Enchanted Prose

A character-driven novel illuminates the complexities of a humanitarian crisis and a love story in the poorest country in the world, hoping for peace but rarely seeing it (South Sudan on the border with north Sudan; November 2001 to August 2002): Ghost Season is a must-read.

Especially if you want to better understand why Sudan, independent from Britain since 1956, and South Sudan split from the north in 2011, have been at or close to war for nearly all those years. And why South Sudan, where the novel is set, the poorest country in the world — #167 out of 167! — and one of the most diverse ethnically, culturally, and religiously hasn’t been able to achieve a lasting cease-fire.

“What fiction gives you that journalism can’t is this emotional, visceral experience of living things through characters you care about. That can give you a different understanding,” said Fatin Abbas in an interview about her deeply absorbing, affecting, enlightening historical novel.

Reading Ghost Season when the newest cease-fire in Sudan didn’t last; when thousands have already been added to the already millions of refugees; and evacuations by other countries rescuing their citizens is taking place, pulls you in with immense authenticity.

Ghost Season arrived when the humanitarian crisis in South Sudan couldn’t have been worse. Now it is. We can’t even begin to imagine what 9 million people in a country of 12 million have and are going through. Glazing over numbers on that monumental scale, Abbas knows living amidst a few, diverse people up-close helps us comprehend the enormity.

Ghost Season is about relationships. Relationships that form and change when people from different walks of life and experiences come together. Their voices are vehicles for grasping South Sudan’s long story of struggles and conflicts. Vivid, through exquisite prose. Lyrical. Nimble, equally authentic from the tender to the fierce. Gentle at an unhurried pace shifting to terrorizing and fast-moving.

It wasn’t until the end of Part I (of seven parts) that I came up for air to google Abbas’ background to try to figure out how she could equally put us into such contradictory scenes as if we were there, observing both. Just like one of her female characters, schooled in “observational photography.” (See Dena below.)

Turns out Abbas was born in Sudan, raised in Khartoum, the capital, spending the first eight years of her life there. The last without her scholarly father, an English professor, jailed, deemed a political enemy. When he was released, the family fled to America and became US citizens. So what drove a young woman, before she became an award-winning scholar known for her non-fiction Sudanese commentary (and more, see https://www.fatinabbas.com/), to return to Sudan to work for an NGO humanitarian organization? The place her novel revolves around. Still, to finely pull off the transition from academic to emotional perceptiveness in harsh environments that test people calls for an entirely different skill set. Differences abound everywhere.

Optimism to make a difference is at the center of the goodwill of Ghost Season. Set at a compound of an unnamed NGO humanitarian organization in the South Kordofan region at the international borders of southern Sudan and South Sudan. The NGO’s logo features palms in prayer, a familiar symbol of peace, embracing others with similar missions.

South Sudan separated from the Muslim-controlled government in Khartoum that adheres to Arabic traditions in a hopeful move towards democracy. Predominately Christian, the new country follows African traditions, comprised of sixty-four tribes, mostly people of Nilote ethnicity who speak different languages.

Labeling significantly oversimplifies the diversity of challenges and what’s at stake in South Sudan. A landscape of dwindling natural resources spectacularly affected by: 1) geography and climate, the overwhelming dry and wet seasons; 2) desert and semi-arid landscapes, also grasslands and swamplands (the Sudd cited, https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/6276/); 3) the irony of impoverished people in a country of rich resources (such as oil, Chinese workers in the novel’s background; gold in the news since that’s what Russia is after to fund the Ukraine War; and 4) climate change severely degrading already grim conditions. How else to explain a flooding river disappearing in three months, shocking another character in the story? (See Alex below). Climate change depicted as ground zero should shake the world.

All these issues – poverty and the desperate need for humanitarian aid; access to clean water; Sudanese Arab nomad cattle herdsmen and farmers resettling to South Sudan competing for the same resources as the Nilotes, pitting black against black, all represented by the five characters Abbas has dreamed up with clear-sightedness.

The first chapter introduces the characters so you won’t get confused or forget who they are, their differences, and roles. No one knew each other at the start; intimately they know one another by the end:

ALEX: Surveyor and Mapmaker. White, the only one. From the US. His job is to identify “villages, cattle migration routes, water wells, and grazing pastures” since the current maps are fifty years old. Seems to be the one to take charge of the compound, but at twenty-seven he’s too disoriented, fearful, and tense to be able to. Unbearable, sizzling heat contributes to his daze.

