The Women’s Review of Books Vol. XXI, No. 10-11 July 2004 74035 $4.00

I In This Issue

Our Annual Summer Reading Issue is packed with reviews of novels, short stories, and poetry—books that engage the emotions and challenge the mind, yet won’t be seriously damaged if a little sand gets into the pages.

I Painter Emily Carr is already well-known to Canadians. A new biographical novel and reissues— unexpurgated—of her essays promise to bring her unique work and life to the attention of people throughout North America and elsewhere. Cover story D

I Reviewer Adrian Oktenberg says that Desesperanto, poet Marilyn Hacker’s latest collection, definitive- ly establishes Hacker as what the Drawing of herself by Emily Carr, 1901. From Opposite Japanese would call a National Contraries (Douglas & McIntyre, 2003). Living Treasure. p. 6.

I With the novel Empress Orchid, Anchee Min embarks on a trilogy A Canadian original th based on the life of the late 19 - by Anne Marie Todkill century Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi—a controversial figure who Klee Wyck by Emily Carr. Berkeley, CA: Douglas & McIntyre, has been portrayed as enemy of the 2003, 152 pp., $8.95 paper. people, feminist hero—and The Forest Lover by Susan Vreeland. New York: Chinese Empress Barbie. p. 24. Viking, 2004, 333 pp., $24.95 hardcover. I mily Carr, painter, writer, eccentric, future wife. Finding California not colonial I and more... and enigma, was born in the colonial enough and England (where the Carrs E city of Victoria in 1871—propitious- attempted to settle) not English enough, 07> ly, the year British Columbia joined the Richard built a respectable retreat for his Canadian confederation. She was the family on the fringes of Victoria, cultivating youngest and most favored of the five gardens and pastures on ten acres of land, daughters of Richard Carr, an Englishman until, as Emily would recount, he “took who left home at the enterprising age of 18 away all the wild Canadian-ness and made it 74470 74035 03 and roved the New World from Quebec to as meek and English as he could.” PRINTED IN THE USA Peru to San Francisco, where he met his continued on page 3 The Women’s Review Contents of Books Center for Research on Women Wellesley College 1 Anne Marie Todkill I Klee Wyck by Emily Carr; The Forest Lover by Susan Vreeland 106 Central Street Wellesley, MA 02481 4 Letters (781) 283-2087/ (888) 283-8044 www.wellesley.edu/WomensReview 5 Gayle Pemberton I Pushkin and the Queen of Spades by Alice Randall Volume XXI, No. 10-11 July 2004 6 Adrian Oktenberg I Up to Speed by Rae Armantrout; Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002 by Marilyn Hacker

8 Emily Toth I America’s Mom: the Life, Lessons, and Legacy of Ann Landers by Rick Kogan; EDITOR IN CHIEF: Amy Hoffman [email protected] A Life in Letters: Ann Landers’ Letters to Her Only Child by Margo Howard PRODUCTION EDITOR: Amanda Nash 9 Heather Hewett I Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie [email protected]

10 Pamela J. Annas I Whose Names Are Unknown: A Novel by Sanora Babb POETRY AND CONTRIBUTING EDITOR: Robin Becker 12 Jewelle Gomez I Little Black Book of Stories by A. S. Byatt ADVERTISING MANAGER: 13 Leslie Lawrence I Referred Pain and Other Stories by Lynne Sharon Schwartz Anita D. McClellan [email protected] I 14 Enid Shomer Two poems OFFICE MANAGER: Nancy Wechsler [email protected] 14 Valerie Miner I Double Vision by Pat Barker STUDENT WORKER: Bethany Towne 15 Rebecca Steinitz I Emma Brown by Clare Boylan and Charlotte Brontë; The Brontë Myth by Lucasta Miller EDITORIAL MISSION: To give writ- 17 Andrea Potos I Two poems ing by and about women the serious crit- ical attention it deserves. We seek to rep- 18 Alison Hawthorne Deming I Trembling Air by Michelle Boisseau; Slave Moth: A Narrative in Verse resent the widest possible range of fem- by Thylias Moss; Bend by Natasha Sajé inist perspectives both in the books we choose to review and in the content of 20 Judith Grossman I Little Edens by Barbara Klein Moss; Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories by Joan Silber the reviews themselves.

22 Hiromi Goto I The Legend of Fire Horse Woman by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston ADVERTISING IN THE WOMEN’S REVIEW: Visit www.wellesley.edu/ 23 Andrea Freud Loewenstein I A Seahorse Year by Stacey D’Erasmo WomensReview to book an ad online; preview the current issue and classified 24 Lori Tsang I Empress Orchid by Anchee Min ads; and download a media kit including display, classified, and line rates, sizes 25 Marie-Elise Wheatwind I The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the and shapes, policies, and deadlines. Imagination by Ursula K. Le Guin The Women’s Review of Books (ISSN 26 Edith M. Vásquez I ¡Caramba! A Tale Told in Turns of the Card by Nina Marie Martínez #0738-1433) is published monthly except August by The Women’s Review, 27 The Bookshelf Inc. Annual subscriptions are $27.00 for individuals and $47.00 for institu- tions. Overseas postage fees are an additional $20.00 airmail or $5.00 sur- Contributors face mail to all countries outside the US. Back issues are available for $4.00 PAMELA ANNAS teaches working-class literature, contemporary author of The Hottest Water in Chicago: Notes of a Native Daughter. per copy. Please allow 6-8 weeks for all women poets, and personal narrative at the University of ANDREA POTOS was recently awarded the James Hearst Poetry Prize subscription transactions. Massachusetts/Boston. Her books include A Disturbance in Mirrors: The from North American Review. Her poems have appeared in many journals Poetry of Sylvia Plath and Literature and Society; she is a member of the and anthologies including CALYX, Poetry East, and Green Mountains Periodicals class postage paid at Radical Teacher editorial collective. Review. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and is a longtime bookseller at Boston, MA and additional mailing ALISON HAWTHORNE DEMING is the author of two books of A Room of One’s Own feminist bookstore. offices. poems and three books of nonfiction and is editor with Lauret E. Savoy ENID SHOMER is the author of five books, among them Stars at of The Colors of Nature. Her new book of poems Genius Loci will be pub- Noon: Poems from the Life of Jacqueline Cochran and Imaginary Men, which POSTMASTER: send address correc- lished in 2005. won the Iowa Fiction Award and the LSU/Southern Review Award. Her tions to The Women’s Review of Books, JEWELLE GOMEZ is the author of the black lesbian vampire novel, stories and poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Center for Research on Women, The Gilda Stories, published in a special 13th anniversary edition this year Paris Review and other publications. Wellesley College, 106 Central Street, by Firebrand Books. Her recent collection of short stories is Don’t REBECCA STEINITZ is an associate professor of English at Ohio Wellesley, MA 02481. Explain. Visit her at www.jewellegomez.com. Wesleyan University, where she teaches 19th-century British literature, HIROMI GOTO is a novelist. She was born under the Fire Horse sign. feminist theory, and writing. One of her life goals is to visit Haworth. The Women’s Review of Books is a project JUDITH GROSSMAN is the author of How Aliens Think, a story col- ANNE MARIE TODKILL is an editor and writer in Ottawa, Canada. of the Wellesley Centers for Women. lection, and Her Own Terms, a novel. In an bygone era she spent her high school poetry prize money on Emily HEATHER HEWETT is a freelance writer and scholar in New York Carr’s The Book of Small. That was the end of poetry prizes but the begin- The Women’s Review is distributed by City. Her reviews and essays have most recently appeared in The ning of a fine obsession. Ingram, Nashville, TN. All other distri- Philadelphia Inquirer, Brain, Child, and The Scholar and Feminist Online. EMILY TOTH, Robert Penn Warren Professor of English at bution is handled directly by The LESLIE LAWRENCE teaches writing at Tufts and Lesley Universities. Louisiana State University, is the author or editor of ten books, includ- Women’s Review. She has a story coming out in the fall issue of Prairie Schooner. ing Ms. Mentor’s Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia. Her monthly ANDREA FREUD LOEWENSTEIN is working on a collection of advice column, “Ms. Mentor” appears on the Chronicle of Higher The contents of The Women’s Review of essays on ritualized language exchange and on a romance novel designed Education’s jobs site (www.chronicle.com/jobs—click on “Ms. Mentor”). Books are copyright © 2004. All rights to earn enough money to allow her to leave her tenured position at LORI TSANG is a Washington, DC-based writer whose poems have reserved; reprint by permission only. Medgar Evers college, CUNY, and devote herself to writing. been published in dISorient, The Drumming Between Us, Controlled Burn, VALERIE MINER is the author of 12 books, the latest of which are Amerasia Journal, and other publications. Her essays and reviews have short-story collections, Abundant Light (2004) and The Night Singers been published in the MultiCultural Review, AAAMPLITUDE, the (2004). She is a professor of English and creative writing at the Washington Post Book World, and other publications. University of Minnesota. EDITH M. VASQUEZ is an adjunct instructor of ethnic studies at ADRIAN OKTENBERG’s poetry collections include The Bosnia California State University Long Beach and the University of Elegies (1997) and Swimming with Dolphins (2002). She lives in California-Riverside. Northampton, MA, and is at work on a history of lesbian artists’ MARIE-ELISE WHEATWIND would rather read than sleep. She social networks, 1930-1960. works at the world’s largest independent bookstore and as an adjunct pro- GAYLE PEMBERTON teaches at Wesleyan University and is the fessor of imaginative writing at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. 2 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 10-11 / July 2004 A Canadian original continued from p.1 2New from If the father was ultra-English, the daughter would prove to be ultra- The Legacy of Canadian, so rooted in her birthplace that Simone de Beauvoir she could thrive nowhere else. She would Edited by EMILY R. GROSHOLZ achieve a stature in Canadian art similar This collection of new to that of Georgia O’Keefe (whom she essays treats the histori- met) in the United States or Frida Kahlo cal, philosophical, and literary dimensions of in Mexico. Her style, like O’Keefe’s, is Simone de Beauvoir’s irreducible to any other; her biography, thought, and celebrates like Kahlo’s, is essential to an apprecia- the 50th anniversary of tion of her art. If the keynote of Kahlo’s her most influential book, The Second Sex. biography is suffering, that of Carr’s is The collection tackles the search for authenticity. As difficult as the relationship between Carr’s distaste for “sham” was to assert in theory and concrete situ- the stuffy parlors of Victoria, a means of ation with fresh insight. expressing her unconventional identity 2004 $35.00 also eluded her in San Francisco, Long-Awaited Revision! England, and France, where she pluckily Language and Woman’s Place and unhappily sought artistic tutelage. Text and Commentaries (Even in the mild foreignness of England Revised Edition ROBIN TOLMACH LAKOFF she experienced “root shock” and suf- Edited by MARY BUCHOLTZ fered a breakdown.) In France, she The 1975 publication gleaned from fauvist and other postim- of Language and pressionist influences something of what Woman’s Place, with its argument that language she needed to know: how to paint expres- is fundamental to gen- sively rather than literally, with a strong der inequality, palette and bold stroke, and how to sim- inaugurated language plify forms to convey the emotional and gender research. This volume presents essence of her work. But no one in the original text along Europe could teach her how to receive with commentaries by the spirit of the West unmediated by the Lakoff and 26 other Victorian impulse to tame nature. So leading scholars of lan- guage, gender, and sexuality. The new edition deep was Carr’s isolation on the West places the text in contemporary context for a new Coast that she was unaware of a fraterni- generation of readers. ty of painters working in eastern Canada, Portrait of Sophie by Emily Carr. From Klee Wyck. (Studies in Language and Gender) whose exhibition in 1920 as the Group of 2004 paper $24.95 cloth $75.00 Seven had reinvented Canadian land- New in Paperback! scape art. Carr’s was a long and lonely ere lies one of the many para- and buried 21 children, and with whom Becoming George apprenticeship until her meeting with doxes of Emily Carr: Her jour- Carr forged a long friendship. She wrote The Life of Mrs W. B. Yeats members of the Group in 1927 in H ney to her authentic self was of her, ANN SADDLEMYER Ottawa, when her stunned encounter through the channel of an Other, which “Majestic... In with the landscapes of Lauren Harris she first perceived through the symbolic Every year Sophie had a new baby. Saddlemyer, George Yeats has found a (the Group’s visionary, unofficial leader) forms of Native totemic art. But as Almost every year she buried one. biographer perfectly set her on the way to her final, mature Blanchard points out, Carr did not live Her little graves were dotted all suited to her... period as a painter. among the Native people of the coast; over the cemetery. I never knew Becoming George is a Carr, however, had already found her contrary to myth, she engaged with them more than three of her twenty-one delight to read: authoritative, sympa- authentic subject on her own: not por- from the periphery. Did she understand children to be alive at one time. By thetic and insightful.” traits and parlors, but towering cedars their way of life? Did she grasp their suf- the time she was in her early fifies —Martin Rubin, and totem poles. Even before her stud- fering, their loss of heritage and health? every child was dead and Sophie The San Francisco ies in England and France, she had dis- Certainly she knew this better than her had cried her eyes dry. Then she Chronicle “Saddlemyer has writ- covered her need to work en plein air.In sisters, friends, and peers; better than the took to drink. (p. 56) ten a profound, exhaustive, and richly evocative the coastal forests of British Columbia government officials who suppressed life of this truly remarkable woman.” this did not mean setting up her easel in Native culture and the anthropologists In this new edition of Klee Wyck, —John Banville, The New York Review of Books sunsoaked fields but rather being fer- who dismissed her work for its lack of Kathryn Bridges restores what perhaps 2002 (paper 2004) paper $25.00 cloth $35.00 ried, wretched with seasickness, to scientific rigor; and better, certainly, than only a handful of Carr scholars knew was Forthcoming! coastal Native villages, penetrating the the opportunists who plundered Canada’s missing: The book’s second edition, pub- The Politics of Public Housing fringes of forest so dense as to be West Coast of Native artifacts. But there lished in 1951 for the school market and Black Women’s Struggles against “unpaintable,” being bitten raw by mos- remains in her painting, as in her writing, for years the only one available, was an Urban Inequality quitoes, falling into stinging nettles, and a tension between an ethnographic abridgement that expunged disapproving RHONDA WILLIAMS lying awake in forsaken mission houses, impulse to preserve and hence accurately references to religion and racial abuse. In this collective biogra- phy, Rhonda Y. Williams abandoned by her Native escorts to the represent a vanishing way of life and a Bridges’ edition rights this wrong and takes us behind, and ghosts of their ancestors. need to transform her observations includes the introductions to the first and beyond, politically expe- The first inkling of this odyssey came according to her own vision: to paint not second editions by Carr’s friend and liter- dient labels to provide with a sketching trip in 1899, when at the totem but what the totem said to her. ary mentor Ira Dilworth. In the second, an incisive and intimate portrait of poor black age 27, she visited a Presbyterian mis- Although by the 1930s the importance Diltworth’s indignation is compressed, women in urban sion among the Nuu-chah-nulth of Carr’s art was at last being accepted by with fatal Canadian politeness, to the America. (Nookta) at Ucluelet, on the west coast the Canadian art establishment, it was phrase “some passages have been omit- (Transgressing Boundaries: Studies in of Vancouver Island. Paula Blanchard’s writing, not painting, that earned for her ted.” For both new and established Carr Black Politics and Black Life of Emily Carr (1987) fixes this expe- the popular acceptance that she craved. enthusiasts, Klee Wyck deserves a reading Communities) rience as the originating moment of The publication of a book of autobio- (or rereading) for the adroit intelligence August 2004 $29.95 Carr’s lifelong engagement with Native graphical sketches, Klee Wyck, earned her a of Carr’s spare style, her engaging (if Forthcoming! culture and consciousness, and the first Governor General’s Award, Canada’s unreliable) accounts of her often arduous On Female Body Experience awakening of the pantheism that would highest literary honor, in 1941. Precluded sketching trips, and her blunt presentation Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays infuse her unorthodox Christianity and by heart disease from physical exertion as of what were, for their time, novel sub- IRIS MARION YOUNG provide a central impetus for her art. she aged, Carr funneled her energy into jects, such as the mortuary poles that held Written over a span of more than two decades, Blanchard writes: transforming old journals and other the dead aloft in the forest: the essays by Iris Marion Young collected in this materials into 21 vignettes about her volume describe diverse aspects of women’s lived body experience in modern Western societies. The She experienced no artistic revela- sketching trips to Native villages up the It was beautiful how the sea air collection draws on the ideas of such twentieth tions on this trip, but Ucluelet British Columbia coast—where she had and sun hurried to help the century philosophers as Simone de Beauvoir, marked the beginning of a deeper been named “Klee Wyck,” “laughing corpses through their horror. The Martin Heidegger, and Julia Kristeva. connection with the native people; one”—and in the Haida Gwaii (Queen poor, frail boxes could not keep (Studies in Feminist Philosophy) through them she would reach the Charlotte Islands). The stories also the elements out; they were quick September 2004 paper $19.95 cloth $65.00 sense of unifying, universal life recount her acquaintance with Songhee to make the bones clean and that pervades the painting of her women living on the boundaries of white white. (p. 41) 1 later years.... [S]he sensed that the society in Vancouver, where Carr kept a native lived in a universe she recog- studio—most notably with a basket- Over this unexpected beauty Carr lays her www.oup.com/us nized as her own. maker, the tragic Sophie Frank, who bore critique:

