Women’s accomplishments have always been swept under the rug. For every Nefertiti and Eleanor of Aquitaine, how many unknown heroines are there? And why is it still the case that being a homemaker is only rarely recognized as an extraordinarily demanding career choice?
Women’s voices–and their achievements–have only begun to emerge, but the chorus is growing. Reflecting that change, these five books focus on the challenges–banal and serious–that ordinary females face:
The Usual Rules
By Joyce Maynard
St. Martin’s, 390 pages, $24.95
Everyone knew it was coming, and everyone dreaded it: the work of fiction that uses Sept. 11, 2001, as a touchstone. But in Joyce Maynard’s new novel, “The Usual Rules,” it’s OK.
Her protagonist, Wendy, is a 13-year-old who quibbles with her mother and leaves for school without saying goodbye that horrible morning. While Wendy is sitting in class, making book covers out of paper grocery bags, it happens–her mother is killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center–and Wendy begins a powerless cruise into impossible pain.
Wendy’s stepfather and 5-year-old brother stew in devastation, and her best friend, Amelia, stumbles awkwardly to protect her. Her biological father, Garrett, shows up on their Brooklyn doorstep after many years of abandonment, inviting Wendy home with him. Seeking a door through her pain, she escapes with her mysterious father to his northern California home. There Wendy skips school and starts telling lies, creating new family structures to hide the one she has lost. But fictional or not, the new bonds she forms with her father and friends remind her of who she is and encourage her to return to the life she knows.
Maynard’s novel is helped by her decision to eliminate quotation marks for dialogue, turning things that are merely said into things that are heard and interpreted by a grieving adolescent mind. In spite of her age, or maybe because of it, Wendy is an honest and capable navigator, allowing Maynard to make a delicate weave from the complex demands of incomprehensible loss.
Family History
By Dani Shapiro
Knopf, 269 pages, $23
Rachel Jensen’s life has been filled with subtle luck, the perfect path unfolding before her. Intelligent and surefooted, she hasn’t really had problems, or when she has encountered them, she has operated with the certainty that belongs to people who have not experienced inexplicable trauma.
By the time we meet her, that has already changed. Studying to be an art restorer, hanging out in an East Village Ukrainian cafe, Rachel met Ned, a painter. Months later, Rachel became pregnant. They married, moved to Ned’s Massachusetts hometown and had a daughter, Kate, who is beautiful, strong-willed and idealistic–a clone of her parents.
But as Kate grows older, signs of adolescent rebellion appear, heralding a flurry of emotional and psychological changes that Rachel cannot unravel. Was it the birth of the Jensens’ second child, Josh? Did something happen at the overnight summer camp Kate attended? The family’s stability sits in the balance, until a tragic accident pushes Kate over the edge and the Jensens’ marriage is shattered.
Dani Shapiro, author of the best-selling memoir “Slow Motion,” writes wonderfully, and with Rachel as narrator, she gently regulates the tone of the novel to reflect the tenuous nature of its central conflict. Her portrayal of a mother and wife struggling to accept the limits of her love and custody will resonate with anyone who has ever wished they could protect someone, and failed. As Rachel comes to terms with circumstances that even the best intentions can’t conquer, she becomes a greater hero, and mother, than she ever could have hoped.
Tilt
By Elizabeth Burns
Sourcebooks, 275 pages, $22
As in “Family History,” we meet Elizabeth Burns’ protagonist, Bridget Fox, in the aftermath of her personal struggle. We learn that she divorced young and moved to Portugal, where she met her second husband, Pierce, a sculptor. Together they moved back to New York, where Bridget’s father, Hugo, and close cousin, Nessa, lived. They had a daughter, Maeve, and another on the way, and Bridget began to believe that her longed-for perfect life was back on track.
But all at once, things fell apart: Nessa died of breast cancer, and after Bridget moved with her young family to Minneapolis, where Pierce had secured a teaching job, Hugo died. With Bridget’s support system obliterated, her life spirals out of control. Severe episodes of manic depression render Pierce practically incompetent, and signs of mental slowness in Maeve develop into full-blown autism. Doing what it seems women characters tend to do, Bridget assumes all the responsibility for keeping her family functioning. It is an impossible task: Her husband becomes deceptive and violent, and Maeve’s disorder is so severe that Bridget finally has to call the fire department to help her control her daughter’s physical outbursts.
The fragmented chronology of “Tilt” creates a necessary tension in the novel, but the narrative is so chaotic that it is unclear if Burns has maintained control of it. When Bridget is finally hospitalized for inevitable depression, she realizes that to regain peace she must release her grip on the whirlwind forces controlling her life. Although “Tilt” sometimes hungers for that same calmness, it remains a gripping and surprisingly uplifting story.
Twelve Times Blessed
By Jacquelyn Mitchard
HarperCollins, 532 pages, $25.95
Midwesterner Jacquelyn Mitchard has scored big with her past work. Her novels, such as “The Deep End of the Ocean” (the first Oprah book, which became a movie starring Michelle Pfeiffer), have secured a wide audience because they aim to give legitimacy and power to the everyday trials of female characters. This year’s turn, “Twelve Times Blessed,” shares that admirable intent, but it stumbles on delivery.
The novel tells the story of True Dickinson, a 43-year-old widow living on Cape Cod with her young son, Guy. Her small business is thriving, her friends are loyal and wise, and her son still thinks the world of her. But True is unhappy, weighted with feelings of emptiness and failure because she does not have a man.
Fair enough; it happens. But Mitchard’s novel is not a story of loneliness and strength. In walks Hank, her (much younger) savior. He is a Southern-drawling cliche of a man, immature and brawny, with a “rack of muscle” that True hopes the neighbors notice. Hank rescues her after a car accident, they mutter to each other in clumsy English, French and Creole, and fall in ridiculous love. (“This moment she will have rapture. If only this.”) Hank and True marry hastily, neglecting to tell Guy; when the newly pregnant couple runs into problems (Guy is hurt, True is jealous, Hank sleeps with his ex-girlfriend), it is hard to stay invested in the outcome. As protagonists, True and Hank have already betrayed us, men and women alike.
Mrs. Kimble
By Jennifer Haigh
Morrow, 394 pages, $24.95
In her immensely accomplished novel, “Mrs. Kimble,” Jennifer Haigh profiles not one woman, but three. Despite vast differences in age, personality and provenance, Birdie, Joan and Dinah have been married to the same man, Ken Kimble. Ken is a subtle con man with a talent for exploiting each woman’s deepest vulnerabilities and a habit of taking off when things get boring.
When we meet Birdie, the first Mrs. Kimble, Ken has already left her and their two children, Charlie and Jody. Birdie met Ken when he was the choir director at her Bible college; she never learned to care for herself and married Ken because he seemed to want the job. His abandonment leaves her in severe depression, and she risks losing custody of her children.
In the meantime, Ken meets his second wife, Joan, shortly after she has taken time off to settle her father’s estate. After spending most of her life focusing on a successful career, Joan finds herself fighting breast cancer alone, her life devoid of intimacy–that is, until Ken comes along.
Later, after accumulating substantial wealth, Ken runs into Dinah (who was once his children’s baby-sitter) and offers to pay for the surgery that would remove a birthmark from her face. Parading Dinah as his trophy, Ken invents himself as the self-congratulatory head of a nonprofit organization for underprivileged families. When the organization is discovered to be a fraud, he disappears, and the people Ken has left behind convene to put the pieces together.
At turns beautiful, devastating and complex, “Mrs. Kimble” explores the interplay between deception and vulnerability, betraying Haigh’s ambitious talent in the process.