WILLIAM: Translator. Catholic, a “Nilot man” even though he’s returned from Sudan educated. Better off because he’s working at the NGO compared to others treated as-less-than, slave-like. Thirty-three, elegantly dressed and proud, he takes on what Alex cannot.

MUSTAFA: Hardworking “errand boy.” The poorest. A street-smart, twelve-year-old kid, willing to do all the unpleasant chores and whatever else, for money. Attached to William.

DENA: Cinematographer, unsure of what she’s filming. Born and raised in Sudan, her family fled to Boston. She’s returned for unsaid reasons that drive Alex nuts. The unfolding story shows her what to record.

LAYLA: Cook. Arabic nomad from Sudan, she nurtures everyone. The love story between William and Layla sets up intense drama. The most endearing relationship, as William patiently woos Layla for as long as he can, acutely aware that her heart isn’t supposed to accept his love. Their future on edge, uncertain, like everything else.

Of the female characters, you’ll love Layla from the start but the same can’t be said of Dena. Closed-off, she’s not at all receptive to Alex’s friendliness, though she warms to Layla and is intrigued by Mustafa. Fearless and low-key, whereas Alex isn’t the laid-back type. Who can blame him here? Plenty of obstacles, while Dena is free-floating hiding behind her camera. There’s a feminist focus in terms of conventional Layla compared to unconventional Dena, and how women bear the crushing burdens fending for their children and themselves. So many widows, victims of heinous wars.

For William and Layla: how long can two forbidden people manage to keep their love? For Mustafa: how long can someone in dire poverty stay out of trouble? For Alex: how long can an American aid worker remain in a place he has no idea “how he was to find his bearings?” For Dena: how long can someone stay closed-off when their life is threatened?

For us: in spite of a deeply personal connection, a scholar’s insight, stirring prose, we still ask: how Fatin Abbas pulled off this powerful heartwarming and heart-wrenching debut novel?

Lorraine

A literary artist paints big themes of America’s West and other frontiers through an FDR New Deal visual artist (fictional town in Wyoming, also Seattle, San Francisco, Florida; 1937): “We don’t know how any minute of history will play out,” says Val, the WPA New Deal muralist narrator-protagonist of Charles Frazier’s intriguingly told new historical novel.

Capturing the majesty of the American frontier landscape when America was limping through depressing economic times, The Trackers is living history America is still contending with. The prose is old-fashioned storytelling: muscular dialogue, jawboning, tall tales, legendary stories. It wraps art and adventure with economic, cultural, political, and moral themes into a mystery.

In 1997, judges of the National Book Award called Frazier’s debut mega-bestselling novel Cold Mountain “a vastly compelling narrative, and a useful mirror in which to witness ourselves and our perplexities.” The same can be said of The Trackers, Frazier’s fifth American history novel.

A fuller description might add how art critics described Val’s iconic heroes – painter and muralist Diego Rivera who left his mark on Thomas Hart Benton, depicting America’s grit and industrial engine – as: “socially and politically wide aesthetic vision, storytelling focus, and utilization of symbolism.”

The Trackers – a brilliant title since it has multiple meanings – begins and returns to Wyoming when it was still a wild frontier although historically the Wild West ended in the early 1900s. The standout prose isn’t a romanticized version of America’s Old West, even though twenty-seven-year-old artist Valentine Montgomery Welch III, Val, is a dreamer. A do-gooder who also needs money. The power of money is a big, conflicted theme: its role in America’s expansion, greediness, politics, relationships. 

Val’s coming-of-age evolves from idealist to realist. The art plot embraces aspiration and optimism. Thanks to a former art professor, Hutch, Val landed a New Deal art commission to paint a mural in a small Wyoming town’s post office (one of 1,400 painted around the country). Val can’t put into words what he’ll end up painting, but he has a mental image of “the energy of America” that should reflect the region’s culture and hopefully lift the community up. The value of public art at a time when dreams were crashed is another thread.

Val’s progression spins-off the initial plot. The subplot consumes a chunk of the novel, turning Val into a detective.

Both storylines originate from Val’s benefactor: John Long, a wealthy cattle rancher who owns hundreds-of-acres and was recently married to younger wife Eve, with movie-star looks and mystique. Val’s plum deal comes with the perk of Long’s hosting him on his “enormous log-and-stone cabin” ranch property, complete with rustic cabins, horse barn, and that classy red convertible Packer on the cover resembling National Park WPA Poster Art.