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 10-11 / July 2004 3 Carr’s own writings are full of ambigui- ty, and it is as difficult for the historian, or novelist, to sort out the facts of the Letters events as it must have been for Carr’s contemporaries to cope with her critical Dear Women’s Review of Books: known, and that Tubman’s rescue mis- edge and prickly self-absorption. In In response to Adele Logan sions cannot be documented. conveying Carr’s essence, Vreeland mir- Alexander’s review (May 2004) of the 3 Alexander highlights Clinton’s rors the painter’s own dilemma in recent biographies of Harriet Tubman, hypothesis that a favorite niece of depicting Native art; in an afterword, including my own (Bound For the Promised Tubman’s may actually have been Vreeland explains that just as Carr Land) I would like to offer a few com- Tubman’s own daughter, possibly the “wanted to paint the spirit of a thing, so ments and correct some misinformation. product of rape by a white man. While have I wanted to offer the spirit of her First, I would like to acknowledge that it I, too, speculate that Tubman may have courageous and extraordinary life.” is no easy job to read three biographies had a daughter, I also offer the highly From time to time, however, the scholar of Harriet Tubman, a woman about possible alternative that this child, elbows the novelist aside with too-obvi- whom so little has been accurately writ- named Margaret Stewart, was the ous planting of factual information and ten in the past 150 years, and thoughtful- daughter of Tubman’s brother Ben. mini-manifestoes. ly to identify the strengths and weak- Clinton believes that because Margaret Carr’s enigmatic sexuality, a theme nesses of each biography, so I commend was a mulatto, she must have had a unresolved by biographers, is pursued Adele Alexander for her effort. white father. But of course not all somewhat breathlessly. Vreeland fictively While I am pleased that Alexander mulattoes were the direct result of white examines the damage caused by the “bru- acknowledged my meticulous research, I parentage. John Tubman was a mulatto Emily Carr. From Opposite Contraries. tal telling”—an actual event in which found her comment that more than 250 and, therefore, could very well have Carr’s father disclosed the facts of life to names appear only once in my index to been Margaret’s father. …[T]he forest climbed a steep hill her in a manner that destroyed her be somewhat petty and disrespectful. I One more clarification: Neither and here in the woods was one daughterly affection forever. And she am curious as to why she bothered to Clinton nor Humez speculates that lonely grave, that of “our only invents a lover for Emily, the romantical- count, and why I was singled out for this Tubman suffered from temporal lobe professed Christian Indian”, ly named Claude du Bois, who fails in exercise, considering that both Jean epilepsy—that theory is mine and mine according to the Missionaries. The seduction but not in friendship. Humez and Catherine Clinton, the alone. I hope that other scholars, both Missionaries had coffined him If this satisfies the narrative require- authors of the other Tubman biogra- junior (like myself) and senior, will con- tight and carried him up the new- ment for love scenes, one wonders to phies, also list well over 200 names only tinue to look at Tubman’s life through a made trail with great difficulty. what extent the fictional Emily’s soul- once in their indexes. I would have pre- variety of lenses. Perhaps some will be They put him into the earth searching is intended to satisfy present- ferred that Alexander highlight my inspired to do new research, for it is in among the roofs of the trees, away day qualms about cultural appropria- painstaking research, which resulted in the pesky details in primary sources that from all his people, away from the tion. Toward the end of the novel, many never-before-reported details of we will discover and understand the rain and the sun and the wind Emily laments the political impotence Tubman’s life. I devote 200 pages to long obscured history of African- which he had loved and which of her art: uncovering Tubman’s life in slavery and American familial and community life, would have rushed to help his her activities on the Underground the Underground Railroad, and the body melt quickly into the dust to But without a positive reception Railroad—aspects of her life that many women, both famous and make earth richer because this from whites, I’ve done nothing by Humez and Clinton write little of in unknown, who remain at its core. man had lived. (p. 42) these paintings to counter the their books. Among those 250 names Kate Clifford Larson tragedy of Cumshewa and other are the actual identities of the friends Winchester, MA owever creative a historian ruined villages. Nothing to count- and family who constituted the vibrant Carr was (her biographers er the torched village just a few free and enslaved African-American H agree on this), and whatever blocks from here. Nothing to community within which Tubman was The Women’s Review of Books degree of late Romanticism infuses her counter any loss, not only of raised, and the scores of slaves who ran depictions of the Native way of life, Klee Sophie’s babies, but all those up away with her help during the 1850s. In welcomes letters to the editor. Wyck was a work of protest, as was her the coast. (p. 221) fact, it was for her family and close Mail your letters to Amy Hoffman, attempt to record in her paintings a van- friends that Tubman risked her life on ishing Native art. One of the many suc- Vreeland’s Emily Carr entertains our the Underground Railroad, not for Editor in Chief, Women’s Review of cesses of Susan Vreeland’s interpreta- contemporary doubts for us; although strangers living in distant states or plan- Books, Center for Research on tion of Carr’s life in her novel The Forest her portrayal is sympathetic and at tations. I successfully challenged the Women, Wellesley College, 106 Lover is her exploration of Carr’s rela- times rhapsodic, it is neither simplistic myth that Tubman completed 19 trips Central Street, Wellesley, MA 02481; tionship to Native culture. The opening nor uncritical. into the South and rescued 300 individ- fax them to the attention of Amy scenes depict Emily’s awakening to “the The questions of interpretation that uals, a story that was manufactured by Hoffman at (781) 283-3645; e-mail teeming, looming forest alive with raven Carr grappled with through her art are Tubman’s early biographer, Sarah talk and other secrets,” which include a inevitably replicated in any attempt to Bradford. Through scores of primary them to ahoffman@ wellesley.edu; or menstrual hut hidden in the woods—an come to terms with her biography. In records, including Tubman’s own words, visit our website at www.welles- emblem of the distance she had traveled their way, Klee Wyck and The Forest Lover I have identified, by name, over 100 of ley.edu/WomensReview and use the from Victorian propriety. From scene to are both works of interpretation, in the approximately 130 people Tubman handy form. Please make sure to scene and setting to setting, Vreeland which the political and personal ambigu- rescued personally or through her include your mailing address and gives solidity to Carr’s journey toward ities of Carr’s aesthetic project remain detailed instructions (Tubman rescued phone number in your letter. We personal and artistic authenticity. She unresolved. In their different ways, both 60-70 directly, and she gave directions to necessarily became a Carr scholar to of these books bring the reader imagina- another 60 or so). I have lain to rest the especially appreciate letters of 300 perform this feat (even traveling in tively closer to an imposing, elusive, and notion that the operations of the words or less. Carr’s footsteps in the Haida Gwaii), for ultimately inexhaustible subject. I Underground Railroad cannot be

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4 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 10-11 / July 2004 Recent Prize-Winners Menaced love from Curbstone Press by Gayle Pemberton

Pushkin and the Queen of Spades by Alice Randall. New York: 2004 Mármol Prize for Latina/o First Fiction Houghton Mifflin, 2004, 320 pp., $24.00 hardcover. THE FIFTH SUN I a novel by ear the middle of Alice Randall’s rative, which is sometimes addressed to him MARY HELEN LAGASSE Pushkin and the Queen of Spades, her and (confusingly) at other times to the read- N narrator, Windsor Armstrong, er, is an attempt to make Pushkin under- declares, “I am way past beginning to think stand what she considers to be her extraor- “Lagasse has woven a tapestry that all the constructions around race in dinary love for him. Windsor’s reasons for of many colors in her novel America are good for is a belly laugh.” withholding the information about about Mercedes, the Mexican Randall, a former journalist, country-and- Pushkin’s origins are unarticulated in the girl whose life is like a blood- western song writer, and novelist, is best novel, but clearly she fears that no good red thread that weaves its way known for The Wind Done Gone, which sat- could come of his knowing: After all, his through the intricate design irized Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the namesake, Alexander Pushkin, died in a Wind. A suit brought—and later settled out duel over his wife’s honor. representing an early 20th of court—by Mitchell’s estate dominated Randall’s novelistic design is broad and century Mexican-American the novel’s reception. Its rewriting of Gone complex, as Windsor tells the story of her experience.” 1-931896-05-4 $15.00 pbk with the Wind centering on Scarlett O’Hara’s life beginning in the inner city of Detroit, —JUDITH ORTIZ COFER mulatto sister, Cynara/ Cinnamon/Cindy, followed by her sojourns at Harvard and in while inventive and at times engaging, is Washington, Russia, and finally Nashville. previous winners: surprisingly short on belly laughs, or for Windsor’s father, Leo, named her after the Soy la Avon Lady & Other Stories by Lorraine López that matter, much humor. Better to stick city in Canada, a bridge and sometimes a What Night Brings by Carla Trujillo with Carol Burnett’s “Went with the Wind” world away from Detroit. Windsor herself, television parody for the belly laughs. having fallen in love with literature at What Pushkin and the Queen of Spades Harvard, and particularly with the life of shares with The Wind Done Gone is an ambi- the Russian literary giant, Alexander tious engagement with history. In her pre- Pushkin, continues the name game. Her 2002 Sor Juana Inés de vious novel, Randall tackled the mythology young son not only carries the name of la Cruz Prize of a genteel and ultimately tragic white Pushkin, but also X, for Malcolm and for South that Mitchell and others so effective- the missing patronymic. Harvard, in NO ONE WILL ly grafted onto the American psyche, if not Randall’s hands, is Xanadu, the sine qua non onto that of the world. In her effort to of higher education. Windsor aligns herself SEE ME CRY redeem the enslaved blacks of Tara, Twin with another black Harvardian, W. E. B. a novel by Oaks, and ultimately, the entire South, Du Bois, who in asserting his intellectual Cristina Rivera-Garza Randall provides an alternative narrative kinship with the world of white intellectu- that is in turn plausible and wistful. Pushkin als, wrote in The Souls of Black Folk, “I sit This is a vividly imagined and the Queen of Spades takes on a more per- with Shakespeare and he winces not. historical novel by one of sonal, private history, that of a mother and Across the color line I move arm in arm Mexico’s new literary stars. son. The novel opens with Windsor, an with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling African-American professor of Russian at men and welcoming women glide in gilded “...one of the most beautiful Vanderbilt University, struggling mightily halls.” She goes on to say, and perturbing novels ever with the realization that her son, Pushkin written in Mexico.” X, a star NFL defenseman, is about to Observe one of the little-recognized —CARLOS FUENTES marry a Russian lap dancer named Tanya. habits of the oft-unrecognized 1-880684-91-8 $15.95 pbk Windsor’s plans for Pushkin included nei- African American intellectual—the ther the NFL—he was to have a Harvard making of friendships across the some previous winners: education to match hers—nor a white wife. chasm of death, particularly the Tierra del Fuego by Sylvia Iparraguirre As James Baldwin observed in friendship of authors, especially The Love You Promised Me by Silvia Molina Conversations with James Baldwin (1980), “In white authors. Somehow friendships Assault on Paradise by Tatiana Lobo the lives of black people—everyone over- with dead white poets and novelists looks this and it’s a very simple fact—love and theologians feel less disloyal than has been so terribly menaced.” Windsor, friendships with living ones. I shared who loves Pushkin “more than the moon with Pushkin my passion for Emily 2003 Mármol Prize, Paterson Prize loves the sun,” takes her son and the read- Dickinson. Have I disclosed that for Books for Young People, Latino er on journeys back through her life and once upon a time I considered Emily Book Award for Young Adults, and those of relatives and significant neighbors, to be one of my very best friends? Lambda Prize for Fiction finalist charting the vexed, menaced, and some- Did my love of Emily somehow pre- times absent love of black people for pare Pushkin to love Tanya? (p. 7) What Night Brings themselves and their own. But Baldwin also cautioned in his essay “The Fire Next t is Alexander Pushkin’s black blood, a novel by Time,” that “To accept one’s past—one’s his bond to his “brother Negroes,” that Carla Trujillo history—is not the same thing as drowning I forms the intellectual and emotional in it; it is learning how to use it.” At times fabric of Windsor’s determination to free Pushkin and the Queen of Spades can’t tell the him, Othello, herself, and ultimately all “I have been waiting for this difference. The complex weight of black people from the “racist ideology” that one, and it was worth the Windsor’s past comes perilously close to denies both their beauty and their right to wait.”—DOROTHY ALLISON overwhelming the story, leaving the reader “enjoy requited love,” in the poet Pushkin’s gasping for a life preserver. words. It’s too tall an order for the novel. “...a page-turner that lingers The simple frame of the story is that If Pushkin and the Queen of Spades can be long after the last page has Windsor is filled with guilt over having said to resemble any novel, it is Ralph been turned.” given up Pushkin for three years while she Ellison’s Invisible Man, even though —MARGARET RANDALL 1-880684-94-2 $15.95 pbk finished her BA in Russian at Harvard. Windsor tells us that Pushkin X is “invin- During his infant years, he lived with a cible” and anything but “invisible.” “Trujillo is definitely a writer neighbor back in her hometown of Detroit. Randall, like Ellison, builds a narrative of to watch.”—Booklist She reclaims him, but her absence in his enormous scope on allusion and pun. earliest, formative years nags at her. She had However, she locates her narrative in the been made pregnant through rape, and she center of one of the major shortcomings has never honored Pushkin’s requests to of Invisible Man: Randall’s is an exploration ask for these books at your local bookstore know his paternity. In the days leading up to and affirmation of the love in the black distributed to bookstores & libraries by Consortium: www.cbsd.com Pushkin’s wedding, Windsor and he family and, yes, of the possibility of love become estranged over this. Windsor’s nar- across the racial line. In this, she goes www.curbstone.org

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 10-11 / July 2004 5 © Eric England The branches of Windsor’s family tree, like those of most African Americans and thus of white Americans too, are entwined by sex across the color line, consensual and Our living treasure not. Her quest leads her to realize that by Adrian Oktenberg [W]e are shaped by the cradle in which we are rocked. Mine was a Up to Speed by Rae Armantrout. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Malcolm X-loving, Black Panther- wannabe cradle thrown into a world University Press, 2004, 69 pp., $28.00 hardcover, $13.95 paper. where the only numbers that count- ed were IQ points. I am giving up Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002 by Marilyn Hacker. New York: on numbers. They have failed me. At the end of the day we are W. W. Norton, 2003, 122 pp., $23.95 hardcover. shaped by the beds in which we have lain. (p. 204) I

Alice Randall Times have changed, and the first edition echnically, Rae Armantrout is a © Paul Barnett of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, which language poet and Marilyn where very few African-American men or Windsor had given Pushkin X, shows signs T Hacker is a neo-formalist—but women in fiction have dared to go. of having been used as a coaster. have we learned anything yet? These Windsor’s convoluted journey through labels are awkward. Widely disparate hat daring is not met with perform- time and love, race and class, leads her to poets are often grouped into the same ance, however, and a story as an acceptance of the fact of Tanya’s love school, and almost no one follows her T hyperbolic as this one requires a for Pushkin and his love for her. This own manifesto. One could also say that lighter touch. Randall’s prose can be mad- acceptance, presumably, is what made the Armantrout is a West Coast poet and deningly melodramatic, making a soap pre-publication hype label the novel as Hacker is a poet of the East. I find these opera out of the fundamentally humorless controversial; nothing else in the story par- categorizations no more than a conven- Windsor’s efforts to come to terms with ticularly fits that description. ience. Nevertheless, they provide direc- Pushkin X’s choice. Randall wants to make Windsor’s wedding gift to Pushkin and tional markers. sure we understand how smart she and Tanya is the rewriting—and finishing—of So-called language poetry is more or Windsor are: They know the English and Alexander Pushkin’s story “The Negro of less the equivalent of abstract art. Think American literary canons, Tupac, Joni Peter the Great” in hip-hop verse. As a Merce Cunningham and John Cage. Mitchell, and Hank Williams Sr. They can long poem in a novel, it doesn’t work at all; Language poetry rejects narrative, drop names of living black scholars and in our multimedia world, an accompanying rejects “story,” rejects the “I,” the self, gauge the influence of black music on CD might have been more appropriate. rejects identity and object. It never met dead country-and-western singers. They Rather, Randall might have quoted a metaphor it liked. It hates meaning, know where to eat and drink in Nashville, Alexander Pushkin’s own poem,“I Loved even meanings. In short, it rejects the Rae Armantrout Washington, and heaven knows where else. You Once,” written in 1829: whole tradition of romantic poetry The difference between allusiveness and going back to Wordsworth. What it does as baby name dropping is sometimes unclear. I loved you once, nor can this heart like is slippage, discontinuity, contin- plus crucifixion, Finally, there is little to endear us to be quiet; gency, chance, flux, and play. It focuses Windsor, who dominates the narrative so For it would seem that love still on what the futurists called “the word as as distended much that her deft portraits of other char- lingers here; such.” Its sources are European, going incredulity acters remain unfulfilling. Randall is at her But do not you be further troubled back to French symbolist Stéphane best when writing about Windsor’s father, by it; Mallarmé. It is an attempt to locate held toward the cars, Leo, whose love for his black daughter is I would in no wise hurt you, oh, my poetry’s purest essence. If free verse is, as silence (p. 4) quite beautiful and unconditional, or about dear. as Robert Frost said, “playing tennis Windsor’s surrogate mother, Martha without a net,” language poetry is play- If the lag-time is a problem, it helps to Rachel, who like the forlorn ship Rachel in I loved you without hope, a mute ing tennis without a ball. know that Armantrout lives in San Moby Dick suffers from the loss of her chil- offender; Czeslaw Milosz (also a West Coast Diego. The poem can be read as a sort of dren. We see too little of the brilliant hood- What jealous pangs, what shy poet) said that poetry in recent abstract landscape of a scene at the bor- lum Spady, who takes care of some impor- despairs I knew! decades has moved toward “spinning der: the line of cars, waiting to cross at tant business in the novel. Other characters A love as deep as this, as true, as out the thread of language,” and this is sunrise; hawkers selling novelties and are insufficiently drawn and, if not com- tender, what Rae Armantrout does, with great images of the Christ-child and crucifix- pletely abandoned, reappear only mechani- God grant another may yet offer you. grace and finesse. The thread of lan- ion; and an attitude, a mood. It could be cally. These include Windsor’s half-sister, From The Poems, Prose and guage, in her work, is what the mind that. Or something else. Diana, also at Harvard, with an unex- Plays of Alexander Pushkin follows, and yet it is neither descriptive I don’t find anything in these poems plained drinking habit; her color-struck nor narrative. It is a kind of dwelling beyond an intellectual interest. They mother, Lena, who plays wicked stepmoth- Windsor’s love for Pushkin X is not that of place, intuitive, associational, imagina- focus on only one aspect of poetry, the er to Windsor’s Cinderella; and her hus- an unrequited lover, but the prayer for him tive and, to her credit, frequently fact that it is made of words, and stretch band, Gabriel Michael, whose presence is to find true love is answered. Windsor’s funny. One does not “read” these it to its limit. But contrary to claims, this shadowy, understated, and raises a number journey is to make that love and her own poems, in the sense of tracking the does not a revolution make. And I am of unanswered questions. Windsor’s rela- understandable. It could have been pro- lines from here to there (lineation as a interested in the whole spectrum, not just tionship to Pushkin X feels more like that found and filled with belly laughs, but it boundary being yet another thing lan- one end of it. Even the French are not of a single mother to a son. misses its ambitious, elaborate mark. I guage poets reject). Rather, one expe- that single-minded. riences the poem as a whole, including the blank spaces on the page. arilyn Hacker has read the This is what Armantrout sounds like, French poets too (en français, Greenfire in a poem called “Currency”: M bien sur), but she takes away a women’s spiritual retreat center on Maine’s midcoast from them something different. Entirely I stare at the edge radical in her own way, Hacker fuses the ~Make space for the holy within you at our sacred and refreshing small circle~ work of writing in forms with a context until the word that is utterly contemporary. Fast, furi- Pass your days 4 hours from Boston by the sea on 59 wooded acres tulip ous, fiercely honest and uncompromis- G meditating, writing, painting ing, ranging across a wide spectrum of comes up emotions and intellectual concerns, she G in a Greenfire circle conversation or work vision where I thought it might. places her poetry firmly in the post-’60s G hiking, biking, enjoying our St. George Peninsula’s beaches when she came of age: She has been G shaping your time with us and/or apart, in and/or out of silence But the lag-time informed by the various movements and is a problem. “revolutions” of the time, living in the Following a gourmet dinner around our common table, sleep in knowledge of the Holocaust, the age of G our 200-year-old farmhouse The swollen, yellow AIDS. She has been much honored— head of Tweety-Bird most recently, with an award from the G a yurt at the edge of the woods American Academy of Arts and now offered Letters—but because she is openly and For information, go to: www.greenfireretreat.org at the border explicitly lesbian, I still don’t think she is Greenfire, 329 Wallston Road, Tenants Harbor, ME 04860 as widely read as she deserves. This is a email:[email protected]. as balloon shame, because she is one of the most or ceramic, important and necessary American poets.

