worth.” 

Of Claire, the author’s best friend, she says, “Other than my father, there was no one I loved more.” You wince wondering how Nesbit reacted to those words. Like the “cool realist” she’s attributed to here? You’ll appreciate the author’s appreciation of her mother, but that comes much later.

The Critic’s Daughter is a candid assessment of enmeshment between a without-boundaries father-daughter bond. Almost fused together, raising questions on when the line is crossed by a parent too dependent on a child? The child on the parent?

The memoir is both a primer on the role of playfulness and the devastation of divorce. Saturated with adoring love, the book is also a beautiful testament to the emotional power of literature and the performance arts. Priscilla Gilman loves performing and singing, but directed by both parents to pursue an academic life. Achieving notably as an English literature professor at Yale and Vassar, where she was tenured. (Surprisingly, her father wasn’t; at Yale; no doctoral degree). After he died, she gave academia up. The last part of the memoir explains why the courageous change of heart. Brave having received an elite education all her life, she’d attended one of the most prestigious all-girls private schools in the country, the Brearley School, founded in 1884. The alumnae list another Who’s Who. My favorite, Caroline Kennedy.

Growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan near Central Park and Museum Mile was a privileged life, with the burdens and sacrifices offstage. In one of the eye-popping statements, a precious excerpt from the author’s diary, is a list titled, “Things Not to Do When I’m w/Daddy.” First up is “Don’t Cry.” Followed by “Don’t Complain,” “Don’t Be Difficult,” “Don’t Tell Him Anything But Good News,” “Don’t Mention Mommy,” and “Don’t Expect Him to Be the Daddy of Old.” Penned in middle school, it’s stunning and sad that this young girl could be so mature and perceptive of the role she had to play, shaping who she became. How did she manage all that, in light of all that happened?

Claire was the troublemaker constantly aggravating her father as a child; Priscilla, the “easy one,” the “good girl.” The only one of his three children – Nicky, loving son and artist from his first marriage – Richard Gilman knew would unconditionally always give him what he needed. (He loved them all.) Vividly, we see a “little girl who was enraptured by her father’s magical abilities, recognized his vulnerability and addictive tendencies, and feared his inevitable demise.”

Happiness and despair, trust and betrayal, halcyon and tumultuous, are intertwined. As if you can’t have glorious without paying the price.

Richard Gilman’s books include Chekhov’s Plays: An Opening into Eternity; The Making of Modern Drama; and his hot-button memoir Faith, Sex, Mystery (this review by Mary Gordon cited), which exposed his conversion from Judaism to Catholicism and his loss of faith, along with his struggles reconciling an existential “romantic soul” with his lust for sexual transgressions, erotic tendencies, gender experimentation.

Considering how much this family read, including to each other, quotes from great literature and poetry are richly infused. Relishing is the roster of writers like Bernard Malamud (Uncle Bern), Toni Morrison (Aunt Toni), Ann Beattie (Aunt Ann), Susan Sontag, and a slew of other writers, playwrights, and students who frequented the Gilman Manhattan home and countryside retreat in Connecticut.

Opening with a Shakespearean quote, “All the World’s a Stage,” befits the man who felt “great plays can be as revelatory of human existence as novels and poems.” Daddy’s Girl turns in a stellar performance like being judged on a stage getting a standing ovation.

Lorraine

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Nurture vs. Genetics and other mysteries of life (Manhattan & Long Island, NY and Cambridge, MA; 1950s to 1968): Like a three-act play, Margot unfolds theatrically.

Probing many issues, asking many thought-provoking “What If” and existential questions about the meaning of life, Margot, historical fiction, can’t be pigeonholed.

Shaped around Margot’s unsettling coming-of-age story – a searing search for identity and belonging, battling achingly low self-esteem amidst the changing social and cultural forces of the fifties and sixties, along with an early, belittled fascination with science – Margot is a psychologist’s feast. Raised in a loveless, emotionally abusive family of Old Money white privilege and prejudice, her sad and lonely trajectory swings submissively, feverishly, passive-aggressively.

Margot presents as many things too. Can she ever recover from the relentless “fault-finding” of her cold-as-a-fish mother Peggy, the emotional abandonment believing she’s the one always wrong?

The moody cover sets a disquieting tone. Told in three parts: “Beginnings” (Part I/Act I), her choke-hold, formative childhood and adolescent years; “Intermediate” (Part II/Act II), her breaking-out college years – the burning core of the novel; and the haunting ending, “Advancing” (Part II, Act III), the mood is “doomy-boomy.”

Provocative, Margot will surely elicit varying reactions and thoughts. Not, though, when it comes to the originality of the prose. Wendell Steavenson’s writing holds us hostage evoking what Margot’s family did to her. Playing with snappy combinations of words, she intentionally overuses hyphenated words, creating drama, zippy pacing, laser-like focus. Words are also repeated without punctuation for emphasis – “studied studied studied” (Margot’s head always in books, her “favorite people”), and “ran ran ran all the way home home home without looking back.” Cynical, the rapid-fire dialogue reeks of sarcasm.

No warm and fuzzy happiness. At best satisfaction and acceptance. So why would a novel screaming disenchantment fit so well with Enchanted Prose? The best explanation I’ve uncovered so far comes from an article adopted from a new book, Out of Silence, Sound. Out of Nothing, Something by Susan Griffin in which she says: “If the sound of your words is true, your reader will be riveted if not enchanted.” 