Page one hints at whether Val’s stay will be as lucky as he feels with his first impression of the Long Shot ranch “hunkered against the world . . . As architecture, it made me wonder who it was afraid of or, conversely, who its anger was aimed at.” Prescient, because the more time Val spends with the couple, the more curious he gets about their relationship as tensions are exposed but not discussed. Eve is not the emotional kind, Long has his own agenda, and Val is in over his head. 

Eve is a mystery. Once a cowgirl singer in a traveling band, she has a vagabond’s soul. Jaded, she believes most of life is a business transaction, except for dreaming. Val will come to question whether his dreams were worth the risks of doing business with Long.

Old Faro, Long’s longtime ranch hand cowboy comes across as scary, gun-toting. Don’t be fooled by his machismo as he’s a horse whisperer who keeps his sensitivities to himself. 

Long has strong political ambitions, aiming for Governor, preferably US Senator. How Eve feels about that sets off alarm bells today on how far people will go for political power.

What Val has going for him is he’s cynical enough, and catches on reasonably quickly. Long, the guy with all the money, calls all the shots. Val, then, is willing to do his dirty work.

The mural will be painted fresco-style in the tradition of Mexico’s Rivera. The fictional Wyoming town Dawes might be a nod to former US Senator Henry L. Dawes and The Dawes Act of 1887, which impacted the Wind River Reservation. Long’s ranch “stretched west across sage hills to distant blue-black pine mountains in front of ghostly snow peaks flat as drawing paper against the sky, the Wind River Range.”

Historically and symbolically, Dawes represents power land grabs and injustice. The legislation deceived, billed as more land for American Indians but intended to get that land into the hands of White opportunists. Long, an art collector, owns some paintings by Charles M. Russell (1864-1926) known for “celebrating Indigenous cultures . . . while his art is considered historical, his spirit is timeless,” the C.M. Russell Museum states. Likewise, the novel‘s spirit feels timeless, and subtly makes a statement about America’s shameful treatment of Native Americans.

From the first sentence – “A Muddy Black-and-White Newspaper Photograph” – Frazier’s prose hooks us. Whether you view the novel from the standpoint of Art (each of its five Parts are named for the colors of Val’s palette: “Ten Thousand-Foot Blue”; “Charcoal and Umber”; “Rust and Chartreuse”; “Cinnabar and Azure”; “Indelible Black”), or as a detective story almost doesn’t matter. Honestly, we’re happy to go wherever Frazier wants to take us.

His prose sings – grandly, nostalgically, shadowy, sultry. It conveys Western ruggedness, breathtaking landscapes, the freedom of wide-open spaces and endless skies. Also looming is “whether the heaviness could overwhelm our desire to lift and fly to a better place.” Frazier isn’t just writing about a bygone era, but pointedly for today. Evidence includes: 1) Faro speaking of America’s future as he “how bad it’s gonna get . . . that’s how you’ll know the world has gone to hell”; 2) Hutch telling Val their world is a “different, harder world we were living in after the giddy” Roaring Twenties; 3) The Dust Bowl symbolizing the climate-change world we’re living in today: “drought conditions,” “front-page apocalyptic photographs,” “black blizzards,” “flooding rivers”; 4) Billy the Kid and other outlaw storytelling bringing out America’s increasingly violent culture; 5) and citing bad Supreme Court decisions.

Eve’s singing evokes a “mood more than a song.” Like Frazier’s prose that evokes moods contrasting the Depression against new feats of architecture Val found “oddly hopeful.” “Hope can sometimes be a sad thing, that or embarrassingly unhip, but I couldn’t help myself,” he says.

“Love and rejection and retaliation” are other moods coloring the prose. Whose love? Rejection? Retaliation?

Do you believe as Eve also does? “There’s not but one true trail through the world, and all the truth you can say of it is it’s there. Everything else is a guess.” 

What about Val, who wants to have faith in public art to “elevate the country, maybe by only an inch, but every upward movement, however small accumulates”? One of the questions we guess at is whether today’s America would endorse a revitalized WPA art deal for the public good and struggling artists if it weren’t a money-making proposition?

Frazier wants us to reflect on what we could gain from the lessons of the past.