6 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 10-11 / July 2004 She captures what it means to live in our Mitchell K. © Margaretta time as no one else can. Hacker’s 11th collection, Desesperanto, combines the Spanish word esperanto, “hope,” with the French desespoir, “to lose heart.” If that isn’t the theme of life in our time, I don’t know what is. The book is mostly solitary meditations and memories (Hacker “talking to herself,” as she says), reflecting its central fact, grief at the loss of Special Offer a long-standing lover and companion. “I’m To Book Group Members leaving you. There is nobody else. / She lied she lied she lied she lied she lied.” After betrayal, what? That is the basis of the Send us the names and addresses of the people in book, and yet nothing in Hacker is ever your group and we will send each of them a free simply personal. All is seen, heard, thought, sample copy of The Women's Review of Books. and felt against a backdrop of the wars and Marilyn Hacker dislocations of our time, the wounds and scars of living, the joys of friendships, Ponsot, Mavis Gallant, Hayden Carruth, GO BEYOND OPRAH neighborhoods, various kinds of love and Louis Aragon, Claire Malroux, Agha comradeship, and as always, Hacker’s two Shahid Ali, and many others. Desesperanto Send addresses to homes, Paris and New York. includes a good many references to musi- Book Group Offer The book begins in New York, with cians as well; often jazz is the background Women's Review of Books “Elegy for a Soldier,” written for the poet sound to the book. This is part of one of Wellesley Center for Research on Women and activist June Jordan, who died in 2002: many neighborhood poems, “Road Work”: 106 Central Street Wellesley, MA 02481 The city where I knew you was Road work: a jackhammer swift.... tears up the street: the smell ...Now your death, as if it were of steaming bacs of tar ‘yours’: your house, your invests the café, full dog, your friends, your son, your serial lovers. of tourists and a few Death’s not ‘yours,’ what’s yours are neighborhood regulars. a thousand poems I am both “I” and “thou,” The Journey alive on paper, watching the bulldozers, I talk about them to in the present tense of a thousand Continues students’ myself, as I’ve always done, active gaze at printed pages and my own interlocutor. blank ones What’s already begun, which you gave permission to a season of departure, blacken into will terminate with mine. outrage and passion. (pp. 15-18) I’ll probably come back less occupied with grief. This is a characteristic move for Hacker, Slowly around the block to begin with a loss not merely or entirely in a vest like a maple leaf, her own, to segue from the personals of with a tall, carved walking stick friendship, to conflict and struggle with the world-as-it-is, to hope for the world-as-it- comes a cavalier old man might-be, and finally to a note of homage with his wolfish alter ego. for an exemplary life. By this means she One sits, and one lies down; brings the poem up and out from herself one gets water; one, espresso. onto a plane that encompasses us all in a One smokes, one sleeps in the sun. world we share. (pp. 88-89) There are many good poems here, but Hacker’s best are very long, which com- One notices not only the economy of promises my ability to quote them to the story but also the excellence of the advantage. Among these are “A Farewell to craft. First you read for the plot, then you the Finland Woman,” “Alto Solo,” note the beats in each line, threes and fours, “Vendanges,” “Chanson de la mal aimée,” then you review the line endings: “A Sunday After Easter,” and “Desesperanto, after Joseph Roth.” The book “back” ends with the poem “Essay on Departure,” “grief” very beautiful, but Hacker sums up just “block” before that in “Canzone”: “What can I “leaf” learn?” Even in despair, this poet is alive “stick” and hopeful. Hacker’s means in a poem is almost always accretion: of details, phrases, There is simply no other American sounds, and rhythms that are continually poet whose craft has been so expertly ISBN 0-06-620975-7 • hardcover • $23.95 ($34.95 Can.) • 224 pages being added to, conveyed from a new brought up to date. I have long thought ISBN 0-06-075761-2 • CD containing Four Souls and Tracks • $39.95 • ($59.95 Can.) angle, changed. The moods change as well, that the sonnet is the only form that has until the whole suddenly comes clear, often been made contemporary by many hands, with a very casual non-ending. Another and that many forms—sestinas, vil- Be reunited with Fleur Pillager and Nanapush as Hacker move, almost a signature (and it lanelles, and the like—are largely an aca- the story of revenge and anger that began in has been much imitated by students), is to demic exercise in the hands of current Louise Erdich’s New York Times bestseller Tracks connect different poems in a book by poets. So many who try it get the form repeating a phrase or sentence from previ- correct but write completely boring becomes a story of healing and love in Four Souls. ous poem in a new one, giving it an entire- poems (Robert Pinsky, for example). ly different context. Hacker’s skill is so great, and so second “A writer of truly extraordinary gifts—imaginative nature to her, that this rule is completely power, acute sensitivity, and unpretentious acker may be solitary, but she is subverted. Her forms are so unobtrusive, never alone in her thoughts. If call so little attention to themselves, that stylistic grace.” —San Francisco Chronicle H grief is a recurrent word, so is let- they seem entirely organic to the poem. ters. Her poems are heavily peopled, by This is craft of the highest order, and it is www.louiseerdrichbooks.com friends, neighbors, lovers, acquaintances, why Hacker has justly been awarded her and of course, numerous other writers— prizes, even while her lesbianism and her HarperCollinsPublishers this book includes Guillaume Apollinaire, politics have been barely tolerated. As www.harperacademic.com Charles Baudelaire, Léopold Senghor, they do in Japan, we should declare her a Muriel Rukeyser, Joseph Roth, Marie National Living Treasure. I

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 10-11 / July 2004 7 and her small staff answered some 2000 politics. But after the sudden death of the letters a day, or 34 million over her career. Chicago Sun-Times’ “Ann Landers” (Ruth She read letters everywhere, especially in Crowley), Eppie auditioned to replace her, Smelling the coffee the bath tub. Even in her 80s, she turned defeating nearly 30 other applicants, in letter-perfect columns every Monday, despite her own total lack of newspaper by Emily Toth 28 pages typed on yellow newsprint experience. (One of the other candidates paper. (She never could get the hang of was Rick Kogan’s mother.) America’s Mom: the Life, Lessons, and Legacy of Ann Landers computers—though, as a night owl, she From the beginning, Eppie’s Ann loved to fax.) Landers had a unique voice. She wasn’t by Rick Kogan. New York: HarperCollins, Kogan’s book is an appreciation and a sweet in a you-poor-dear way: empathy biography of sorts of Landers, born wasn’t as important as toughness and self- 2003, 260 pp., $23.95 hardcover. Esther (Eppie) Friedman on July 4, 1918, respect. She was a quick study who drew to immigrant Jews in Sioux City, Iowa. on a life’s worth of talking with women. A Life in Letters: Ann Landers’ Letters to Her Only Child She and her twin sister Pauline (Popo) “Wake up and smell the coffee” (also the attended Morningside College, where title of her last collection, published in by Margo Howard. New York: Warner, 2003, they wrote a gossip column. Their dou- 1996) was a favorite saying of her sister’s ble wedding took place two days before mother-in-law. Eppie adored the mother- 393 pp., $22.00 hardcover. their birthday in 1939—even though in-law—but her relationship with her own I Eppie had switched grooms. The wed- twin was, well, interesting. ding was already in the works when she A few months after Eppie became woman with opin- dumped her original fiancé for Jules Ann Landers in Chicago, Popo became ions has to be a Lederer, who was dashing and handsome Abigail Van Buren in The San Francisco A tough cookie. The and had much better prospects (he later Chronicle. “Dear Abby” also got herself world is full of people founded Budget Rent-A-Car). syndicated first, and in the late 1950s and who’d like to tell us where Eppie gave birth to their only child, early 1960s the twins didn’t speak for six to go if we come out in Margo, in March 1940, eight months after years. According to Kogan, they patched favor of sex, political the wedding (hmmm). For many years it up in 1964 and remained close activism, or equal rights, or Eppie and Jules were considerably poorer friends—but Eppie’s daughter Margo if we just come out. than Popo and her millionaire husband, tells a different story. It’s been ever thus. But Mort Phillips. Both couples moved around Eppie hated it when people confused half a century ago, there was in the Midwest, but the Phillipses eventu- Ann Landers with Dear Abby, for Ann only one mold that white ally landed in California. Eppie and family had much more warmth and substance. middle class women’s lives stayed in Chicago, and her Midwestern Ann Landers’ columns were a thoughtful were supposed to fit. Get heartland roots helped anchor her when balance of the serious and the comical, good grades, go to college to she became Ann Landers. and they were full of information. Pre- find a hubby, don’t have sex Eppie Lederer was not the first of her Internet, she listed numbers for cancer until the wedding night, have Eppie with some of the hundreds of owls, symbols of wis- kind. Kogan skillfully summarizes the his- societies, domestic violence hotlines, and the kids and the cars and the dom, that were given to her over the decades by friends, tory of newspaper advice writing, includ- countless other resources. When she suburban house—and don’t admirers, and others. From America's Mom.. ing “Dorothy Dix” (1890s on) and the didn’t know something, she consulted complain about anything. Jewish Daily Forward’s “Bintel Brief ” (“bun- and cited her stable of experts. And Smile and make nice. dle of letters”) (1906 on). But he does not while she did use one-liners, she was Underneath it all, though, was burbling nally thought homosexuality was an aber- observe that all the powerful advice writers caustic only with correspondents who discontent and frothing pre-feminism. ration (though she always favored toler- of the 20th century were Jewish women: were cruel or willfully obtuse. She open- Betty Friedan described the melancholy of ance). But she grew to support sex among Ann Landers, Dear Abby, Miss Manners, ly opposed the Vietnam War and sup- those housewives in The Feminine Mystique consenting adults of any gender. She was Dr. Ruth, Dr. Laura. Nor does he particu- ported the right to abortion. (1963)—and now, women with kids are also the first newspaper columnist to use larly note the impact of feminism on Ann Ann Landers loved her readers and also furious, as Cathi Hanauer shows in the word homosexual in print (in 1956). Landers’ changing ideas, which were learned from them. In a 1975 survey, 70 The Bitch in the House (2002). Through all Landers was a realist about happiness always progressive about racism but grew percent of her readers told her that if they that time, we’ve had a chronicler. Ann and assessing one’s options. When delud- more so about women’s choices. Still, he had it to do again, they’d choose not to Landers, with her advice columns, showed ed people wrote to her (especially “other does an excellent job of honoring her have children. When she asked readers in us how we had—and hadn’t—changed. women” waiting for hubby to leave his career and celebrating her life. 1984 if they preferred hugging or “the And she helped change us. wife), she would tell them, “Wake up and Like most smart and energetic women, act,” 72 percent of the women preferred From 1955 until her death in 2002, the smell the coffee.” That was her theme, by the 1950s Eppie had become bored cuddling, but only eight percent of the column Ann Landers wrote was published and perhaps her best line. with housewifery and unfulfilled by vol- men did. Some 70,000 people answered. five times a week. She was open and Rick Kogan, one of her last editors on unteerism. She’d chaired the county Ann got us talking. brave, and she grew with her readers. In The Chicago Tribune, was fascinated by her Democratic Party in Eau Claire, Abby was different. She answered with her earliest columns she’d been against charm, humor, and insatiable curiousi- Wisconsin, then found herself out of her flip one-liners and chose letters that divorce and “shacking up,” and she origi- ty—and awed by her professionalism. She league and unwelcome in dirty Chicago showed off her wit, rather than knowl-

8 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 10-11 / July 2004 younger than his own grandchildren. He also sank into alcoholism, ruined his own business, and became a rather pathetic character. But Eppie thrived. Finding her voice She had become an independent woman whose happiness came from her by Heather Hewett own achievements, not from her hus- band’s. She retained a huge circle of Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. friends, including gentlemen admirers, and Margo Howard notes wryly that her Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel mother’s first big post-divorce romance was with a married man. It was years Hill, 2003, 307 pp., $23.95 hardcover. before Eppie woke up and smelled the coffee, but she did, and dumped him. She I kept company with others, had nonmari- tal sex and probably had a face lift, but n Nigeria, a country once known recenters the story by giving it to a dif- she was not inclined to remarry. She for its rich literary heritage, a ferent narrator: to the daughter rather loved having a room of her own, the 14- I younger generation of writers has than the father. room Chicago apartment overlooking the proclaimed its arrival. To outside Fifteen-year-old Kambili Achike and lake. It was filled with everything she observers, it may seem as though they her older brother Jaja live a life circum- treasured, especially letters. are breaking a long silence imposed by scribed by school, the Catholic Church, decades of repressive dictatorial and their father, an extremely successful In matching gowns, Eppie (right) and he was, of course, a yenta—the regimes. In fact, many of these writers businessman whose factories and news- Popo were married two days before affectionate, ironic Yiddish word have continued to write, refusing to be paper have earned him the title of their 21st birthdays in a lavish for a meddler, a busybody, a lover deterred by the threat of prison, tor- Omelora, “The One Who Does for the double ceremony in Sioux S City in 1939. From of gossip. (My mother was a yenta; they ture, and execution; with the slow open- Community.” Eugene Achike is a strict America's Mom make great kitchen companions.) Margo ing of the country, some of them have Catholic who lives within the Howard’s book is full of great gossip, begun to garner critical attention at Manichean dictates of an unforgiving edge or compassion. In her collection, especially her mother’s tart assessments home and abroad. In the US, Chris faith. “Papa liked order,” Kambili The Best of Dear Abby (1989), she comes of some famous people. Eppie consid- Abani’s recently acclaimed GraceLand explains; but the simplicity of her expla- across as smart but not kind. Popo is still ered novelist Saul Bellow an “S.O.B.” of a and Helon Habila’s prize-winning nation belies his frenzied obsession alive but has Alzheimer’s, and her column husband and hoped his vile divorce Waiting for an Angel have delved into the with regulating his children’s lives. His has been written for the last decade by behavior would make him “look like such violence, corruption, and hopelessness rigid adherence to order manifests itself her daughter Jeanne. dreck from coast to coast.” When car- of Nigeria in the 1980s and ’90s under in the daily schedules he creates for toonist Al Capp came on to teenaged Generals Ibrahim Babangida and Sani them, schedules with ppie’s daughter Margo Howard Margo, her mother called him a “lecher- Abacha. Both Abani and Habila situate declined invitations to continue ous old bastard” whose phone number their novels in the chaotic, slum-ridden meticulously drawn lines, in black E writing her mother’s column. should be fed “to the nearest goat.” She city of Lagos, announcing with their ink, cut across each day, separat- Instead, she writes the “Dear Prudence” considered comedian Jerry Lewis subjects and styles the advent of a new ing study from siesta, siesta from advice column on slate.com. But her “moody, very talented, impetuous” and literature for contemporary Nigeria. family time, family time from eat- biggest gift to us is A Life in Letters, a col- “a psychiatric case if I ever saw one.” Gone is the optimistic hope of the ing, eating from prayer, prayer lection of her mother’s letters to her And like many of us, she was a country’s first generation of English- from sleep. He revised them from 1958 (when Margo started college) wicked private judge of women. language writers. In its place is a more often. When we were in school, to a few months before Eppie’s death in Princess Lee Radziwill was “about as complex assessment of urban, post- we had less siesta time and more 2002. The letters are warm, funny, scold- interesting as a dead herring,” and of independence Nigeria, an attempt to study time, even on weekends. ing, and loving, with tension in the teen Phyllis Schlafly’s carrying on about her- reflect the country’s changes in their When we were on vacation, we years and a warm reciprocity in the last pes, Eppie wrote Margo that “I hope her writing, and a rejection of the qualities had a little more family time, a ones—the kind of relationship we’d all husband gives her a dose.” many readers associate with the mostly little more time to read newspa- like to have had with our mothers. Eppie travelled incessantly, met every- male-authored canonical texts of pers, play chess or monopoly, and Howard contributes lively introduc- one, was a lifelong liberal, and—follow- Nigerian literature—the proverbial listen to the radio. (pp. 23-24) tions to each letter, explaining who’s who ing the Jewish ethical principle that we’re inflections of Chinua Achebe, the and letting us savor the gossip. Margo put on earth to make the world better— mythic ritualism of Wole Soyinka, the ambili’s father foists upon his was not a docile daughter: She was “boy she made a big difference. When she magical realism of Ben Okri. children a dogmatic under- crazy” (as we said in the 1950s), and her urged her readers to write their senators In contrast to the gritty, fast-paced K standing of what is right studies at Brandeis did not engage her. to support a $100 million cancer research metropolises of Abani and Habila, (Catholicism) and wrong (traditional She got a reduced course load in part bill, the streets of Washington, DC, were Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie sets her beliefs); what is civilized (speaking through her mother’s pull and plugged inundated with mail trucks—over a mil- powerful debut novel in small cities and English) and uncivilized (speaking along until her senior year—but quit lion cards and letters. Eppie was invited sleepy towns. Purple Hibiscus is a quiet Igbo). He shuns his own father, Papa- before graduation to marry her “starter to the White House when President coming-of-age story in which family Nnukwu, because of his heathen husband” (her term). They had three Richard Nixon signed the National drama unfolds within elegant houses beliefs and refuses to let his children children in five years before he took off. Cancer Act in December 1971. We all and middle-class apartment flats, but it spend time with their grandfather. Margo edits her mother’s letters a know people whose lives have been steadily builds into a roar. Adichie fur- When an unnamed dictator stages a bit—for her own privacy and legal rea- saved because of it. thermore shares with her contempo- coup, and the country begins its sons—but Eppie/Ann didn’t hide her But shadowing all her pleasure was her raries an ambition to rewrite Nigeria’s descent into chaos, Eugene continues opinion of husband number one, an irre- troubled relationship with her twin sister. rich literary tradition. A Nigerian-born, his domestic tyranny even as he pub- sponsible alcoholic. Number two was a Popo, it appears, never did treat Eppie US-educated writer whose short fiction licly fights the political assault on dem- colorless fellow who hardly registered, with respect. She sometimes claimed to has won the O. Henry Prize, she begins ocratic freedoms in his newspaper. but Eppie adored Margo’s husband num- have cowritten Eppie’s earliest columns, her graceful performance with a line Perhaps, Adichie’s novel suggests, it is ber three, the actor Ken Howard (of The and she lashed out at her sister during that references Chinua Achebe’s 1958 precisely the disorder around him that White Shadow TV show). That marriage social gatherings and in at least one pub- novel Things Fall Apart: “Things started fuels Eugene’s maniacal obsessions. lasted 14 years, but Margo is now happi- lished interview. Eppie took it all in to fall apart at home when my brother, Purple Hibiscus is reminiscent of ly married to her fourth husband, a silence, and stayed away. It was the one Jaja, did not go to communion and Papa Nervous Conditions, the coming-of-age Massachusetts doctor. relationship in her life that she could not flung his heavy missal across the room novel by Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Intertwined with Margo’s marital resolve through kindness and generosity. and broke the figurines on the étagère.” Dangarembga, in which a similar family troubles is another tale of marriage There’s a great deal of wisdom in Like her literary predecessor, Adichie absorbs and mirrors the external power woes. After 36 years, Jules Lederer left both of these books about Ann Landers. chronicles the breakdown of the family dynamics of colonialism. Adichie’s tale, Eppie for another woman. Certainly Both are fast-paced, well-edited page- unit under the pressures of politics and however, is much darker. As the story there were those who reacted with turners. Both are full of gossip nuggets. religion, weaving her story around the unfolds, the author carefully controls schadenfreude (“that serves her right”). Like the best advice books, they make figure of a domineering father. the reader’s descent into the recesses of But I remember the shock and sadness you look at why and how people become Achebe’s novel begins at the moment this family. The daily fallout of their of reading the July 2, 1975, column in who they are—and what choices they when the forces of Christianity and troubled lives—their mother’s multiple which Eppie announced that the mar- can and should make. colonialism were first unleashed onto miscarriages, Jaja’s deformed little fin- riage was over (she didn’t say why). She Which is why I had trouble finishing traditional Igbo culture, while Purple ger—remains unspoken secrets, things also asked her editors to leave some this review. I was so enthralled with Hibiscus takes up the story years later, shared between Kambili and her broth- white space to indicate her mourning— Margo Howard’s book that I could not when Christianity has spread its roots, er through stolen glances, a private lan- the same thing they did, at Margo’s bid- decide what to quote first. independence has come and gone, and guage Kambili calls “asusu anya, a lan- ding, after her last column. Finally, though, I woke up and Nigerians watch powerlessly as their guage of the eyes.” These secrets weigh Jules soon married the very young smelled the coffee—so that you, dear hopes for democracy are cruelly dashed. most heavily on Kambili herself, whose Englishwoman he’d been keeping in a reader, could get my best advice. Buy But Adichie’s most powerful revision frequent inability to speak suggests how London apartment, and their child was these books. I occurs in an act of displacement. She deeply her fear has sunk. When her