The What Ifs begin before you open the book. What If author Wendell Steavenson had a different career? Would she have written a gentler, happier story? Steavenson, a war correspondent, has witnessed the senselessness and trauma of conflict in some of the most dangerous hotspots around the globe. Having written three notable nonfiction books set in revolutionary times in Iraq, Egypt, and Georgia (post-Soviet), expect those presumably life-purpose perspectives in Margot, her second novel. (Paris Metro, her first).

The What Ifs kick off on page one, when eight-year-old Margot falls from a “rope ladder” dangling from her treehouse. Instead of her small-minded mother appreciating that her wonderfully curious and intelligent only child can find solace and joy in the natural world, Margot fears she’ll be “mad at me for gallivanting.” Soon her mother’s “brittle-voice” will repeat her mantra that Margot will never be “good-enough.” When that’s pounded into your head, what does that do to a young girl’s sense-of-self?

What If her hiding-in-the-library nursing apple-brandy father Harrison gave her any attention? Absent are any real mother-daughter or father-daughter relationships.

What If her wealthy family wasn’t in the 1% and thought only money equaled happiness? They own two homes: one on the richest avenue in the world, Park in Manhattan, and the more vivid setting, the “big house,” an estate on Oyster Bay, Long Island. (Teddy Roosevelt summered here; today Sagamore Hill National Historic Site). Would they treat her any differently if she was growing up today? 

The House Of Teddy Roosevelt At Sagamore Hill, Oyster Bay, NY
By Jo Zimny Photos on Flickr [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

Two different types of revolutions in the “hippy-dippy” sixties take center stage: the Sexual Revolution and the Women’s Movement. Sharpened by Margot’s choice to attend the all-women’s experimental and rigorous college Radcliffe, before it merged under Harvard. Heightened by her captivation with Molecular Biochemistry after Watson and Crick made their discovery of DNA. Margot is gripped by the possibilities of cellular life on this planet after America landed a man on the Moon.

DNA structure by Zephyris
via Wikimedia Commons [CC BY-SA 3.0]

Margot herself is an experiment. Desperate to liberate herself from the shallow, prescribed world her repugnant mother turned into a “head-game.” Magnified by an edgy time when women were liberating themselves sexually, Margot turns into a “head-game” for readers.

“What are we going to do about Margot?” is a refrain. Bright, socially awkward girls who shoot up to six feet tall are not marriage material as far as uppity Peggy is concerned. Marriage is all that matters when money rules the world. The family’s history is also marked by antisemitism involving Margot’s Aunt Sarah, her mother’s long-lost sister. A mystery that unravels bit-by-bit. It’s not beautiful, but it fits beautifully with what it says about Margot’s family’s intolerance. The loss of Sarah, who might have filled the emotional vacuum, emphasizes Margot’s yearning for “tenderness” yet rarely finding it.

Margot is “weary-wary” up against pernicious limitations then disorienting freedoms. Socially, her young life was filled with too many unlikable characters forced on her, setting in motion others who’ll hurt her. Two exceptions: one who rescues Margot’s wild, perhaps only girlfriend Maddy/Mad, and the standout Sandy Full, aka Sandyful. Full of sensitivity, kindness, allure. Margot met him when he’d graduated from West Point and she was about fifteen. He’s in and out of her life as he’s Stevenson’s eyewitness to war. Doing his patriotic duty for the US Army as the Vietnam War rages, he profoundly knows what sacrifice, loss, and physical pain mean. Perceptive to Margot’s emotional pain, he tells her “the trick is to look at the world with your own eyes.” Can she? 

Margot is in and out of her own life too. Thrusting her into the radical, groundbreaking mission at Radcliffe – a “messy experience” in general, and specifically in a highly unusual genetics class where Margot’s male classmate calls her the “Princess of the Chromosomes” – sets up a perfect storm. Far from being treated as a princess, she’s torn between studying studying studying and inserting herself into a foggy milieu of partying, drinking, sexual promiscuity, pot smoking. Margot muddles through – unsecure, confused, distressed, burdened by her trademark shame, yet sometimes she’s excited and hopeful. Push-and-pull. Heady times.

The “Pill” is seen as a powerful trigger in freeing women sexually. Steavenson strikes at the hot button struggles in the current abortion rights ban and women’s freedom decades later.

To highlight how women don’t get their due, Rosalind Franklin’s name pops up. She worked with Watson and Crick, instrumental to their genetics discovery, but never got the credit. Her story may be famous in science circles, but most of us never heard of her. An article in The Guardian poses whether sexism was the reason this British chemist was left behind? An example of how thoughtful Steavenson was in crafting Margot’s story. 

Margot, then, is often pictured with her head looking down into a microscope. Or, a centrifuge or an oscilloscope, studying the “protophase metaphase anaphase telophase” stages of mitosis. “The division of a cell is a beautiful and mysterious process,” thinks Margot who sees “something romantic about laboratories at night.” Even romantically she thinks scientifically: “Is it chemistry or electricity that quickens a heartbeat?”

Sandy offers what may be the novel’s most hopeful message: “Everything causes a scar, visible and invisible” . . . we can never erase our pain but we can honor it and we can learn to redirect it.” Again, can she?

Lorraine

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