Lorraine

Dark shades of grey in an insular world of pretty pinks (Manhattan, and ballerina stories elsewhere; 2001-present day): Ballet is a supremely beautiful “visual art form.” Ballet is a supremely destructive aesthetic discipline. Clashing perspectives on an all-consuming artistic endeavor, and what happens when you’re no longer part of the ballet “cult.”

Alice Robb – a former “bunhead” who trained intensively for ten years at the most prestigious ballet school in America when she was young – the School of American Ballet (SAB) founded by Russian “creative genius” and choreographer George Balanchine (“Mr. B”) – has written an absorbing, frank, eye-opening memoir that’s not just about her early ballet life and the aftermath, but stories of other ballerinas, renowned and not.

Drawing its title from the authoritative words and philosophy of a ballet master who left his mark on the ballet world, “Don’t Think, Dear” is remarkably thought-provoking.

The desire to feel “special” overriding everything else, it’s no wonder that at thirty ballet is still etched in Robb’s “psyche and behavior.” Striving but not there yet to “break the ballet mindset,” it seems Robb isn’t the only one reckoning with the legacy of Mr. B (See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/theater-dance/2023/03/28/balanchine-city-ballet-ballet-podcast-/).

“The dream of being a ballerina begins with the dream of being beautiful.” What does it mean, though, to be made to feel you’re not “good enough”? To weigh yourself against everyone else? Competition so fierce it leaps off the pages.

Robb’s dream was to dance for the New York City Ballet (NYCB), one of the top ballet companies in the world, also founded by Balanchine. The SAB a training ground for the dream of becoming a “chosen one,” which meant having the perfect female body; “artistry and technique;” and the submissiveness Balanchine demanded of his girls.

Robb is a dreamer, starting with her first foray into her “post-ballet” writing life “Why Do We Dream”. In this deeply personal insider’s look at her unfulfilled ballet dreams, she also takes an outsider’s examination of what she gained and lost. Her memoir is wrapped up in her dreams as well as the dreams of countless others, writing from the dual vantage points of Beauty and the Beast. Robb cites, among other issues “isms” such as sexism, favoritism, idealism, masochism. How far should someone go for the sake of Art? When is the line crossed?

Robb tells us she was “born in 1992: the Year of the Woman.” Back then, she “loved the hyperfeminine trappings.” Today her quest is to be “feminine but strong,” as opposed to ballerinas so weak from starvation yet they “danced through their unbearable pain,” Virtuosos of how to “suffer in silence.” Of how to disconnect from one’s body. A “perverse relationship with pain” that stuns and horrifies those of us in awe of ballet’s beauty and elegance. Time and time again, though, Robb reminds us that pain for a ballerina is a “source of pride.” Is this beauty-in-the-eyes-of-the beholder? A ballet culture gone terribly wrong? Seeing the world through a “ballet lens” versus a more objective assessment? The answers not as clear-cut as you might think.

Balanchine’s approach isn’t a classical one like the dancers in the oldest ballet company in the world, the Paris Opera Ballet, the inspiration of Edgar Degas’ paintings Robb loves.

Mr. B’s legacy is one of “aliveness, an energy that was new to ballet.” Great artists create something others haven’t. That doesn’t mean we have to think everything about Balanchine’s techniques and style are triumphant in achieving the effect of “ethereal fairies.” By making us take off our rose-colored glasses, the legend disturbs us too. 

The audience for this artistic and cautionary tale well-exceeds ballet lovers. “To dance is a universal impulse,” even babies rhythmically move to music Robb points out. Broader than that are females obsessed with counting calories, have distorted body images, and battle anorexia and other eating disorders. (Affecting 30 million Americans, twenty million women according to this account.) Greater still are compulsive perfectionists. What are the benefits of pursuing perfectionism in one’s craft versus the damage of pursuing the impossible-to-reach goal of perfectionism in life?

Robb’s book reads like a perfect vision of a memoir: combining the intimate with stories of ballet student friends, interviews, and an extensive reading and recounting of other ballet memoirs, novels, research studies, blogs, magazines (dance and psychology); and watching numerous documentaries and movies. Way too many to cite, but you’ll find them listed at the back of the book in her “Reading and Viewing” suggestions and a twenty-page, single-spaced bibliography.

Full of contradictions, a few include:

• Ballet objectifies female bodies. Is this art, “sexual harassment,” or “mental torture”?
• We visualize ballet as the epitome of grace, whereas Mr. B sees his girls as “obedient animals.” 
• Is ballet a stunning example of “stoicism” or “masochism”? Keep in mind every dancer worships Balanchine, wanting to push themselves way beyond their limits for him.
• Is this kind of behavior “resilience” or a “concession to a toxic culture”?