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 10-11 / July 2004 9 © Nnamdi Chiamogu writerly self-consciousness, Adichie restrains her hand nicely. urple Hibiscus possesses a narrative Unknown no more arc common to many coming-of- P age tales: The narrator encounters by Pamela J. Annas destructive characters and inspirational ones; she faces external constraints and Whose Names Are Unknown: A Novel by Sanora Babb. inner shortcomings or trauma; by the end, she gains the perspective from Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, which she narrates her life story. But while this storyline feels familiar, in 2004, 222 pp., $29.95 hardcover. Adichie’s hands it is not formulaic. She captivates her reader with alternating I moments of suspense and horror, sur- prising us with unexpected twists and anora Babb’s quietly powerful fresh ways of looking at the world. In novel about the Dust Bowl farm- particular, her lush, vivid descriptions S ers of the Oklahoma Panhandle Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie linger long after the novel is over. At one and their reluctant transformation into moment, as the enraged Eugene raises a migrant workers in the valleys of classmates and teachers at Daughters of belt, Kambili’s mind jumps to a scene California is finally in print—65 years the Immaculate Heart ask her ques- she has witnessed many times: after Babb finished it on an advance tions, the narrator’s throat tightens; from Random House. In one of those “bubbles of air” block the passageway, Sometimes I watched the Fulani shifts of fate familiar to writers, espe- and her words come out in stutters and nomads, white jellabas flapping cially new writers—and this was Babb’s whispers. Kambili literally has no voice, against their legs in the wind, first novel—when she turned her man- and she is trapped in a cycle of self- making clucking sounds as they uscript in to Bennett Cerf in 1939, negation by her adoration of her God- herded their cows across the Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath had like father and her acute need for his roads in Enugu with a switch, already hit the bookstore shelves and affirmation. For while Eugene can be each smack of the switch swift become a bestseller. Cerf, and subse- abusive at home, in public he can do no and precise. Papa was like a Fulani quently editors at Scribners, Colliers, wrong; those around him revere him for nomad—although he did not have and Viking, turned down Whose Names his public acts of generosity, his piety, their spare, tall body—as he Are Unknown, saying another novel on Sanora Babb and his willingness to take a stand swung the belt at Mama, Jaja, and the same subject wouldn’t sell. A further against his country’s military muscle- me, muttering that the devil irony is that a year earlier, the adminis- effacement of individuality carries a men, for which he wins a human rights would not win. (p. 102) trator of the Farm Security positive message: As in much working- award from Amnesty World. Administration migrant camp where class literature, the protagonist is the When Kambili and her brother take a The juxtaposition of peaceful, rural Babb was working, Tom Collins, had community as a whole. There are strong rare trip to visit their freethinking Aunty nomads with Eugene’s violent rage star- borrowed a copy of her field notes to individual characters, of course, but Ifeoma and their spirited cousins, tles, but the image does more. By slowing pass on to a visiting writer, John though finely delineated they are less Kambili begins to see another world. down the moment, it heightens the ten- Steinbeck. Babb put her manuscript idiosyncratic than representative, exam- What this family lacks in material wealth, sion, enabling us to see through the eyes into a drawer and went on writing— ples of what Georg Lukacs called, in they make up for in opinions. They all of a young narrator who possesses acute short stories, poems, a second novel, “The Ideology of Modernism,” the “seemed to simply speak and speak and powers of observation. While Kambili’s The Lost Traveler (1958), a memoir, An “concrete typicality” of realist fiction speak,” Kambili observes, wondering sensitivity renders her vulnerable, it is also Owl on Every Post (1970), and journalism, rather than the “abstract particularity” how it is that Amaka, also 15, “opened the source of her powerful narration. The the career she had come to California to of modernist (read bourgeois) fiction. her mouth and had words flow easily result is a story suffused with tenderness, pursue in 1929. The story of Sanora (In Realism in Our Time: Literature and the out.” As she spends time with her even at its most brutal moments. Babb and the manuscript of Whose Class Struggle [1964].) cousins, her grandfather, and a sympa- The development of Kambili’s char- Names Are Unknown is another case Whose Names Are Unknown is divided thetic young Nigerian priest, Kambili acter—her fearful adulation of an abu- study of the recovery of lost or out of into two parts, “Oklahoma Panhandle” tastes a freedom that had never before sive father, her struggle to find her print work by women writers. The com- and “California.” Part I is the story of been hers. It resembles the purple hibis- voice—is poignant and true. Adichie parable stories of Meridel LeSueur and the Dunne family in their last year of cus in her aunt’s garden, which is deftly captures the awkwardness and Tillie (Lerner) Olsen, working-class rad- trying to survive by farming in the confusion of a 15-year-old whose self- ical womanist writers of Sanora Babb’s drought ravaged plains of Oklahoma. rare, fragrant with the undertones consciousness is only beginning to generation, come to mind, as does Alice Part II is the story of their first year of of freedom, a different kind of bloom. Her transformation contains Walker’s revival of the work of Zora trying to survive and finally to organize freedom from the one the more than a share of sadness, and the Neale Hurston. as migrant workers in green and bounti- crowds waving green leaves novel ends on a mixed, tentative note. Beyond the story of the novel is the ful California where all the farm-land is chanted at Government Square Having extricated herself from the trau- novel itself—and it is well worth read- already taken. after the coup. A freedom to be, ma of her past, Kambili finally has the ing. Based on Babb’s childhood experi- Julia Dunne, her husband Milt, and to do. (p. 16) strength and self-possession to bear wit- ences as the daughter of a sometime their two children Myra and Lonnie ness to all that has happened. Like sorghum farmer (the rest of the time he live with Milt’s father, the “old man.” The metaphor may be obvious, but it’s Nigeria itself, she now must find her was a gambler) in Colorado and Even though the Dunne family seems appropriate for a 15-year-old narrator. way forward—slowly, resolutely, inde- Oklahoma and on her work as a volun- at first to be isolated in a dugout sod While the moment contains a whiff of fatigably—into the future. I teer in the camps for migrant workers in house out on the Oklahoma prairie, it the late 1930s, Whose Names Are quickly becomes clear that this com- Unknown has the grounded authenticity munity of farmers and small town res- of documentary realism. And real docu- idents take care of each other as well as ments are central to the novel, which they can. The mailman carries mes- For two years, from the moment Dursilla’s grew out of a diary Babb kept in the sages and local news as well as letters husband, Robert, vanished from their com- migrant camps and a letter she received and packages from mail order stores; fortable New York City life with their from her mother about life in Dust Bowl the doctor often takes his pay in farm daughter, Dursilla has battled the precipita- Oklahoma, a letter which, according to produce; before the general store tion of her soul’s demise. In The Last Five the foreword by Lawrence Rogers, Babb owner shoots himself, he carefully can- Days On Mt. Calvary, novelist L.A. Scott imported into the novel “almost verba- cels the accounts of all the farmers tim.” Rogers provides an excellent, who owe him money; the neighbors chronicles the final hours of this mother’s though short, historical, literary histori- show up to help whenever tragedy desperate 24-month search to be reunited cal, and biographical introduction to the strikes. Frieda, whose sister teaches in with her precious child, and in the process novel. I found supplemental biographi- the one-room school, decides to go reveals that what Dursilla had lost was far cal information in Alan Wald’s introduc- west with the Dunnes and the recently greater than she ever imagined. tion to Babb’s short story collection, Cry widowed Mrs. Starwood, who dumps a of the Tinamou (1997). dead skunk on the bank president’s Babb writes in a prefatory note that desk in answer to a letter of reposses- ISBN 159 286 578 X /197 pages /$19.95 /Fiction www.PublishAmerica.com her title is taken from a legal eviction sion of her farm equipment. notice: “To John Doe and Mary Doe The Last Five Days On Mt. Calvary Whose True Names Are Unknown.” he trajectory of many proletari- by L. A. Scott is available at This novel is in one sense an act of wit- an novels of the 1930s moves PublishAmerica.com ness, giving presence and voice to the from suffering in relative isola- and many online booksellers. T unknown women and men of the high tion and silence, through the experience plains. In another sense, the title’s of a social, economic, spiritual, political

10 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 10-11 / July 2004 epiphany, to banding together with novels; one that struck me was each California that foreshadows and repli- caught in a dust storm and dies. “April other workers to organize and fight writer’s use of interpolation. Steinbeck’s cates in miniature the situation of many 23. Dust. I am sick of writing about it.” back. However, Babb’s characters are narrative is broken up by essays and Dust Bowl farmers—the bank takes The journal establishes Julia’s voice and radical long before they reach short stories, some of them irritating, everything and evicts them; they scrape the need of Babb’s characters to write California. The old man, who refuses to some of them brilliant (my own together enough money for a car and and speak their own reality, to be more leave his land, ponders “his wordless favorite is the story of the truckstop drive west; and than those “whose names are hunger for dignity” and thinks about diner). Whose Names Are Unknown has unknown.” “Julia brushed the dust from how Christ “was killed for his ideas that its own powerful interpolations in the sometimes we get work and the rough school tablet paper.... She threatened the enthroned greed of the form of actual documents integrated sometimes we dont but you can read her description of the first storm times.” Babb’s farmers are neither iso- into the text, beginning with the evic- see we are here trying to get and felt frightened again, and pleased lated nor unaware of their situation; one tion notice that gives the novel its title. work to make alivin for our chil- with herself.” young farmer says, “We’ve got to wake Eviction notices follow the Dunnes to dren. Husband never gives up I was more drawn in by these docu- up and find out about things and stick California, where the workers are evict- wantin a farm of his own but mented voices and by Babb’s lyrical together more, the way the workers do ed from a corporation camp after they farmin heres different and we evocation of the land and of life in the in the cities.” In California, the Dunnes, go on strike. On the back of the notice, got to just try to get farm work Oklahoma plains, dust and all, than by the Starwoods, and Frieda spend time in which is printed in full, the strikers now and do the best we can.... It the comparatively reportorial prose on a government camp for migrants, pick write a letter to their comrades still in seems funny sometimes seein so migrant life and union organizing in apricots and peaches, participate in a sit- jail and sign it “with Mary Doe and much to eat and not dare touch California. Babb establishes herself as a down strike in a cotton field, get thrown John Doe written many times in as a thang. (p. 56) fine regional writer in this first novel in in jail, and see the children sneeringly many different handwritings.” her vivid, almost painterly descriptions called “Okies” in school. The novel They receive a letter from Old Man he most extraordinary docu- of the high plains. After a rare rain: ends in the camaraderie of a union Dunne back in Oklahoma. He’s fine—a ment in Whose Names Are “Moisture blackened the earth deeply organizing meeting, where the sense of little lonely, misses his grandchildren, T Unknown is Julia Dunne’s jour- beneath tender green wheat that leaned family and neighborhood the Dunnes life goes on. The dignity Babb gives nal, one chapter in the Oklahoma sec- far over under a lashing wind. The had in Oklahoma has shifted into a mul- Grandpa Dunne is in stark contrast to tion. Julia records the month of April, tracked yard hardened into a mask.” ticultural community of sisters and Steinbeck’s treatment of Grandpa Joad, detailing the dust storms—“April 10… And coming home from town at sun- brothers committed to improving the who also did not want to leave his land Monster gusts of dirt sweep across the set: “Large owls scooped through the condition of workers—a markedly dif- but is forced to by his family; he dies on yard like great clouds of black smoke dusk and settled like blossoms on the ferent ending from The Grapes of Wrath, the trip west, the first of what will be from a fire.” “April 27. Black as night tops of the frail country telephone which closes with the remnants of the numerous cracks in the Joad family’s nearly all day.” She writes about the poles.” Babb’s love and intimate knowl- Joad family isolated in a barn in a flood, solidarity. The actual journey west, so occasional hopeful rain, worries about edge of the land and the people of the Rosasharn breastfeeding a starving man. central to Steinbeck’s novel, is barely a when and whether to plant, about chil- plains make for compelling reading, The Grapes of Wrath did hang over my footnote in Whose Names Are Unknown, dren lost in the dust and found by res- and she shows us how the dignity and shoulder as I read the first 25 or 30 contained in one two-page section: cue parties, about people dying of dust independence of the people of the pages of Whose Names Are Unknown and “The shadow of the car slid along the pneumonia—“April 26... Just heard on plains segue into the beginnings of a thought, “This is kind of slow.” east side of the highway, growing taller, the radio of 24 deaths this month so migrant workers’ movement. At last we Steinbeck’s novel, dramatic and senti- blotting the sagebrush and the cracked far.” She writes amused comments hear the whole powerful story from the mental, has become the iconic saga of dry earth for one swift moment. Out of about trying to keep the house clean: point of view of a woman who had the Dust Bowl migrants, but the reader Arizona into California, the dark shad- “April 10... Noon. Ate on a dirty dusty actual experience with both the origin should persevere until Babb’s intimate ow fled like a black wing toward the table. The dirt is in waves. Think some- and the destination of the migrants. and powerful story of the Dunnes and Imperial Valley.” one’s farm is in our house, maybe our Whose Names Are Unknown is a welcome their community takes over. There are Early in the novel, a neighbor shares own.” The family’s one cow dies. A addition to my canon of American many differences between these two with Julia a letter from her sister in neighbor’s child dies. Mr. Starwood is working-class literature. I

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The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 10-11 / July 2004 11 good looks were to a certain Voices of Our Own: extent a substitute for amiability. (p. 53) Mothers, Daughters, and The failure to communicate Elders of the Tenderloin Damian becomes fascinated with the by Jewelle Gomez emaciated young artist who dedicates Tell Their Stories her days to decorating the hospital ward by Nancy Deutsch with Little Black Book of Stories by A. S. Byatt. and disappears mysteriously every photographs by Kathrin Miller night. He impulsively sets about finding New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004, work and lodging for her, but his inabil- ity to bridge their communication gap “Lose yourself in the words 240 pp., $21.00 hardcover. leaves him bumbling unimpressively. and images of Voices of Our Daisy, an acerbic, petulant, wounded Own, and you’ll never again I child herself, is not an easy subject for walk through any struggling rescue; she’s the drowning swimmer © Michael Trevillion neighborhood without seeing he varied ways in which human who would sink her rescuer with her. the richness and hearing the beings can be mute are difficult Although it may be that Damian’s to convey, especially on the page. last name is coincidental, the story is, dreams.” T The unintelligible mutterings of the in many ways, like a Beckett play, -Gloria Steinem young Helen Keller were not the same as where the pauses are the substance of a silence emerging from ignorance. the piece. It is there that the uncer- Immigrant and low-income women Wordless terror is different from speech- tainty and the possibility lie. But the and girls from San Francisco’s less joy, yet they both might be notated characters’ inability to articulate what poorest neighborhood share the on paper with an exclamation point. In they feel, fear, or want often poisons spirit of survival and the power of her new collection of short fiction, A. S. that space. Daisy and Damian’s hope through journal writing, oral Byatt conveys a variety of inarticulate encounters become a comedic series history, poetry, color artwork and states successfully, and each time in an of cryptic half phrases that barely stunning photography. inventive manner that finds the reader touch the surface of what each of the eagerly leaning forward to hear better. characters wants to say. Several of the stories spring from The plot has its twists, but what stays the realm of speculative fiction; howev- with you are the silent turns that Byatt er, this is not an attempt by Byatt to crafts so well. At the end of this story, avoid ordinary human conflict. Her what is most affecting is that none of A. S. Byatt approach throws into sharp relief the the characters can really speak cogently, nuanced facets of the emotional lives and that words would not have been of her characters. Still, at every turn, Byatt’s description of the metamor- able to contain the fierceness of the life Byatt makes it clear that the elements phosis and its effect on the woman inside of them anyway. Shaping her that make the heart beat are eternally and the one person she trusts is rivet- phrases like a poet, Byatt conveys the mysterious and impossible to articulate. ing. The author’s spare language and tremulous anxiety of the unspoken “A Stone Woman,” the most fan- use of Icelandic mythology evoke rich decisions her characters must make, tastical story of the collection, is a colors and textures for something— decisions that will change everything. voluptuous evocation of a drastic stone—that we are normally more “The Pink Ribbon” is a blend of change that makes speech superflu- likely to tread upon than to notice. She naturalistic and speculative fiction that ous. After the death of her closest weighs the value of human communi- also depends on the inability of its cen- companion, her mother, a woman cation against the mute world of sym- tral figures to communicate with each “Through this book women finds herself “flitting lightly from biotic existence. The final triumph of other. James, along with a home care and children speak to us with room to room, in the twilit apartment, this story is her exploration of the attendant, nurses his wife, who is suc- their hope, creativity and spir- like a moth.” But before she can breadth of life that geological forma- cumbing to Alzheimer’s. The woman it, giving us all hope for a bet- adjust to this weightlessness she tions can represent, and the fulfillment who’d spoken “like a radio announcer” ter world.” begins a startling transmutation. that might be found among them. before their marriage now answers -Dolores Huerta, Byatt conjures a massive bulk of sounds from the cupboard in “a rough co-founder, She noticed… a spangling of stones, assumed to be silent, but gives Cockney voice, shrill and childish.” United Farm Workers what seemed like a glinting red them a vibrantly articulated presence Their relationship has devolved into dust, or ground glass, in the as they envelop the woman who was the impersonal details of care taking— folds of her dressing-gown and meant to be them. but James’ memories of their romantic “Reading this book, you will her discarded underwear. It was past persist. Sadly, the state of his wife’s find sisters. In hard times, a dull red, like dried blood, nother story, “Body Art,” recollections is less reliable. Their inter- their voices give inspiration which does not have a sheen. approaches the theme of actions around memory become the and hope.” (pp. 117-118) A silence more opaquely. It stumbling block. Can he survive if she -Maxine Hong Kingston, opens, “There was a customary ban- doesn’t remember him? And how can author of Then: “One day she found a cluster ter in the Gynae Ward at St. he know what she remembers if she The Woman Warrior of greenish-white crystals sprouting in Pantaleon’s, about the race to bear the can’t talk to him? When a ghostly, her armpit.” It’s a mutation that, on the Christmas Day Baby.” Dr. Damian attractive woman arrives at his door it is Nancy Deutsch is a San Francisco face of it, would seem to be from life to Becket, on duty tending to mothers ultimately their conversations that writer currently directing poetry death, from motion to stasis, but in fact and their newborns, is a jumble of enable James to understand what his and intergenerational programs this proves untrue. distractions who can barely remem- failing wife might want to say. The transition proceeds relentlessly, ber when he slept last or the names of in Bay Area public schools and In this story, as in “The Stone more fascinating than frightening to the his patients. He does not, however, Woman” and others, Byatt uses fantasy low-income housing. She is also woman whose flesh begins to be occu- take his lapse lightly. He’s a good elements to deepen the emotionality of the author of the training manual pied by a cascade of stones and gems. obstetrician who appears to under- the characters, much as Edith Wharton Voices of Our Own: Helping stand his personal limitations yet is did in her often overlooked ghost sto- Mothers, Daughters and Elders [A] necklace of veiled swellings unable to imagine compensating for ries. Their styles are, of course, worlds Tell Their Stories, which is only above her collar-bone…broke or outgrowing them. When he meets apart: Byatt has tamed the excesses of available at From My Window slowly through the skin like eyes Daisy, an erstwhile visual art student the popular minimalist style, creating Books. Photographer Katrin from closed lids, and became who lurks about the hospital on the lean, poetic narrative that doesn’t feel Miller’s work has appeared in opal—fire opal, black opal, gey- verge of starvation, he’s drawn to her. obscure; Wharton reined in the stout Newsweek, Time, Parenting, The serite and hydrophane, full of But he can’t grasp hold of the con- layers of Jamesian language that might Utne Reader and The LA Times. watery light. (p. 120) nections that would make communi- have drowned her. cation possible. Where they are similar is in how they From My Window Books Making the transition is no simple successfully layer the fantastic over a task; she becomes less and less attached He asked her about herself. He solid undercurrent of emotional reality. San Francisco, CA to the “living” world and the friend was not good at this. He was a Like Wharton, Byatt is able to blend the ISBN: 0-9715320-0-1; 8” x 10”; who aids her: good doctor, but he had no skill real and surreal to create sparkling, clear, $24.95 Trade Paper at talking, no ease of manner, he and often painful vistas of humanity. He was becoming insubstan- didn’t in fact want to know the Byatt’s stories are polished gems, www.frommywindowbooks.com tial… She had to cup her basalt details of other human lives, each mined from a different universe Telephone: (415) 648-6121 palm around her ear to hear his except in so far as he needed to but each about characters whose words Available from the publisher great voice, which sounded like know facts and histories in order are rendered unavailable or inadequate. the whispering of grasshoppers. to save those lives. He was Fortunately for us, Byatt herself suffers (p. 151) unaware that his conventional from no such affliction. I

12 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 10-11 / July 2004 outs, or dangling elements. Their novelistic scale—some roam across decades—allows her to showcase her structural wizardry, her Love, always complex wisdom and maturity. Yet this telescopic approach has its drawbacks. To cover so by Leslie Lawrence much ground, Schwartz uses a good deal of summary, which tends to be delivered by Referred Pain and Other Stories by Lynne Sharon Schwartz. omniscient narrators who maintain a dis- tanced, often ironic stance. For example, New York: Counterpoint, 2004, 271 pp., $24.00 hardcover. “Hostages of Fortune” begins like this: “The Willlards were a handsome pair; I everyone in the neighborhood thought so.” And “Sightings of Loretta” opens this way: n the title story of Lynne Sharon Schwartz is a connoisseur of desire; she “Death’s intrusion left Bennett a widower Schwartz’s new collection Referred Pain knows that when it comes to sexual attrac- in his mid-fifties. An awkward age. Too I (her 17th book in roughly 25 years) tion, well—go figure. In “Heat,” the first young for the slow fade, but on the late side Richie Koslowski cracks a tooth on an story in Referred Pain and perhaps my to contemplate a fresh start, even had he olive pit—a mishap that sends him careen- favorite, a nameless woman describes the been one for fresh starts.” ing into a dental hell populated by nearly a secret passion she once held for a man These openings are clean and smart and dozen professionals, encyclopedic in their who is not only married and “too old” but wry—and there’s certainly a place in short Lynne Sharon Schwartz array of specialties, ethnicities, and ingen- also “a little ugly.” It was a sexy ugliness, stories for this sly tone, but for me it wears ious methods of torture. There’s Dr. she assures us. And he was large, she goes thin quickly and, although Schwartz does ued to read the expanded version, some- Blebanoff, the generalist; Callahan, the on to explain. “When he got up out of a eventually drop it (with stunning results), I thing remarkable occurred. First, Schwartz endodontist; Dahlberg the periodontist; chair I could see the air shifting deferen- found myself wishing she had dropped it tells us how she would begin to transform Rodriguez; Eng; Habemeyer; Mbuto; tially to make room for him… And his sooner so I could stop observing the char- the details of her own experience into fic- Ferrucci… Ironically, it’s the drably named voice. Deep, as if it snaked up from some- acters from the outside and feel what it’s tion: “Okay, someone not me, but scared Fisher who delivers the most devastating place near his groin.” The narrator, also like to be them. like me.” Schwartz names her Rosa. She news: “There doesn’t seem to be anything married, never acted on her desire, though I also had mixed feelings about the title toys with background details: “Suburban? wrong with the tooth,” he tells Richie, with she had no doubt it was mutual, and now story. It seemed both under and overde- Or small town? Work that out later.” She an infuriating shrug Koslowski later learns the man is dying, and his wife has asked veloped. The former because the source explains that these tidbits are not the story is endemic to dentists. her to give him a haircut. You can imagine of Richie’s pain—his parents’ horrific sto- proper, but “keep going and the story will the pathos. This story, though shorter and ries—is explained mostly near the start of turn up.” She dismisses some ideas, “It could be referred pain.” less complex than many here, is a gem. the 69-page saga, in brief spurts. We are approves of others, and then gives the “Referred pain?” One of just a few narrated in the first per- told about how the stories affect Richie, material “a trial run,” at which point, “That means the place where it son, it is full of marvelous observations but we don’t experience their impact for almost miraculously, the story does indeed hurts is not the source of the trou- about the surprising and sometimes comi- ourselves. What we do experience, and “turn up.” Without our realizing when, ble. The source of the trouble is cal workings of lust; it is also brimming experience, and experience is his aching Schwartz has drawn us into her now fully somewhere else.” (p. 76) with tenderness and rue. tooth. Do we really need a dozen dentists fictional account, inside Rosa’s fear that with as many diagnoses? By the third, I soon she will be trapped in a marriage to a To the dentist, “somewhere else” chwartz’s men, though not immune was flailing along with Richie, desperate to man 20 years her senior and her sickening means somewhere in the intricate neural to their gender’s characteristic inade- extricate myself from yet another recognition that she has only herself to networks of Koslowski’s body; however, S quacies, are, as always, sympathetic. hydraulic chair, and by the time I reached blame—although we as readers see that her it gradually becomes clear to the reader In fact, many of the stories in Referred Pain the ending, where Schwartz gives her vulnerability as a young, relatively poor, that the source of Richie’s trouble is his are told from the male point of view—and most concise and articulate explanation of unsophisticated, half-Puerto Rican woman parents—Holocaust survivors whose to me, convincingly so. In “Sightings of Richie’s pain, it didn’t have the impact it may have more than a little to do with it. suffering will forever trump anything Loretta,” another of my favorites, Schwartz should have. At the same time, I delighted The story section of “Intrusions” is Richie experiences. is less interested in exploiting clichés about in Schwartz’s linguistic playfulness and successful on its own terms. The essay is And so it is with several of the best sto- men’s shortcomings as conversationalists precision, her staggering knowledge of fascinating, especially for readers who ries in this ambitious, often dazzling col- than she is in exploring the complex psy- dental calamities, her sheer literary chutz- want to learn more about how stories lection: The source of present pain, if not chodynamics that occur between any cou- pah as she prevailed on the high wire come to be written. It provides insight handed down from past generations, is ple over time. Bennett, the husband, dividing farce from tragedy. into what Schwartz calls her “writerly located somewhere else in the characters’ hungers to talk about his feelings. “But instincts, which run opposite to the aes- histories. Their unending grief or still Susan didn’t ask anything more. Way back, inally, a word or two about thetic of full disclosure; I prefer conceal- smoldering passion has gained squatter’s she’d complained that he didn’t ask many “Intrusions,” the “story” that sits ment, cunning, and artifice,” and explains rights in the psyche, and in various sneaky questions, was not curious, and in time she F almost smack in the middle of her preference for fiction over memoir. ways, that tenant continues to intrude had become that way herself.” Referred Pain. I enclose story in quotation “My own feelings and experiences— upon the present, exerting its perverse will. “By a Dimming Light” also has a male marks because the first section of recounted in a straightforward way that In some stories, the pain can be traced protagonist, Eric, an aging writer who is los- “Intrusions” originally appeared as an essay is—rarely entice me as raw material,” she back to the loss of a child (a theme ing his vision along with his reputation and in a textbook on creative nonfiction. It says. The essay also contains this tantaliz- Schwartz braved in her second novel, the his arrogance. “Loss, he thought, makes you begins with a stark, uninterpreted rendition ing tidbit: Schwartz was once a big sister marvelous Disturbances in the Field); in oth- humble. It wasn’t age that bred pomposity, of a frightening incident that occurred to a Barnard student who cracked her ers, it is a childhood passion or an affair but the robust entitlements of youth.” when Schwartz herself was a young moth- tooth—no, not on an olive pit but on a that occurred 24 years ago during a semes- The passages describing Eric’s frustra- er. This “just the facts” approach, she morsel of panforte. ter abroad. In other words, love—some- tions are some of the book’s most fully explains, was prompted by an exercise she Despite my reservations about some of times parental or filial, but more often sex- imagined and poignant. gave her students to minimize their “seduc- the stories in Referred Pain, this is a collec- ual—is the real culprit; and love, with its tive and endless and often fruitless soul- tion I can recommend whole heartedly. concomitant fear, grief, shame, regret, and [S]hades oozed into windows, food searching” and make them “concentrate on Schwartz knows a great deal about love (especially) joy, has always been Schwartz’s merged with his plate; squinting at things and words.” She then deconstructs and pain; she celebrates the erotic and at forte. Schwartz was a pioneer among the the mirror, he couldn’t find the line her bit of memoir, searching for what the same time is unflinching when it women writers of the 1980s who were between his sand-colored hair and seems to be missing and concluding that comes to exposing the ways we delude finally claiming their right “to tell the truth his skin, and all was shaggy, atrem- she has not done justice to her theme, fear, and fail ourselves. Enlightened by her about the body” (a phrase from Virginia ble... A few friends still asked him because she has not sufficiently trans- insights into the games we play, the bar- Woolf’s “Professions for Women”). At a to dinner, but it was like visiting a formed the real-life details into fiction. gains we strike, the ambiguities and time when that truth most often con- foreign country where he only half At first, I was annoyed to come across ambivalences with which we must make cerned the abuse or hollowness or mere grasped the passing scene. He this essay in a fiction collection (doesn’t she our peace, we just might delude and fail dullness of sex with men—or the intensi- missed the visual nuances, the small have enough real stories!)—but as I contin- ourselves a little less. I ty and pleasure of sex with women— stitches that wove the social fabric Schwartz was writing about strong, smart of the evening. (pp. 212-218) women who loved making love with men. Schwartz’s women characters still tend to To help him with his writing, Eric MOVING? be strong, heterosexual, and lusty. hires an assistant. Schwartz has an uncan- Don’t miss an issue! “She loved everything about love—the ny grasp on Eric’s anger and humiliation desire, the ever-startling bliss, and the lush, when he suspects that his assistant is not Please give us six to eight weeks’ notice of your change of address. We need dank lassitude after,” says Schwartz, only changing his language but changing describing Julia Willard in “Hostages to it for the better. Most touching, she nails your OLD address (on your mailing label, if possible) as well as your NEW Fortune.” In a nice twist, Julia is not only the way in which his diminishing vision one. Send the information to: Address Change, The Women’s Review of more adventurous than her husband, she is sharpens his ability to see his own deeply Books, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA 02481, or phone toll-free 888-283- also less focused on their children. “She’d flawed character. never really pined for babies anyhow. It There’s nothing tentative or sloppy in 8044/ fax 781-283-3645/ email [email protected]. was love she pined for.” Schwartz’s stories—no false starts, easy The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 10-11 / July 2004 13 Poetry by Enid Shomer Rendering truth

Jazz at Bradley’s by Valerie Miner

Between sets the brass swan Double Vision by Pat Barker. New York: Farrar, Straus sleeps propped against a wall long neck drinking in the darkness and Giroux, 2003, 258 pp., $23.00 hardcover. that must be swallowed to make a song I

digress from melody until © Ellen Warner ouble Vision showcases Pat the veins on the players’ necks bulge Barker’s novelistic strengths and like conduits, the left hand sasses passions: intense psychological the right on the ivories, and the drums D and moral responses to world affairs; the evolution of individual integrity; connec- race to a stop like long-jumpers tions between local and international vio- churning through air. lence; an acute appreciation for land- I heard this music once before, scape. Like Regeneration, her celebrated canoeing the Suwanee—willow leaves World War I novel, Double Vision is a transfixing story about the personal con- dropping like mallets on patches of water sequences of wartime engagement and bright as the slats of a vibraphone, disengagement and about the redemptive beavers gnawing branches down power of facing the truth. to motes swirling like the galaxies While Barker is feted for her portraits of men at war, Double Vision, her 10th of secondhand smoke above this bar novel, introduces complex women char- whose patrons slump, oblivious acters as well, reminding us of her first with pleasure as the drummer hoists a harness three books, which launched her as a of sleighbells and shakes it, once. feminist writer. This narrative opens in familiar Barker territory, a village near In memoriam, William Mathews Newcastle, England. Kate Frobisher, a sculptor, is mourning her husband, Ben, a news photographer recently killed in Pat Barker Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Ben’s friend A Lady Astronaut Tests for Space and journalist colleague Stephen Sharkey seven imprisoned, shackled men in the has just returned from the battlefield to nearby Bowes Museum, stirred by the Secret women’s Mercury Project, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1961 write a book about the mutable “truths” artist’s observation, “One cannot look at of war reporting. this. I saw it. This is the truth.” Science is good to a point, but how do you measure Kate is struggling with a 15-foot As Stephen writes his book and Kate, guts? Can numbers predict who’d dive through a fire sculpture, a figure of Christ, commis- recovering from her injuries, chips away to rescue a child? How will you gauge bravery? sioned by the local cathedral to be erect- at the sculpture she calls “The Christ,” a By dexterity, stamina, reflexes? They aren’t the heart ed on a hill in time for Easter. Suddenly, tentative friendship develops. Romance of the matter. I passed the extraocular balance test. an almost fatal auto accident leaves her hovers with Kate gradually surfacing In the Slow Rotating Room they thought I’d launch seriously injured. She is panicked about from grief and Stephen, whose wife had her deadline. Alec, the local vicar, sug- an affair during his absence, shedding the my lunch, but a day’s fast left nothing to launch. gests she hire young Peter Wingrave, a pain of his broken marriage. The two Strapped to the tilt table, my muscles measured seasonally unemployed gardener. attractive, 40-ish people share aesthetic in ergs, I aced the pressor-reflex test. Independent, sometimes taciturn Kate and political interests as well as a bond to I adapted to bright and black light, to fiery reluctantly agrees to enlist charming their beloved Ben. red. If velocity of the ulnar nerve is where heart Peter’s assistance with some of the ardu- However, Stephen is surprised to find resides, then from wrist to elbow I am brave. ous physical labor. himself in an affair with Vicar Alec’s The northern English countryside is a daughter Justine, a precocious, strong- While I dreamed of headlines—“NASA Braves character that resembles the humans on minded young woman. Justine has just Public Opinion...Picks Dame for Space”—they launched this stage—both benign and ominous, deferred entrance to Cambridge for a probes into my nose and throat. Heart always concealing secret meaning. Kate is year and is working as an au pair for pounding, I rode the Dilbert Dunker and measured deeply attuned to season and time of day: Stephen’s brother. Kate, meanwhile, up: underwater and upside down, I fired becomes preoccupied by her attentive, like a sparkplug and kicked to the surface. For the test The weather turned colder, until enigmatic aide, Peter. Barker has imag- one day, returning from her walk, ined the lives of her whole cast in precise that mimics g-forces, they rigged a test she noticed that the big puddle detail. Although Kate and Stephen are ejection seat to slide on a vertical track. I braved immediately outside her front the spotlighted characters, their stories the kick of a fifty caliber shell firing gate was filmed with ice, like a are rendered through complicated inter- beneath me like a rocket. They say a real launch cataract dulling the pupil of an actions with friends and relatives. As feels like a kick in the pants from an immeasurably eye. She heated a bowl of soup, always, Barker’s people live in context, geo- larger boot. Last came the heart built up the fire and huddled over graphical and historical. The encounters it, while outside the temperature among them—Kate and the vicar; exam, the Lee and Gimlette procedure. The heartier dropped, steadily, hour by hour, Stephen and his brother’s family; Peter you are, the slower your pulse under stress. The test until a solitary brown oak leaf Wingrave and the other villagers—are discovers leaks in the chamber walls by measuring detaching itself from the tree fell wrought with the clarity and authority blood flow. I’ve often used bull and bravado onto the frost-hard ground with a only possible from an intimate third-per- to mask my flaws, but a blaze in my chest nearly launched crackle that echoed through the son omniscient narrator. me off the table. I turned fishbelly white. Fired whole forest. (pp. 1-2) hile Kate and Stephen mend into space, I’d never survive, they said, my fire The story opens in the dark days of from their different wounds, doused in the thrust and rattle of gravity’s waves. My heart winter and ends with the promise of everyone copes with physical or line on the EKG still spiking like flames, I launched W Eastertide. Barker employs allegorical psychic threats or moral dilemmas. the excuse that I hadn’t been sleeping. It didn’t fly. Test names and other metaphors such as Justine learns to distinguish between me again, I begged, or let it pass. A life of bravery Kate’s recurring memory of the crypt of autonomy and fear of intimacy. Alec should outweigh a single graph. Here’s the measure Lord and Lady Chillingham, who have faces dismissal when he falls in love with lain side by side for five hundred years in a parishioner. Stephen’s brother Robert of my mettle, what testing can’t reveal: launched their local church. Stephen is frequently tackles the quagmire of his own mar- on a column of fire into measureless space, I’d brave the dark haunted by the recollection of a dead girl riage. Robert’s son Adam tries to create a heart of creation. I don’t care if I never get back. in Sarajevo, “Eyes wide open, skirt place for himself in the wilderness, safe bunched up around her waist, her splayed from classmate’s taunts about his thighs enclosing a blackness of blood Asperger’s Syndrome (a form of autism). and pain.” Both Kate and Stephen are Peter becomes more tantalizingly drawn to the stark Goya painting of enigmatic throughout the book and in

14 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 10-11 / July 2004 the end is the one character limited by his allegorical weight. Early on, one learns he is an ex-convict, pursuing a writing career while supporting himself Brontës through the ages with manual labor. Vicar Alec, his self- appointed mentor, defends Peter’s right by Rebecca Steinitz to be accepted without disclosing the nature of his crime, even though he has Emma Brown by Clare Boylan and Charlotte Brontë. had an affair with Alec’s daughter and is working alone with Kate in her New York: Viking, 2004, 437 pp., remote studio. The only way Peter can survive is $25.95 hardcover. through strange and faintly menacing masquerades. Pretending to be short- The Brontë Myth by Lucasta Miller. New York: sighted, he wears spectacles made out of clear glass. He presents himself as a Knopf, 2004, 351 pp., $25.95 hardcover. gentle, artistic soul, belying the severity I of his past transgressions: Late in the The Brontë sisters (left to right: Anne, novel, Alec reveals that Peter, as a small Emily, and Charlotte), painted in lad, committed a burglary and mur- n March 31, 1855, a 39-year- get to display their historical and literary 1834 by their brother, Branwell. dered an old woman. The parallel old woman died in Haworth, knowledge while writing unapologeti- From The Brontë Myth. between Peter Wingrave and the young O Yorkshire. We don’t know why cally descriptive and dramatic fiction murderer Danny in Barker’s Border she died. It may have been typhoid or that reveals what we think the Crossing is so striking that perhaps consumption, or perhaps complications Victorians wanted to hide. Readers get Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” Barker feels she had already developed of early pregnancy. She left behind her to read thickly satisfying novels, usually his 1885 exposé of child prostitution. this characterization. Yet unless one has father and her husband of a few with a good dollop of sex and crime, Boylan also knows her literary mod- read Border Crossing and believes that months; her mother, brother, and four and feel smart for recognizing how els. Emma Brown is full of birds, vari- every child murderer is identical, one sisters were already dead. Her death was Victorian it all is. ously caged and free, a favorite searches fruitlessly for the person nothing out of the ordinary for mid- Victorian metaphor for femininity. beyond the symbol in Peter Wingrave. Victorian England. Dozens of women mma Brown is a quintessential Fuschia Lodge, the school where we Kate is troubled by the fleeting probably died in similar circumstances neo-Victorian novel. Boylan first meet Matilda/Emma has echoes of image of a white van, like Peter’s, that that very day, hundreds that week. E knows her Victorian fashion, Vanity Fair and A Little Princess, as well she glimpsed the night of her accident. The woman, of course, was geography, and scandalous history. as of Brontë’s earlier novels. Her Could he have been involved somehow? Charlotte Brontë, and Emma Brown and Isabel mends not just lace but “Honiton London slums and Thames shores are Then one evening during a storm that The Brontë Myth ask us to consider why guipure.” Newly arrived in London, Dickensian, and her hypocritical knocks out phone and power lines, Kate we still care about her. Clare Boylan is Emma finds herself in the slum market preacher is straight out of Wilkie looks out the window to see Peter in her an accomplished author in her own at Seven Dials, “a seething junction Collins. Jenny, the eight-year-old studio. “Her mind grappled with the right, yet for her eighth novel she where seven different roads converged orphan who picks up dead babies from wrongness of the image, and then she chose to share authorial credit and and each of these a heaving stew of the gutter and carries them around for realized he was wearing her clothes, write Emma Brown, in her publisher’s humanity.” The secret at the heart of the company until they begin to decom- even to the fur hat with earflaps that she words, “a novel from the unfinished novel derives directly from journalist pose, is at once a Dickensian grotesque sometimes wore when the studio was manuscript by Charlotte Brontë.” In William Stead’s purchase of a young girl and the Victorian archetype of the really cold. He looked ridiculous, terri- The Brontë Myth, Lucasta Miller, former for five pounds, documented in “The saintly young dying girl (Little Nell, fying. Deranged.” She doesn’t intervene, deputy literary editor of The because he is not altering “The Christ.” Independent, traces the afterlife of “If he had been destroying her work, Charlotte Brontë and her sisters Anne UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI [email protected] she must and would have confronted and Emily through 150 years of biog- A member of the Association of American University Presses him, but…[h]e was stealing her power raphy, criticism, literature, and film. Conversations with in an almost ritualistic way.” Both books raise the question of what Gloria Naylor the Brontës mean to us today, and Double Vision is layered with intrigu- EDITED BY MAXINE LAVON ingly contradictory relationships in though they raise it quite differently, MONTGOMERY which people learn about themselves, they generate similar answers. An indispensable resource each other, and their agency in the larg- When Charlotte Brontë died, she left which offers rare insight into er world. Stephen’s and Kate’s views of behind two chapters of a new novel, works that are in the van- the deceased Ben, Stephen’s and which are now the opening chapters of guard of contemporary Justine’s experiences of their affair, Emma Brown. In them, the widowed American literature $48 unjacketed hardback, everyone’s fears and projections about Mrs. Chalfont describes the arrival of $20 paperback Peter—all these notions raise important heiress Matilda Fitzgibbon at a girls’ questions about what can be seen at the school kept by three genteel but impov- Conversations with intersection of time present, observa- erished sisters, and the subsequent dis- Mass Media and the Gwendolyn Brooks Breaking the tion, and memory. covery that Matilda is not what she Shaping of American EDITED BY Rule of Cool As Stephen says to Kate about Goya’s seems; indeed, that nobody, including Feminism, 1963-1975 GLORIA WADE GAYLES Interviewing and Reading BY PATRICIA BRADLEY Interviews which underscore Women Beat Writers self-interpretation, Matilda, knows who she really is. It’s a “This is an important, original, the legacy of one of the BY NANCY M. GRACE AND classic Brontë beginning (her own hus- and smart book that focuses on nation’s most brilliant and RONNA C. JOHNSON “This is the truth.” It’s that argu- band suggested critics might find it a topic of considerable signifi- humane poets Interviews and essays that ment he’s having with himself, all repetitive): Both Jane Eyre and Villette cance.” –Daniel Horowitz, $46 unjacketed hardback, spotlight nine women Beat the time, between the ethical feature orphans, girls’ schools, and author of Betty Friedan and the $18 paperback writers who broke with social Making of The Feminine and literary norms and with problems of showing the atroci- poor gentlewomen reduced to teaching. Voodoo Queen ties and yet the need to say, Boylan takes over in chapter three, Mystique:The American Left, the the male rule of Cool Cold War, and Modern Feminism The Spirited Lives of $48 unjacketed hardback, “Look, this is what’s happen- and the novel quickly broadens its focus. $46 unjacketed hardback, Marie Laveau $20 paperback ing.”….There’s always this tension Isabel Chalfont tells three stories: her $18 paperback BY MARTHA WARD between wanting to show the own; the subsequent adventures of “Ward not only tells the Shebang truth, yet being sceptical about Matilda, who turns out to be the novel’s Interviews with entire astonishing and moving BY VALERIE VOGRIN what the effects of showing it are eponymous Emma Brown; and the Betty Friedan story of the two Marie A rollicking story that cele- going to be. (p. 100) efforts of Mr. Ellin, a gentleman neigh- EDITED BY JANANN SHERMAN Laveaus, but she also offers a brates the intricate web of Thirty-six years of interviews fresh perspective on Creole family life—the families we’re bor, to trace Emma’s past. In the course with the “Mother of Modern culture.” –Booklist (starred born into, and the families we Double Vision brims with such philo- of it all we encounter country estates Feminism” review) create out of necessity sophical issues, yet it is never didactic or and London slums, poor governesses $46 unjacketed hardback, $26 hardback $26 hardback overly cerebral. Readers are caught up in and malicious employers, tragic love $18 paperback Barker’s brisk pace and spare, nuanced affairs and mercenary marriages, crusad- Black Diva of the Lauren’s Line language as the story raises discrete and ing journalists and avaricious procuress- Conversations with Thirties BY SONDRA SPATT OLSEN Audre Lorde The Life of Ruby Elzy A witty, satirical novel unveil- interconnected questions. Will Kate fin- es, not to mention a significant number EDITED BY JOAN WYLIE HALL BY DAVID E.WEAVER ing faculty shenanigans on an ish her sculpture? Will Stephen produce of coincidences. Just about everyone Interviews that portray the The bittersweet biography of urban campus a readable, “true” book? Will Justine arrives at a happy ending, though not many sides of the Harlem-born a black operatic soprano $25 hardback accept her place at Cambridge? Will before enduring significant travails. author and activist who shone as a star of stage Stephen’s brother separate from his wife? The neo-Victorian novel is a popular $48 unjacketed hardback, and film, but died unexpect- And what on earth is Peter Wingrave up genre these days. Whether rewriting $20 paperback edly at the age of thirty-five to? Barker’s surprising climax pushes the Victorian classics from the perspectives $26 hardback reader off center in a provocative, unfor- of minor characters or creating their Available in bookstores, visit www.upress.state.ms.us, or call 1-800-737-7788. gettable manner. I own Victorian worlds, its practitioners