While reading ballet terms, one word you know but not in the context of ballet is “lengthen.” Code for “lose weight.” Another word we likely haven’t heard is “thinspo,” which stands for “thinspiration.” Ballet’s devotion may be inspirational but it comes waving a red flag. 

This certainly isn’t the only ballet memoir published, but it certainly feels wide-ranging. A sample of ballet memoirs Robb dissects depicted in the images below include Misty Copeland’s Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina; Margot Fonteyn: A Life by Meredith Daneman; Suzanne Farrell’s (with Toni Bentley) Holding on to the Air; Little Dancer Aged Fourteen: The True Story Behind Degas’ Masterpiece by Camille Laurens; Bunheads by Sophie Flack. They provide insight into what the culture means and demands, as well as the mental health benefits and deleterious focus on nothing else in a girl’s/woman’s life.

Not all ballerinas are in companies that relentlessly drum into a female’s head the “fat talk,” but Robb’s story seems to represent them. Which is why twenty-eight-year-old ballerina Michaella DePrince’s story and trajectory is so beautiful and uplifting. Escaping from the horrors of the Sierra Leone war, she danced with the Dutch National Ballet and the Dance Theatre of Harlem, now with the Boston Ballet (See: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/14/arts/international/for-michaela-deprince-a-dream-comes-true-at-the-dutch-national-ballet.html). Feel good watching her performing and looking athletic: 

The pink pointe ballet shoes on the cover symbolize both the exquisite imagery and the pain of breaking in “custom-made shoes” that are “far from ready to wear.” Detailing the process is even painful to read. Robb’s characterizations are likened to a “crown of thorns,” a “bed of nails.”

Who knew there’s a world of “mother’s-of-dancers” online message boards? Robb disgusted by them calls them “cesspits of parental anxiety,” scornful of mothers who use their daughters to fulfill their unrealized dreams. These moms are different than the strict Tiger Moms who want their children to succeed; they’ve gone to extremes for their own selves. 

One of Robb’s ballet student friends says, “Perhaps I can show the world that one defeat doesn’t mean the end.” Robb speaks about learning that the happiest former ballerinas found a way to “keep ballet in their lives.” The sense the reader gets, confirmed by Robb, is that writing is now her way.

We are the beneficiaries.

Lorraine

What happens when you can’t take the inequity and inequality anymore? (Central Massachusetts, present): It’s always exciting when a new novel by Ellen Cooney comes out.

Cooney writes refreshingly unique novels that leave impressions and challenge us to think about what her finely-drawn prose is really telling us. A Cowardly Woman No More, released today, well-fits that description.

Evoking Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, forty-four-year-old Trisha Donahue claims to be a proud “company woman.” Is she really? Her first-person voice is restrained, as if she’s hiding something. Does she really feel “lucky, lucky, lucky” as she keeps coaching herself?

Trisha’s company is nameless and located in a nondescript office park somewhere in the middle of Massachusetts. The initial sense you get is it could be anywhere; later you tweak that to anywhere where conventionality thrives.

C0oney, who lived and taught creative writing at numerous Boston and Cambridge universities, sets her eleventh novel at a beloved, old-fashioned, estate-like country restaurant, the Rose & Emerald, a bus ride from the company. Taking place on one life-altering day – the company’s annual Banquet Day – this is the day a woman who’s made sure “what was going on inside me has stayed inside me” is no longer able to hide.

The country getaway may be “unfussy and earthy,” but Cooney keys us in that it’s “always ready for a brawl.” Coupled with Trisha’s depiction of herself as a “master of mysteriousness” – also reflecting Cooney’s refined prose that also has an air of mystery to it – we’re captive. What’s going to happen to Trisha on this day? By page six, she tells us she’s going to be awarded Employee of the Year. So why does she add: “This made it worse”?

Cooney, in her underplayed prose, tips us off that today is a rare day for Trisha by opening with the townspeople believing a comet crashed into the country inn, a rarity. When Cooney says on the first line that the “Rose and Emerald has “come back from the dead,” she’s forecasting Trisha’s awakening from a long-drawn-out sleep. The comet theory is later corrected to a meteorite; the surreal picture already established. Contradicting Trisha’s assessment that hers is a “normal, ordinary” life, today is anything but.