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 10-11 / July 2004 15 Beth March) who proffers salvation to pages to discover what would happen those around her—in this case Emma, to Emma as she navigated the treacher- who finds meaning in life by creating a ous shoals of Victorian London. I home for Jenny. never had much interest in Isabel, But accomplished as she clearly is, especially once her story shifted from Clare Boylan is no Charlotte Brontë. tragic melodrama to comfortable She has an unfortunate penchant for domesticity, but I eagerly followed Mr. anachronistic gastronomical Ellin as he followed Emma’s trail, and I metaphors—the “alliance” between the happily congratulated myself when my sisters who run Fuschia Lodge is “a thin suspicions of connections between sisterly soup,” and as a governess, Isabel characters proved true. Once I forgot is “compressed in this sandwich of the that Emma Brown was supposed to be a social order, as stifled as a wilting leaf of Charlotte Brontë novel, I quite enjoyed lettuce.” The conceit that Isabel narrates it, happy to be just an obedient neo- the entire novel frequently falls apart in Victorian-novel reader. long passages that detail events and thoughts she could not possibly know f course, if Emma Brown wasn’t about. Brontë is often didactic and supposed to be a Charlotte unquestionably ideological, but when OBrontë novel, I probably Boylan’s characters tackle issues of class wouldn’t be reviewing it. It’s a good and gender injustice, they sound more read, but it offers nothing new, nothing like feminist literary critics and histori- that makes you think “I’ve never read Branwell's painting sentimentalized as it appeared in Warner ans than Victorian characters. this before,” like Sarah Waters’ late- Brothers’ Devotion (1946). From The Brontë Myth. But even as the reviewer in me bris- Victorian transvestite actresses in tled at these faults, the reader in me Tipping the Velvet (1999) or Michel was seduced. To my surprise, I found Faber’s intensely sensory London of instead is the not-quite-kept promise involved in the life of Haworth which myself tearing up a bit over Jenny and 1874 in The Crimson Petal and the White that we can get more of something old: was, contrary to popular belief, a her dead babies and rapidly turning the (2002). What Emma Brown offers Charlotte Brontë. Why we would want bustling industrial town, not a romantic more Charlotte Brontë is a question The moors outpost. But biographers have Brontë Myth helps us answer. resolutely stuck to the more appealing The myth of the Brontës is as well and ideologically useful myth, tweaking known as their novels: Three sisters in a it to reflect the Zeitgeist, as Charlotte “trenchant, lucid, and daring”* lonely parsonage on the moors spend evolved from Victorian moral exemplar their motherless childhood in a fantasy to the repressed spinster of early 20th- world and grow up to write incendiary century psychobiography to late 20th- RISKING novels that shock Victorian readers century feminist heroine. Emily, about with their wild passion and rebellious whom we have hardly any real informa- DIFFERENCE feminism. In a staggering display of tion, emerged from her own writing Identification, Race, and Community scholarship, Miller sets out to trace the and her sisters’ accounts as first a in Contemporary Fiction and Feminism development of this myth and its Victorian nature-child savant, then the effects through hundreds of reviews, mystic of the moors. JEAN WYATT biographies, and fictional representa- I occasionally got a bit impatient with Looks at the dynamics of identification, tions. She argues forcefully that, Miller. The confidence with which she envy, and idealization in fictional narratives enchanted with their own images of the asserts what Charlotte “was beginning by Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Brontës’ lives, successive generations of to feel” or “sensed” seems out of place Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison, and others, readers and writers have transformed in a book about the hubris of biogra- as well as in nonfictional accounts of the Brontës into ideological avatars, in phers, and her narrative occasionally cross-race relations by white feminists the process neglecting the literary mas- threatens to devolve into one biograph- and feminists of color. tery that is the source of their power. ical plot summary after another, each As a “metabiography,” The Brontë Myth inadequate for its own biases. But her thus demonstrates how biography has research is so thorough, her evidence of been used as a tool to neutralize women “Risking Difference is a trenchant, lucid, and daring inquiry appalling biographies so entertaining, artists, ironically often by other women and her argument so sure-footed that I into the power and dangers of identification in recent feminist determined to protect them. kept getting pulled back in. discourse and practice. Wyatt thoughtfully unravels the desires Miller begins with Charlotte herself One of the ironies of both the neo- that fuel idealizing identifications, especially those that cross racial who, “torn between the desire to rebel Victorian novel and The Brontë Myth is boundaries, and examines the damage these fantasies inflict on and the need to conform and be that in setting out to uncover the delu- the possibility of an enduring and diverse feminist community. accepted,” played out the one in her sions of the past from the enlightened fiction and the other in her life, creat- vantage point of the present, they suc- This is an important book for anyone committed to keeping the ing a demure public persona to count- cumb to a progressive narrative that is conceptual and social boundaries of the female subject open.” er the charges of coarseness and sub- itself deeply Victorian. Luckily, Miller, — Elizabeth Abel*, coeditor of version that her fiction engendered. at least, is aware of this paradox. Even Female Subjects in Black and White: But the real villain of this book is as she claims that “we are now living Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism Charlotte’s first biographer, Victorian in a golden age for Brontë scholar- novelist Elizabeth Gaskell who, in an ship” when “it seems that progress really has been made in the journey “Simultaneously bold and delicate, Jean Wyatt’s Risking Difference effort to defend her friend, turned Charlotte into a domestic martyr, her toward rediscovering the real fuses psychoanalytic theory, feminism, narrative theory, anti-racist life as fascinating for its tragic isolation Charlotte,” she acknowledges that discourse, and concerns within multicultural politics to propose as its literary achievement. Miller is “Any history which presents itself in an original praxis for feminist intersubjectivity. Feminists who care brilliant in her reading of The Life of terms of progress rather than process about ethical and political questions pertaining to alterity will find Charlotte Brontë, rightly hailing Gaskell should be treated with a certain her punchy last chapter on cross-race dialogue indispensable. for creating a new model of intimate amount of suspicion,” and “we will never arrive at the end of that jour- This is a vigorous, careful, lucid, and thoroughly readable feminine biography while also reveal- ing how she transformed Charlotte’s ney.” Her self-consciousness confirms contribution to feminist ethics and politics.” life into a novelistic narrative of loss what a sophisticated and thoughtful — Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, author of and duty based as much upon book The Brontë Myth really is. Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race Victorian domestic ideology as the Ultimately, Miller’s point, which she available biographical evidence. asserts repeatedly, is that what matters Just as Gaskell’s opening panorama about the Brontës is not their life but 286 pages / $23.95 pb / ISBN 0-7914-6128-9 of the Haworth parsonage became the their literature, that first and foremost standard beginning for Brontë biogra- they were great artists. A dozen years phies, so subsequent biographers fol- ago, her argument might have been con- lowed her lead in subordinating the demned as retrogressive and elitist, but works to the lives and the facts to their aesthetics and value judgments are back own agendas. Miller convincingly in fashion, and, I have to admit, Emma state university of new york press demonstrates that the Brontës did not Brown supports her case. We’ll read SUNY spring out of nowhere, but rather were Emma Brown because we’re entranced by For more information and to order, please visit highly purposeful artists, steeped in the the name on its cover, but we’ll re-read www.sunypress.edu literature of their day, especially the Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights because Romanticism of their childhoods, and they are great novels. I

16 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 10-11 / July 2004 Poetry by Andrea Potos

ON THE MOORS, The Brontës CHARLOTTE BRONTË SPEAKS OF POET LAUREATE ROBERT SOUTHEY, 1837. Some shun it here— call it tree-starved, stunted, How I hungered for his reply! drizzled in mist. When he informed me I possess in no inconsiderable degree In untrammeled air, curlews cry. the faculty of verse, my hopes Over bilberry, gorse, escaped from their cellar, quivered spikes of purple heather, and peered from the margins. the earth is a bog that erupted one day— under blackened skies, peat and mud flowed for miles, He warned me of danger: woman’s duties swept away bridges, suffocated fish. misdirected, forgotten, (Papa preached that God unsheathed a distempered state of mind. his sword, brandished it over our heads. Though I may scribble in the few Be thankful we are spared, he cried.) idle hours (for nourishment of heart and soul), let me not embrace Indeed, this ground is a living being notions of glory—he urged me that breathes through our soles, to hold to my Destiny:

the air turning the linen, an infinite undone page, gathering the turnips and potatoes, the wind the voice that dictates. scrubbing the fireplace fender ’til it shines— he knows not how (could any man know?) with this pen how near to the flame I bend.

JULIE SPEED THE SUMMER OF Paintings, Constructions, HER BALDNESS and Works on Paper A Cancer Improvisation With essays by Elizabeth Ferrer By Catherine Lord and Edmund P. Pillsbury “This is not your mother’s cancer journal. Sexy Combining anxiety, erotica, and violence and scary, it is as much an exploration of lesbian with the subversive power of beauty, Julie erotics as it is a reflection on disease and Speed’s work is squarely in the vanguard of a modernity. Catherine Lord finds unexpected return to figurative painting in contempo- opportunities for community in that most private rary art. This beautifully illustrated volume of properties, the body.” presents color plates of her oil paintings, —David Halperin, W. H. Auden Collegiate constructions, and works on paper. Professor of English, University of Michigan Accompanying the images are essays by art Constructs Series; Robert Mugerauer, Vivian Sobchack, and historians Elizabeth Ferrer and Edmund H. Randolph Swearer, Editors Pillsbury, as well as fascinating excerpts 49 color photos, $24.95 paper, $60.00 cloth from the “Books of Conversation,” a series HISTORY FILMS, WOMEN, of public journals initiated by the Austin AND FREUD’S UNCANNY Museum of Art in connection with a touring survey of Speed’s work. By Susan E. Linville 100 color plates, $45.00 cloth “Linville takes a highly original angle on the subject of women and historical representation in An English-Spanish bilingual volume film, arguing that the concept of the Freudian QUESTIONING THE LINE uncanny provides a way of characterizing and Gego in Context explaining the structuring absence or the Edited by Mari Carmen Ramírez ambivalent characterization of women in a genre that has become increasingly important to .utexas.edu/utpress/subjects/womgen.html with Theresa Papanikolas Spanish translations national self-definition. . . . I find her argument MAJALIS AL-ILM: by Héctor Olea to be complex, subtle, and illuminating.” English translations —Robert Burgoyne, Wayne State University, by Julieta Fombona author of Film Nation: SESSIONS OF KNOWLEDGE Hollywood Looks at U.S. History Through a series of essays examining her art $21.95 paper, $55.00 cloth RECLAIMING AND REPRESENTING in relation to Modernism, Informalism, kinetic art, and other tendencies, this GENDER AND THE THE LIVES OF MUSLIM WOMEN volume situates German-born Venezuelan BOUNDARIES OF DRESS artist Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt) in her IN CONTEMPORARY PERU Salima Bhimani international context. By Blenda Femenías Distributed for the International Center for the Arts of the Set in Arequipa during Peru’s recent years of Through lively provocative discussions (“sessions”), thoughtful analyses, and Americas, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston crisis, this ethnography reveals how dress 38 color plates, 32 b&w quadtones, 4 b&w photos, $29.95 paper creates gendered bodies. It explores why personal creative expression, nine young people from diverse backgrounds Now in paperback for the first time! people wear clothes, why people make art, and why those things matter in a war-torn land. consider their lives as modern Muslim women in Canada. With the current NO GIFTS FROM CHANCE view of Islam in vogue in the West, Muslim women have often been presented Blenda Femenías argues that women’s clothes A Biography of Edith Wharton are key symbols of gender identity and to the mainstream as victims and products of a misogynistic religion and of By Shari Benstock resistance to racism. barbaric societies. Majalis al-ilm: Sessions of Knowledge counters these Praise for the first edition (published by Louann Atkins Temple Women & Culture Series stereotypes. Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1994): $29.95 paper, $70.00 cloth “Here, at last, is Edith Wharton in all her New in paperback power, her ambitions, and her angers. For the “The model of women examining issues relevant to their practice on the first time we have a biography using new THE EMPRESS THEODORA basis of their experience and perceptions, rather than the basis of their material and allowing us to acclaim an Partner of Justinian Islamic study and knowledge of Arabic, provides a breath of life into contem- accomplished though prejudiced woman, one By James Allan Evans who was against women’s suffrage, who “There is no other book that gives Theodora as porary understanding of the inner dimension of Islam.” — Montreal Gazette surrounded herself with famous men, yet was extensive or as penetrating treatment as this one. the author of insightful, feminist novels. Here is . . . The task is worthwhile, because Theodora is a paperback • ISBN : 1-894770-06-4 • Price: $23.95 the truth, brilliantly recounted, compelling to figure of historical importance and great interest read.” —Carolyn G. Heilbrun, and perhaps the only Byzantine woman about hardcover • ISBN : 1-894770-05-6 • Price: $29.95 author of Writing a Woman’s Life whom the sources say enough to make even a short DISTRIBUTED IN THE US BY SMALL PRESS DISTRIBUTION 43 b&w photos, $29.95 paper book feasible.” —Warren Treadgold,

OMEN’S STUDIES FROM TEXAS author of A Concise History of Byzantium TSAR Publications $19.95 paper UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS www.tsarbooks.com 800-252-3206 www.utexas.edu/utpress

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The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 10-11 / July 2004 17 “Unending,” inspired by the poet’s visit to Berlin where she witnesses “the fall/ of communism as the spring of capital- Walking on rough water ism” and views the face of a Wisconsin woman “looking calmly at her Nazi pho- by Alison Hawthorne Deming tographer,” the anguish of historical pain becoming close, familiar, and Trembling Air by Michelle Boisseau. Fayetteville, AR: University reframed in a spiritual context. of Arkansas Press, 2003, 74 pp., $16.00 paper. hylias Moss opens history’s stat- ic facts to reveal its human com- Slave Moth: A Narrative in Verse by Thylias Moss. New York: T plexity in her new book Slave Moth, a narrative in verse about Varl, a Persea, 2004, 152 pp., $24.00 hardcover. brilliant 14-year-old slave girl living in antebellum Tennessee. Varl is the prop- Bend by Natasha Sajé. Dorset, VT: Tupelo Press, erty of Peter Thomas Perry, a man who collects and experiments with “rare 2003, 80 pp., $14.95 paper. things”—luna moths, a dwarf, an albi- I no, “every animal with more than/ or less than the right number of any- am small, I contain/ multitudes,” © Gloria Vando thing”—including this learned and lov- writes Michelle Boisseau, subverting ing young slave who writes down her I and enlarging Whitman’s famous experiences in “needle-writing” on boast. This might be the voice of poetry cloth panels she wears under her itself speaking, a modest art of formal clothes, like a luna moth’s cocoon discipline that gives shape to the enor- “inside of which it writes itself a new mous reach of human imagination. existence and changes to fit it.” From Byzantium to Bizmart, from Sappho to Sears, the icons of the cultur- —You can fit all of my name al moment find their habitation in the Varl into larva. poem. Three new books of poems by You can fit all of my name into women writing with aesthetic acumen, something emotional intelligence, and historical that undergoes complete depth make clear once again the capaci- metamorphosis. (p. 6) ty of poetry to transform grief, oppres- sion, and appetite into song. Varl understands where she stands in Boisseau’s Trembling Air, her third “the hierarchy of intelligence” and that full-length collection, is framed with ele- her position, though enslaved, is heads giac poems written in response to the above that of Ralls Janet, Perry’s cranky Michelle Boisseau deaths of both her father-in-law and and illiterate white wife (“Would she father. Her second book Understory know/ how to choose something (1996) won the Samuel Morse French fall,” a reader might overlook the for- besides which piece of chicken/ to fork Prize, and she is the coauthor with mal precision and allusive richness to off the platter?”). Varl is in love with the Robert Wallace of the craft book Writing be discovered elsewhere in this collec- slave Dob (“the king of strength”), but Poems (2003). These new pieces study tion. Boisseau is formally stringent, it is her own mind that frees her, no loss through the oblique vocabulary of most often working with stanzaic heroic act of external force. She is images: A man’s workshop gone silent forms and a personal voice that leads taught to read and to think by her moth- after his passing becomes the source for the reader to assume that the “I” in the er, Mamalee (whose own story of “Visual Dictionary,” the poem a lexicon poem is indeed the poet speaking of becoming educated and educator makes for the new language that each death her own experience. an engrossing digression), but Varl requires, as this excerpt suggests. This book includes a polyvocal set of comes to realize that she can’t be satis- persona poems in which the poet fied with education, “with revenge of …The vise hangs at the end speaks in the voice of dust, a hammer, the mind.” She writes: of its thread, its jaw set: the sun, the moon, a flower’s thorn, a potato, despair, envy, and talk radio, maybe I’m just a page in the nothing can speak for him, among other subjective presences. master’s book; not even you, his middle- These poems owe and claim debts to free in my thoughts, but attached aged children. He was hard George Herbert, Gerard Manley to the binding. Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, Milton, and I can turn but not exit… (p. 16) to know. And now harder Dante, among other forebears. The to lift and hardest to put best of them ring with a playful intelli- The metaphor is apt—one of many back down again is this gence, as when dust describes itself: “I/ that brings a sense of the inner life of am the library of Alexandria/ and pop- both slave and master to consciousness maple-handled hammer, sicle/ sticks”; or when the sun says, “I on the page. Peter Perry is in love with lying where he left it. (pp. 7-8) am like the Sears of space—a middle- Varl, though the perversity of slavery aged/ star of medium brilliance near and his own taste for experimentation Death has not softened the man, but the edge/ of a third-tier galaxy” and with human subjects makes his love the tools, well ordered and well named, goes on to articulate the appropriately itself a deformity. While the master have been transformed into instruments simplistic equation referring to the remains entangled in the ropes of desire for ordering and naming his absence. “dimwits” who invested the sun with and denial, Varl sees and names his The poet’s father, who had worked as a metaphoric and mythological meanings: attraction, her clarity of mind leading to late night radio news announcer, seems “Them – me = desolation.” self-possession. also to have been a man not easy to love, The lesser poems in Trembling Air There is so much to praise in this one who inflicted a toxic dose of pain seem driven by formal assignment rather book: the historical reach, the psycho- on his children. The longer meditation than inner imperative; they are compe- logical complexity, the dramatic ten- “Luminous Blue Variables” relies on tent and pleasing, if somewhat coy, and sion, the visceral characterization, the visual and auditory images of the night they don’t really cut through the dust on moral force, the qualities of mind and sky to evoke the poet’s feelings for him. the mantlepiece to get at those emotion- heart embodied in the extraordinary The poem, beautifully lacking in self-pity al, spiritual, or moral truths for which I central character, the central trope of or nostalgia, bounces through echoing increasingly turn to poetry. Perhaps as the luna moth and its capacity for trans- space to arrive at this arresting statement our society more precariously fibrillates formation, the reclaiming of the epic of empathy: “Only when I was looking from its lack of direction, its moral narrative form for contemporary poet- up,// the sky opening at my looking,/ authority waning as its militaristic auton- ry, and the visionary reconnection with did I feel him gone and wholly unhurt.” omy waxes, I hunger for the stronger the natural world, as in “Sweet Enough Indeed, so emotionally tuned to the medicine that is found in the best poems Ocean, Cotton”— power of image are them about family, in the book, ones that reach into the including two about a brother whose emotional difficulty of family and come I call the blown-open cotton a sea, aberrant behavior deprives him of out with love in hand, and ones that I call moving through the rows “every fruit in the garden—children, touch the sharper wounds of history, my attempt to walk on rough jobs, houses, beds—our easy wind- such as the quietly profound water (p. 40)

18 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 10-11 / July 2004 of story; nonetheless its merits are too © David Baddley That playful brightness is present great to quibble over this loss. Not throughout the book: Sajé’s humor is since Marilyn Hacker’s brilliant Love, inviting and intelligent, her narrative Death and the Changing of the Seasons has presence that of a person who under- a book-length narrative in verse been stands the human animal in all its folly so formally, intellectually, and emotion- and error—and still loves it. The spirit ally satisfying. “Maybe slave is much of play is present in her formal strate- bigger/ than you can imagine,” Varl gies—a marvelous panorama of possi- tells Ralls Janet, while they scrub laun- bilities arrayed from free verse poems dry together at the river. And by the scored against the whiteness of the page time I had finished reading this book, I to forms making judicious use of stan- Natasha Sajé was humbled by how true that state- zas, couplets, a triadic line á la William ment had become. Carlos Williams, to an interrogation Sajé’s first book, Red Under the Skin, poem that echos the call-and- response magination’s perversity is to savor won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize of religious liturgy, though here what’s given, to embrace the lyric and established her as a thoughtful employed in an utterly profane context, I moment without a thought to sensualist, and Bend, her second book and even a concrete poem with a canal consequence or ethical implication. of poems, is a finely prepared feast of down the middle of it. The literary For this reason Plato kicked the poets pleasures, body and mind dancing muses she invites to the table, cited in out of his dream town. It seems, in through the house of her imagination. epigraph and allusion, include Paul retrospect, he might have kicked out Words and images, their tumbling for- Valéry, Frederich Nietzsche, Rumi, Thylias Moss some other professions, to the greater ward through the mind, are as deli- Gertrude Stein, Marcel Proust, William good of history, but that’s another cious to this poet as a blueberry crisp. Empson, and the game of Scrabble. The This connection with nature is most story. Natasha Sajé celebrates this In the poem “I See,” the narrator mis- pleasures in this text nourish the mind as stunningly represented in the poem “The lyric self, while acknowledging its takenly identifies a dark pink object well as the senses. She understands “the Tennessee Beehive Prophet Project,” in divided nature: with which cats are playing as a rose savage appetites of ordinary people,” which the body of Peter Perry’s dead fallen from a wreath. As she turns to exorcises the woman-hating of Cotton grandmother becomes a honey hive and ... the self always see it, she realizes it is in fact “the Mather, imagines what human beings site of religious revelation. drunk with the pleasure at hand, long dried tail and entrails of a rat.” would be like if we had tails, and thanks Moss has published five previous shares a body No source of squeamish revulsion, God for Sloth, books of poetry, most recently Last with a woman who has been true the object leads the poet to this hap- Chance for the Tarzan Holler (1998), a to one man, pily profound insight: ...the bear who eats my hours book for children, and a memoir. She is who even at midnight when the so avidly. How difficult life already a force in American literature, other I wants I laugh: If rose & rat are not would be “a permanent poet” as Harold Bloom only to roll into bed, is reaching so far without you, Sloth, an uphill road has called her, a 1996 MacArthur for chocolate and eggs, of industry. (p. 34) Fellow, a National Book Critics Circle melting and separating, envision- apart, then what can’t be mistaken Award finalist, and winner of a ing the faces for something that it’s not? Bend is filled with lively but never Guggenheim Fellowship, among many of her guests at the first mouthful facile surprises, a book of light-heart- other distinctions. This book may not of mousse, The turn’s a way of telling me ed gravitas that reiterates what might exhibit the dazzling contemporary dark as the heart of a faithless to make each breath a be Sajé’s signature line: “Nothing is so velocity of her earlier books, its music wife. self-revision. satisfying as the imagination’s render- occasionally faltering under the burden (p. 52) (p. 15) ing of it.” I

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The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 10-11 / July 2004 19 making these big, awkward stabs at Goldstein © Barry Meaning? In a deceptively casual man- ner, the speaker is soon revealed as Alice, Paradises lost a woman looking back on her teenage years, when she was defined by her mag- by Judith Grossman nificent breasts. The essential “turn” in this story comes with Alice’s descent into Little Edens by Barbara Klein Moss. New York: a purgatory of lessons in show dancing with a sadistic coach, Duncan Fischbach, W. W. Norton, 2004, 329 pp., $23.95 hardcover. whose ultimate, destructive test is the demand that she lick his shoe. It is testi- Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories by Joan Silber. mony to Silber’s imagination, and the boldness of her narrative line, that Alice New York: W. W. Norton, 2004, 247 pp., both complies and immediately initiates the cure for her own life—which has $23.95 hardcover. nothing at all to do with her abuser:

I While I was crying, I understood . W. Norton has given us, in tinct from one another. Silber’s linked clearly that I was never going to be the same season, two story stories in Ideas of Heaven trace the unpre- a dancer in any Broadway show. Joan Silber W collections by women writers, dictable human path from a dream or Not now, not later. I saw too that I each in warm-toned covers from the passionate desire to an ultimate (and didn’t want it so much really. It was own freedom. With Peggy, Tom was the same designer and featuring similar almost inevitably smaller) outcome— as if I suddenly remembered a lover, she the elusive beloved. Now his terms of endorsement: beautiful, magical, something that her characters negotiate thing that had been blocked by dis- task is to earn an angry child’s affection. miraculous. What are we to make of such with singular resourcefulness, even traction and interruption. (p. 28) When a young woman shows up to offer a deliberate pairing? grace. Little Edens, by comparison, is a him her constant heart and help raise his One can imagine the marketing collection unified less closely by theme From here, at last, she can emerge onto a son, he feels bound to accept, although department’s profiling Ideas of Heaven than by a sense of America as the forev- new path that will take her, characteristi- he knows he’ll never fully return her and Little Edens as fictions of transcen- er diasporic space. People in Moss’s sto- cally by odd indirections, toward com- love. Increasingly he is drawn to medita- dental consolation, which, in an America ries find themselves, at crucial moments passion and wisdom. tion and silent wilderness retreats. Years now ruled by aggressively masculinist of insight, in exile; even when they’re The stories in Ideas of Heaven are told later, after Peggy’s death, Tom reflects on reactionaries, might have special appeal tucked up together in a cozy New by separate narrators, who discover the the fact that losing her brought him “a to an audience of women facing degrees England nursery (as at the end of shape their lives have taken on through truer, fuller life.” But there is another of disempowerment. It’s true that these “Camping In,”) the moment promises the telling of them. Their linkage into truth: “I would have traded any of it at are recognizably books of the present no more than temporary respite. the “ring” of the subtitle is crafted in a that moment to bring Peggy back. It was moment; both, for instance, contend Joan Silber’s book—her fifth—builds variety of ways, beginning when the my luck that no one ever gets a choice with the question once raised by Robert on a distinguished record of pitch-per- identity of the second speaker-protago- like that.” The double valence given to Frost: “what to make of a diminished fect realist fiction. The first sentences nist, in “The High Road,” is revealed to “luck” in that sentence carries one of thing?” But neither Silber nor Moss here from “My Shape” demonstrate her be Duncan, the villain of Alice’s tale. It’s those costly, plangent realizations that wants to offer formulaic compensation command of the singular, arresting one of Silber’s most persuasive achieve- are formed only in the latter half of life. for the losses their characters endure; the voice: “I had my own ideas about a high- ments to reveal the tyrant of the dance Readers already familiar with Silber’s ways in which they take on the “dimin- er purpose, but not enough ideas. I could studio as the victim of his own life: a gay work, most recently the novel Lucky Us, ished thing” are in each case vitally dis- have used more.” Who is the person man who carelessly throws away his first, know that her core territory has always true love; whose authentic gifts never been life among New York City-dwellers. gain success; and who winds up in unre- What’s so remarkable about this new quited, even disenchanted devotion to a book is its confident reach beyond, to a young tenor of minor ability. “Who more inclusive and still precise vision. New in September could have known I was going to be so Like Alice Munro in her later stories, constant?” he reflects. “It wasn’t at all Silber draws together threads from the what I expected, and I had some work past and the far distant, making the space getting used to it.” of her fictions larger, with no sacrifice of Visa for Avalon Silber’s major themes here—the desire their classic proportions. for sexual, and also spiritual connec- by Bryher tion—emerge most fully in the central ittle Edens, by Barbara Klein Moss, with an introduction by sequence, “Gaspara Stampa” and “Ashes is a special kind of debut: A Susan McCabe of Love.” These stories make a pair, L mature sensibility informs her sto- hinged together by Rilke’s celebration of ries, even while their meticulous crafting This Modernist treasure helps bring to light Stampa, the Venetian Renaissance poet leaves some traces of apprenticeship. the immense literary contributions of and icon of the prodigal lover in Duino The writer works out the entailments of Bryher. In a novel of political necessity and Elegies. In both stories, generous amounts her fictional premises through attentive urgency, Bryher warns against apathy and of poetry intensify the drama unfolding detail, only rarely taking hard risks. But paralysis, presenting a chilling allegory of in prose. For instance, the quoted lines in when she does, as in the novella, “The life threatened by totalitarian forces. “Gaspara Stampa,” Palm Tree of Dilys Cathcart,” she offers Reminiscent of George Orwell and the reader both challenge and surprise. Margaret Atwood, Visa for Avalon is a All my delight it is, and all my joy Moss observes (according to the jack- poignant election-year page turner. To live endlessly burning, with no et copy) that her stories are often set in pain (p. 91) the “flawed Paradise” of southern "...An enchantment–a journey and warning California. For her characters it is always into the future..."–Horace Gregory are echoed in a frightening reprise at the a place they have come to from some- finale, when Stampa is delirious and where else, thus setting up a dual, $15.00 / paperback 930464-07-X dying: “I had the sense that I had actual- opposed set of perspectives. In “The ly set myself on fire and had been smol- Rug Weaver,” Ebrahim, an Iranian Jew in Available in bookstores dering all night—I had done this terrible exile, prefers the sublime visions of his or through Paris Press (add $6 s&h). thing for a reason I could not fully prison cell back home to the sight of his Available to the trade through remember but that was entirely neces- unveiled blond daughter-in-law on the Consortium Book Sales & Distribution. sary.” Given that for a contemporary fic- patio. In the title story “Little Edens,” an tion writer, rendering a 15th-century inconsolable mother seeks escape in voice with conviction borders on impos- relocation, after her son Andrew’s death daring and beautiful books sible, “Gaspara Stampa” is a tour de force; from AIDS; but her haunted dreams of and the poetic armature effectively him continue, making her despise the underpins the work. fraud perpetrated by subdivisions named Other writers available from Paris Press: “Toscana” or “Persian Gardens.” “It’s Virginia Woolf, Muriel Rukeyser, Ruth Stone, With “Ashes of Love” Silber returns Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to the present and gives us her most pro- one thing to anticipate Paradise; another Jan Freeman, Adrian Oktenberg found exploration of a life claimed by to have arrived,” she remarks at one multiple loves. Tom, who tells the story, point, and is instantly, happily, convinced encounters Rilke’s poetry just when his that it’s Andrew himself speaking P.O.Box 487 • Ashfield, MA 01330 • [email protected] passion for the restless Peggy takes over through her. To accept a remade life here his world. They marry and have a son would mean conceding the finality of his www.parispress.org before she runs off; later, she tosses the death. Moss’s subject in each case is the boy back to him in the interest of her contest of loyalties between the here and

20 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 10-11 / July 2004 now, and the back-then—and the chal- for the next-generation woman writer to two-part harmony it involves requires across genres from “The Sheik” to lenge to change, to transform. take on Roth...) But the novella, “The them to sing together. Krakauer himself “Tarzan of the Apes,” has never entirely In “Interpreters,” the place of the Palm Tree of Dilys Cathcart” delivers is of course married, but to a disabled disappeared. A variation of it appeared model world is assumed by a Colonial- something more original, taking the wife whose wealthy family has just in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s memorable era village theme park, where a nameless point of view of the gentile woman— hijacked her back to New York when the novel, “The Slave,” in which a Polish couple playing the roles of Thomas the English expatriate, piano teacher, and sessions reach a mystical climax. Both girl’s love for a Jew brings her a shtetl life carpenter and his wife Eliza find them- organist for her Episcopalian church. participants are deeply aroused: in which she must erase her ethnicity by selves drawing too close to their New pretending to be deaf and dumb, until, England originals. Predictably, Thomas ilys is 41, childless, and celibate Breathless and shaking, Dilys and dying in childbirth, she finally cries out. is the more gratified—he’s a woodwork- after a brief early marriage and a Krakauer looked at one another. Dilys Cathcart by contrast meets a much er who has found the ideal setting for his D few short affairs. Music is the His face is a mirror of mine, she softened fate; but the shadow of her skills, and he gets to play the patriarch one outlet for her capacity for pleasure. thought. He sees what I see. predecessors must, I think, qualify the over his much younger wife. Yet when he Enter Mendel Krakauer, the Orthodox We’ve brought each other to the ways in which we read it. I perversely abuses her as a daughter of Jewish butcher from downstairs (and this same place. (p. 311) temptress Eve, she gets sexually turned being southern California, the “Marty” on by her role: “It was Eliza who showed associations need not be denied). For a short time, Moss allows Dilys her that her weakness was her strength; Krakauer brings an assignment for Dilys: to imagine her own conversion, includ- she must become the bawd, become the He’s been reading a kabbalistic work, ing even her future union with Krakauer. Now on the temptress, bring him to release and earn curiously named “The Palm Tree of In mind and body—she has to throw Women’s Review her own.” A neatly scripted pregnancy Deborah,” on the attributes of God, the out the breakfast bacon—she feels her- follows. But the choice of how the script sefirot. And as he meditates on these in self Jewish. She takes to heart the kab- of Books website ends belongs to Eliza, since she—unlike the meat locker at work, he’s begun hear- balist’s revelation of a gloriously sexual- the original Eliza who, unhinged by ing music: “Not a little tune but a whole ized cosmos in which she can welcome Subscribe by VISA or motherhood’s burdens, ran off and died chorus, the music is carrying me away. the sacred power of the male, exclaim- in a snowy winter—can easily break that Where, who knows, I’m all ears, the rest ing aloud: “Men aren’t just the shadow Mastercard on our spell. Whether or not she does so Moss of me is sleeping. I wake up with the of the real thing. They’re the main event. secure server. leaves doubtful, in a Gothic conclusion music in my head.” He wants to hire They’re quite the point, actually.” But that is not entirely convincing. Dilys to transcribe this music, since he’s the consummation of that vision is In several of the stories here, encoun- heard her piano through the ceiling. (As denied her: Krakauer’s wife returns to Find out the answers ters between a Jewish man and a gentile a butcher, ranked low in the Jewish com- him, with her family’s blessing, while woman are cast as emblematic of the munity, he can’t expect his inspiration to Dilys receives only a check and a touch .edu/womensreview to some Frequently attraction/repulsion of the Other and be recognized by the cantor at his shul.) of the butcher’s fingertip. Her consola- Asked Questions bring the issue of a contest of loyalties Dilys realizes that “Krakauer saw her tion prize must be simply the under- to crisis-point. This is material that has as the missionaries of her childhood had standing that she has served her purpose been extensively exploited by Bernard seen the African basket-makers featured as a mediator of the divine. Search our useful Malamud and Philip Roth (among oth- in their slide-shows—pagan, even primi- There is, in this novella, an echo of ers). Moss’s story “The Consolations of tive, but endowed by the Creator with a the atavistic appeal that we find in, for index of back issues

Art,” in which the old and ailing useful manual dexterity.” Yet she agrees instance, some of D. H. Lawrence’s .wellesley Kriensky becomes attached to his gener- to make the transcription from his work—most starkly in “The Woman ously sensual caretaker but is traumati- singing—with the door open, he insists, Who Rode Away,” with its blond woman Win a free subscrip-

cally deprived of her by his jealous to preserve modesty. As it happens, the offering herself up for sacrifice at the www tion—what a deal! daughter, seems to me all too closely force of divine music will come close to hands of an ancient, “natural” male derivative of Malamud. (I’m still waiting defeating modesty, especially when the order of power. That vision, played out

“…sensitive, intelligent, and profound.” ASSOCIATION FOR RESEARCH ON MOTHERING — Marshall W. Alcorn The Association for Research on Mothering (ARM) is the SIGNIFYING PAIN first international feminist organization devoted specifi- Constructing and Healing the Self cally to the topic of mothering-motherhood. Our mandate through Writing is to provide a forum for the discussion and dissemination JUDITH HARRIS of research on motherhood and to establish a community A deeply personal yet universal work, of individuals and institutions working and researching in Signifying Pain applies the principles this area. In addition to hosting two conferences each year, of therapeutic writing to such painful life we publish the Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering. Each issue highlights a particular motherhood experiences as mental illness, suicide, theme and showcases the newest and best in maternal racism, domestic abuse, and even genocide. scholarship, poetry and book reviews. ARM is an associa- Probing deep into the bedrock of literary tion for scholars, writers, students, activists, professionals, imagination, Judith Harris traces the odyssey agencies, policy-makers, educators, parents and artists. of a diverse group of writers who have used We welcome memberships and journal subscriptions from their writing to work through and past such anyone interested in research on mothering. personal traumas.