At 206 pages A Cowardly Woman No More resonates. Despite the eccentricities of what Trisha does when she can no longer constrain herself, the absurdism witty, it’s the underlying wisdom that strikes and sticks. Easy to race through the pages, but you might miss all the implications. Cooney’s prose is so well crafted there’s a lot more going on than it might seem. Don’t tell all; don’t show all. Make the reader think.

Since Trisha’s story has a corporate plot, with Trisha having given so much to a company that says one thing but doesn’t really love her back, A Cowardly Woman No More is a feminist novel, but it’s more than a Me Too tale on gender equity and equality. It asks us to look closely at ourselves and wonder if we’ve let daily living take the joy out of life. When Trisha says, “You never forget your first time of joy,” the lyrical line makes us pause, trying to remember ours. When she qualifies that statement with, “I was existing, for just a few moments, in a world where it was possible to feel joy,” we stop to re-read the sentence to absorb a life where there hasn’t been many moments filled with happiness. Hers has been a life of “otherness.” Not just hers, but the lives of countless marginalized others struggling to be respected and appreciated.

Understanding what aches Trisha goes back to her early childhood raised on the “wrong side of the tracks” by parents who were invisible factory workers living in a rowhouse. A life marked by condescension and ridicule, even for being smart and ambitious. What we see is a woman determined to exceed everyone’s expectations.

Trisha overanalyzes things, so she’s well-suited for her analyst position in a HR department in which she’s the only woman on a team of ten. Not lost on us is that although women have bucked male-dominated fields in Human Resource departments, this company hasn’t progressed.

We admire Trisha, root for her, but when she tells us her secret – that she’s a “coward” – we feel sad for her. In today’s world, a woman must be a fighter.

Long ago, when Trisha was young and part of a “girly gang,” she did something brave. But that Trisha is long gone. “What happened to me?” she asks as we do. Does this have anything to do with her lack of any real friendships?

Despite being married with two sons, Trisha’s loneliness echoes a country in a loneliness crisis. A mental health crisis. “How low can I sink”? she worries. When does someone reach their breaking point?

As Trisha’s mind works overtime, her aching soul is palpable. She also suffers from acute self-consciousness that’s led to terribly low “self-confidence, so hard to get by without, so easy to never have.”

Cooney has now written over the past ten years three novels on soul-searching. Following in the footsteps of her acclaimed 2020 novel One Night Two Souls Went Walking, also slim yet explicit in wanting to know “What is a soul?” (see: https://enchantedprose.com/one-night-two-souls-went-walking/), the reader is on the lookout for Trisha’s hidden soul. A different soul is the emotional bond between humans and their pets in The Mountaintop School for Dogs, where rescuing dogs rescues people (see: https://enchantedprose.com/the-mountaintop-school-for-dogs-and-other-second-chances/).

On the face of it, the employee recognition award is something to be proud of. In this case, though, it’s a disguise for an indignity. One piled on top of another. Like a house of cards, when does it collapse?

Trisha’s private life is fairly unknown. Her husband isn’t in the picture much except when they first met over a song. He seems supportive but you feel a sense of disconnect in the immediate aftermath of this revelatory day.

Past and present intermingled, dramatically including the once magical setting of the Rose & Emerald, which used to be Trisha’s fantasy-world. Only three miles by bike for a young, impoverished girl to escape the realities of her worlds-away hard life.

“Writing is like flying,” Cooney said in an interview. What comes flooding back to Trisha in a “memory sweep” feels like a rush of free-flowing consciousness thinking, bursting open after being bottled up for too long.

Having dressed for the event erratically yet remembering to wear high-heel shoes is a sign something is amiss. (Trisha’s attire plays a role in the plot.) Later when she becomes disoriented, people she remembers and doesn’t fly by. With time to think, she asks herself a litany of questions she should have asked a long time ago. One question that’s delightfully edgy and razor-sharp brings Trisha’s situation up-to-date is: “Why does anyone even bother wearing a bra?” referring to the “Pandemic Bra Revolution.”

In One Night the female narrator asks if “a soul can speak to another soul?” Trisha’s unraveling speaks to girls and women crushed by the limiting rules and expectations of others. While it’s hard to imagine that 50% of all women around the world suffer from low self-esteem, Trisha speaks from one woman’s soul to another.

Trisha makes us think about ourselves. What we might do differently to move beyond who we’ve become? Asking us whether our soul is at peace? Or, is there more to life that we can do?

Lorraine

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