“Signifying Pain … both shows and tells what a psychoanalytically informed ARM is seeking submissions for our upcoming sensibility can bring to understanding poetry. To be able to signify pain conferences and journal issues: is a human triumph; to write about the signifying is, too.” — Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, coauthor of •Young Mothers Conference (May 6-7, 2005) Deadline: September 1, 2004 Cherishment: A Psychology of the Heart •Mothering, Race, Ethnicity and Culture Conference “This wise and compassionate book will provide inspiration and guidance not (October 21-23, 2005) only for teachers and students of writing but also for individuals struggling Deadline March 1, 2005 to find relief from mental anguish or to repair a damaged self.” — Mark Bracher, editor of the •Mothering, Religion and Spirituality journal issue Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society Deadline: November 1, 2004

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The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 10-11 / July 2004 21 The novel opens with a conversation munity, by befriending Billy, an 18-year- between a matchmaker and young Sayo’s old, red-headed soldier who guards the aunt, who discuss the suitability of a camp perimeter. Houston does an excel- Manzanar as metaphor marriage between Sayo and the second lent job of playing with the prejudices son of a local man of means. The poten- readers may bring to the character of a by Hiromi Goto tial groom, Hiroshi, is in America to gum-offering, gun-toting prison guard expand the family line there. Sayo was who is friendly toward a 13-year-old girl. The Legend of Fire Horse Woman by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston. born under the unlucky-for-women Fire Hana, Sayo’s daughter, is quiet and Horse sign, so her aunt lies to the apparently passive. But her personality New York: Kensington Books, 2003, 329 pp., $23.00 hardcover. matchmaker, claiming that her niece was begins to change in Manzanar, where born under the sign of the Rabbit. she meets a Japanese bachelor who is I Traditionally, Fire Horse women are said kind, unlike her husband, who is blus- to be too powerful to marry, because tering, thoughtless, and crass. In one uring World War II, nearly “homeland security” tell us we are far they will end up killing and eating their episode, unconcerned with whether 120,000 Japanese Americans, from finished with this discussion. husbands. Sayo’s father-in-law Matsubara Hana wishes to have sex with him or D most of whom were born and Houston told Publisher’s Weekly, “It recognizes her power too late: not, her husband, Tad, urges her to take raised in the United States, were wasn’t my intention to do internment off her clothing: removed from their homes on the West when I started the novel.” She Matsubara felt his hara [gut] suck Coast and forcibly held in prison camps explained that her book is about libera- in involuntarily. For one moment “Here…on this cool spot on the in Arizona, Arkansas, California, tion, and “the barbed wire is a symbol he felt panic. Unmistakable power floor.” He has removed his Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming. of imprisonment, whether self- gleamed from those eyes. shorts and now lies naked on the The wrongs enacted by the government imposed or societal.” This suggests that Matsubara recognized power, hav- linoleum, his penis taut and of that time continue to affect the col- the Japanese-American internment ing been born to it and being pointing upward like a giant lective psyche, and the effects of this could be read as symbolic. But to me, adept at wielding it throughout his shaking finger reminding Hana trauma—the tearing of self from ideal- the historical and political specificities life. But to be challenged at his of her duty. (p. 31) ized notions of “nation” and “citizen- of the times cannot be separated from age—and by a woman—was not ship”—are still explored in contempo- the experience of reading The Legend of what he had envisioned when he Houston’s use of humor at this disem- rary works of art, literature, and culture. Fire Horse Woman. arranged this marriage. Could he powering moment is welcome and suc- Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston revisits the Houston’s narrative alternately tells have chosen wrongly? (p. 26) cessful. She does not depict women as site of this splintering in her debut novel, the story of the 64-year-old Sayo, who in victims, even though the historical times The Legend of Fire Horse Woman. early 1900s Japan was betrothed to a In a strange turn of events, Sayo and in which her narratives are set were hard- Houston is well known for coauthor- stranger in America and traveled there as her father-in-law end up feeling attracted ly progressive in terms of women’s ing, with James D. Houston, Farewell to a picture-bride, and that of her daughter to each other, and they have sex before rights. Houston is determined to present Manzanar, a ground-breaking memoir Hana and granddaughter Terri. All three she leaves to join his son in America. strong female characters, so I wondered that chronicles Houston’s family’s are imprisoned in Manzanar. Sayo’s The details of the harrowing trip across why she structured the development of internment experience. Now a standard story is signaled with italics, making it the ocean and the indignities faced by the the three main characters around their text for schools and colleges, the book easy for readers to differentiate between picture-brides, such as providing a stool relationships with men. Their repeated both teaches a history that many past and present. Using a loosely limited, sample for a “worm test,” provide inter- heterosexual pairings undermine the Americans would like to forget and omniscient point of view, Houston pres- esting and realistic touches, especially as model of female autonomy Houston opens a space for critical analysis of ents the camp experiences from the per- they pertain to women’s bodies and their wants to foster. Hana is able to re-imag- what is wrought in the name of national spectives of Terri, who is coming of control, or lack thereof, over them. Sayo ine herself only after meeting Shimmy, a safety. The current “war on terrorism” age, and Hana, who is discovering her is a powerful and insightful woman who tailor. His personality is “forceful, but and the measures taken to preserve voice and autonomy. is completely capable of taking on every- not in the way she is accustomed to. It is thing that comes her way. gentle, jovial and undemanding, yet with Sayo’s new husband, Hiroshi, who is no questioning of his own authority.” described as “almost effeminate” and Hana is drawn into the warmth of his “delicate,” literally pales in comparison personality, and she begins standing up to his Native American friend Cloud, to her husband’s rants. who has “dark copper skin, thick feath- This is a novel about relationships, “Razor-sharp ery eyebrows, like those of Samurai renewal, and strength in harsh times. Yet warriors. His cheekbones and jawline although half the novel is set during the were finely chiseled, lending an aristo- internment, a time of absolute upheaval in its analysis.” cratic look.” Cloud is not only comely, for Japanese Americans, little is seen of he even speaks Japanese. As Sayo learns the orchestration of the internment or the people who regulate the system. I —MARK CRISPIN MILLER, author of The Bush Dyslexicon more and more about her new hus- band’s life in America and receives hints had a mixed response to this. The novel as well of a secret life his family in is about Japanese Americans and the Japan knew nothing of, she draws clos- daily dramas they experienced while they er to Cloud, who “was strong and mas- were interned, so it seems sensible that culine and also had a sensitive nature.” I the story remain with them. But other must confess I was not entirely con- than Billy, Terri’s soldier friend, the vinced that their interactions were por- internment sequences are almost devoid trayed realistically. Although historically of a white presence. This absence trou- there were certainly alliances and cross- bled me, as it might be read as an elision, cultural relations between early Asian a missing representation of a specific immigrants and Native North historical reality. About halfway through Americans, a Meiji woman from Japan the novel, a protest staged by a group of would have had a great many xenopho- frustrated Japanese Americans goes bic tendencies, not to mention class val- awry, and soldiers fire upon the crowd.

$26.00 hardcover ues, that would have affected at least her This is the only scene that illustrates the initial interactions with a dark-skinned, racial mechanics of the camp. After this Native man. I would have liked to have episode, we’re back in the daily lives of Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane, and the High-And-Tight seen more of the tensions, misunder- the characters. Although it is obvious Gender, Folklore, and Changing Military Culture standings, and struggles both parties that the Japanese Americans were con- Carol Burke would have had to overcome in order to fined and regulated, the absence of “Carol Burke reveals how institutional cultures become sexist—and stay begin real communication. depictions of racially fraught interac- sexist. She uses her sharp feminist eye and ear to expose the boy-o tions left out a sense of the real tensions jokes, marching chants, and initiation rituals that are about privileging nterspersed between the accounts of that must have existed daily. certain forms of masculinity, insuring not only that women are mar- Sayo’s early life are the experiences The Legend of Fire Horse Woman is a cel- ginalized, but also that men police other men. After reading Carol of Terri and Hana in Manzanar. ebration of the female will to face all Burke, the U.S. Naval Academy and its counterparts throughout the I military will never look—or sound—the same.” Terri is Sayo’s favorite grandchild. She challenges with strength, determination, —CYNTHIA ENLOE, author of Maneuvers: knows her grandmother as a strong and and hope. Houston’s characters are not The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives powerful woman, and she enjoys her victims who seek only to survive; they close ties with her, but she is aware of are women with agency who will not let few specific details of her grandmother’s history, political machinations, or social Beacon Press past. Terri is growing into young adult- pressure dictate the courses of their 150 Years of Independent Publishing hood in the internment camp, and she lives. For those who want to read an www.beacon.org chafes at the boundaries. She enacts her uplifting tale of female fortitude and independence, breaking rules set by both optimism this novel will provide an emo- the camp regulators and her own com- tional boost. I

22 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 10-11 / July 2004 rate species” and, until the crisis with her cant gay male character, with the weight of son takes precedence over everything else, all his and Nan’s lost gay friends, including uses the Hunter to keep Marina home. Adam, the founder of the campy 1970s Old friends Marina’s mysterious-artist persona makes drag show in which Hal played an orchid. it difficult for D’Erasmo to avoid repeti- When the narrator is in Hal’s head, by Andrea Freud Loewenstein tion: After her first night with Nan, she D’Erasmo produces sentences like, “His feels “as sure and as unsure as she had manhood and his orchidity twined togeth- A Seahorse Year by Stacey D’Erasmo. New York: ever been in her life.” Marina’s sometime er in his mind, like a single, strong root.” girlfriend Shiloh “is both much too seri- At the center of everything is Houghton Mifflin, 2004, 360 pp., $24.00 hardcover. ous and not serious enough.” And Marina Christopher. His efforts to understand is “afraid of Christopher...but has never what’s happened to him are “like a math I felt more tender toward him.” Marina problem he can’t quite solve though he buys a certain Armani dress of a price so tries, all day long.” Marina notes that “he tacey D’Erasmo’s new novel stayed In many ways, this book follows the unfathomable that it is never specified, a has never seemed more childish. At the with me in the way of an evening (largely American) plot of a parent’s symbol that is overused, as is that of the same time he has never seemed larger.” S spent in good conversation with effort to come to terms with a child’s predatory shark in Christopher’s fishtank. His parents, once playful confidantes, now new friends visiting from San Francisco. I grievous illness. This story, which appears Hal finds Marina “annoyingly elusive,” seem to be his persecutors. He can’t stand found myself thinking about her charac- in both memoir and fiction, is usually though he understands that Nan finds her “the way they’re always coming after him, ters Nan and Marina often, with interest narrated by the mother and includes at quality of being “always in a trance or half following him, the way they unite in his and concern, and I wished they would least a glimpse of the child before he or out of one massively alluring.” He puts up presence.” “Don’t anyone fucking touch come back or at least e-mail and tell me she was stricken. This glimpse gives the with Marina’s constant presence for Nan’s me!” he screams at his father. more. This naive response fits the novel’s rest of the book particular poignancy, sake, as well as because of the general, It’s easier for him to confide in thoroughly realist style. Free of post-mod- although seeing Chris’s former self only unremitting kindness he beams on the Marina, who doesn’t care as much. “It’s in ern self-consciousness or purposeful ambi- through his parents’ eyes made me won- world as a feminist and model father. I feel my back,” he mumbles to her, “and it’s guity, A Seahorse Year is a straight story der whether the sensitive, intellectual, a bit guilty to confess that Hal, unlike the spreading. Don’t tell Mom but it’s defi- about gays and lesbians, one in which the loving child was quite as untroubled as other characters, who became my dear nitely in my spine, and at night if I stop plot matters, and the characters carry the they needed to believe. Such a plot can friends, never felt like a real person to me. moving it travels, and you know I can’t let plot. My “visitors” were a pair of middle- give an inexperienced novelist problems D’Erasmo burdens Hal, the only signifi- that happen, I couldn’t do that to her. I aged dykes who shared my memories of with time, but D’Erasmo, who has grown consciousness-raising groups and fledgling significantly as a writer since her first lesbian-feminism, and who, in the way of novel, Tea, handles it gracefully and natu- many lesbian couples approaching rally. As time moves inexorably forward, menopause, were feeling the strain of their and a pill to cure Christopher is not Celebrating the Power long established coupledom. These things found, it also moves backward, as differ- made their visit compelling to me, as did ent characters revisit their past. of Women’s Words the fact that one of them was so gorgeous Haughty Nan had once watched her I couldn’t take my eyes off her. “delicate changeling who had welcomed I hoped that Nan, the competent little the new millennium... dressed up as some butch who had scarcely taken a breath bewinged, alien creature of his own WOMEN WITHOUT MEN: A Novel of Modern Iran since her son Christopher went off the design” evolve into “the fledgling new man Shahrnush Parsipur deep end, had been able to relax and find mothers wanted for their daughters and “Charming yet powerful . . . transcendent [and] ti some comfort. I wanted to put her in daughters wanted for themselves.” Now, touch with my mother’s friend, whose 40- anti-schizophrenia drugs have made Chris — Publishers Week ish son Heinrich’s schizophrenia, like gain weight, and she takes him to buy An evocative allegory of life in Chris’s, had its onset when he was about clothes in a horrible, expensive store called 16, and who until recently, when someone Husky Bill: “It’s as if an extra tax is being ary Iran, this novel follows the bought one of his strange, haunted paint- levied on fat people like the rapacious destinies of five women as they e ings, had led a marginal life marked by markups in ghetto supermarkets,” she narrow precincts of family and so hospital stays. The owner of Heinrich’s thinks. At Husky Bill, the peri-menopausal only to face daunting new challen painting spread the word, and after a Nan suddenly begins to menstruate. She while he had a lot of customers and then grabs an “ugly, expensive Husky Bill tie” Shortly after the novel’s 1989 pu his own show, with an opening where and stuffs it into her underwear, “where- Iran, Parsipur was jailed for her everything sold out, and he was treated as upon she immediately begins to bleed on defiant portrayal of women’s sexu an eccentric artist rather than a schizo- it, heavily.” She feels much better. So do I. phrenic. Heinrich is now a respected $14.95 paper member of Viennese art world, who nlike any other book I have read requires only minimal medication and has with a sick-child plot, A Seahorse even found a caretaking wife who nur- U Year uses a limited third-person tures his genius. Chris, too, is a talented narrator who moves easily from one artist, whose first breakdown is signaled character’s point of view to another’s by a painting that Nan is unable to focus without ever getting us confused about WORD. On Being a [Woman] Writer on because of “the three uneven spots of whose head we are in. We eavesdrop on Edited by Jocelyn Burrell blood” in the middle of it, but that the thoughts and feelings of all the main impresses her lover, Marina. A bona fide characters: Christopher; Nan; Marina; “These essays articulate the unique challenges tha artist, Marina finds the bloody painting Chris’s father, Hal; Chris’s girlfriend, “brutally sharp and decisive, simultane- Tamara; and, in a surprise, the evil Dr. psychologically, materially, racially—and remind us ously architectural and visionary... aston- Friend, who runs an expensive experi- the power of the written word.” ishing and frightening.” Chris’s next paint- mental madhouse where he gives Chris —Persis M. Karim ing, though heavy in its symbolism, is an untested drug, with dangerous results. In twenty-three essays that are equally strong: “[A] head with a flock of This technique reminds us that most peo- crows picking at it... feasting on the head’s ple, even Dr. Friend, are neither villains personal and fiercely political, open brain; one crow is flying away with a nor angels. While the multiple perspec- world’s most famous literary voic tendril of brain in its large beak.” tives expand the universe of the novel, what it means to be a woman writ “Wake up, Nan,” I’d e-mail her. the present tense holds it back. As Marina “Marina knows dealers and gallery own- feels, Tamara thinks, Hal wishes, and Contributors includeMeena Alexander ers all over the world. Get Chris’s paint- Chris imagines, we are gradually lulled ings out there!” Knowing Nan, she’d and rocked by monotonous sentences Margaret Atwood ¥ Sandra Cisneros summarily dismiss this offer from a instead being jolted by the stylistic leaps Ortiz Cofer ¥ Edwidge Danticat stranger, but after deleting the message, and unexpected language that another Djebar ¥ Liza Fiol-Matta ¥ bell she’d look up Heinrich on the Internet choice of tense might have allowed and Jordan ¥ Ritu Menon ¥ Joy Harjo and be in touch within days, mobilizing that these elegant characters deserve. the part of herself she calls the Hunter. I This flaw did not keep me from fre- Kingsolver ¥ Luisa Valenzuela ¥ Y picture her instead as a small, fierce moth- quently contemplating Nan’s partner. I ¥ Jeanette Winterson er lion, who uses her instinct and vigilant imagined an intimate encounter with cunning to save her weakened cub’s life. Marina—although, since her taste runs to $16.95 paper Like my mother’s friend and other parents voluptuous 23-year-old butches with of schizophrenics, she fears that Chris numerous piercings, I wouldn’t stand a Rediscover the Feminist Press at CUNY will never find a place in a society that chance. Nan, trying to make the best of AVAILABLE NOW at better bookstores or order direc denies dignity and respect to those who Marina’s roving nature and need for 212-817-7920 / www.feministpress.org are tuned to a different frequency. minor affairs, reasons that she’s “a sepa-

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 10-11 / July 2004 23 © Matt Carr a woman who would rather spend money on coffee than furniture.” The so-often messy arrangements between sperm- donating father and biological mother are People’s enemy? Feminist hero? perfectly smooth here, with Hal and Nan from the beginning “scrupulously honor- by Lori Tsang able with each other, fair about sharing time, fair about sharing work, about doc- Empress Orchid by Anchee Min. New York: Houghton tors’ appointments and school plays.” All this tasteful minimalism sets off Mifflin, 2004, 336 pp., $24.00 hardcover. Christopher’s downfall, perhaps even more than if he came from family where I people yell and scream at each other, gain weight, and eat junk food. In Doris einforcing the notion that truth from cultural difference based on class Lessing’s The Fifth Child, written during is stranger—and more entertain- rather than ethnicity—although the her late-1980s reactionary period, a child R ing—than fiction, Anchee Min’s tone of the book never devolves into rejected as an evil stranger by its literary, latest project is to rehabilitate the repu- Marxist rhetoric. Stacey D'Erasmo middle-class family fits easily into a vio- tation of the notorious Empress Having come of age during the lent and dangerous underclass. Dowager Tzu Hsi (1835-1908). Cultural Revolution in a remote labor D’Erasmo implies nothing of the kind. Regardless of the extent to which that camp and later as a budding propaganda have to keep moving, even if it’s just one The trouble Chris gets into has more to reputation deserves rehabilitation and film star, Min conceives a female protag- finger like this….It can get very tiring.” do with life and death than with matters the ratio of fiction to biography in Min’s onist who is strong without being vicious, Christopher’s sections are vivid on the of middle-class taste or values. novel, the documentable facts regarding sensitive without being weak. Her recon- side effects of the drugs that keep his ter- These characters’ pleasing but rare per- Tzu Hsi’s life and times certainly provide struction of Tzu Hsi as a capable and ror at bay but make “this hot world so fection may be D’Erasmo’s response to the basis for a great story; they have patriotic woman, a product of the social flat that he can’t believe he doesn’t fall the decisions she faced as a contemporary already inspired numerous fiction and and political environment of her times right off the edge, though everyone tells lesbian writer. When Hal, Nan, Marina, nonfiction works, a few movies, and yet neither a victim nor major perpetrator him that this is it, this is the world. He and I were coming of age, lesbians and Chinese Empress Barbie. of political intrigue, is consistent with isn’t sure what he believes.” gay men were not considered appropriate Tzu Hsi is generally regarded in some of the readily accessible English- subjects for “mainstream” audiences, and China as a corrupt and decadent enemy language sources. Empress Orchid is as his- hese characters are all elegant, serious novels from our own presses usu- of the people whose use of naval funds torically plausible as any of the other good-looking people who have ally concerned coming out or dealing with to build the Summer Palace’s marble interpretations, although readers familiar T left modest backgrounds in the an oppressive society. But recently, in boat led to China’s defeat by the British with Tzu Hsi may be less fascinated by Midwest to create thoroughly upper-mid- Brooklyn, where I live, both the gay and during the second Opium War, and in Min’s portrayal than those who are not. dle-class households of the kind that lesbian and the African-American sections the West as a backward xenophobe have no need for conspicuous consump- of the main public library branch disap- whose resistance to political reforms lso known as Hsiao Chin or Hsien tion. On her first meeting with Nan, peared. When I scan the new fiction sec- led to the downfall of the Ching Huang-huo, the woman who, Marina immediately notices the “patri- tion each week for books with these sorts Dynasty. She is the most infamous A upon the death of her husband, cian” cast of Nan’s features, and it’s easy of characters, I have to look hard to figure Chinese empress since the Tang Emperor Hsien Feng, was given the title to picture Marina herself as Tilda out what’s what. Even the cover blurbs Dynasty’s Wu Zetian (625-705), who Tzu Hsi, or “kind and virtuous,” was Swinton or some other slightly off-center don’t necessarily give away a book’s sexual supposedly killed her own child in a born into the Yehonala clan of Manchu beauty. When Marina first stays overnight preference, so to speak. There are advan- (successful) scheme to destroy a rival. Bannermen, descendants of the horse- at Nan’s, she understands that “Nan...was tages and disadvantages to this main- But Wu Zetian came to power during back warriors who conquered China and streaming, which applies more to emerg- the peak of the Tang Dynasty, a period founded the Ching dynasty in 1644. In ing writers than to novelists already of relative peace and prosperity with a Empress Orchid, she is called Orchid by known for their lesbian or gay centered pre-footbinding social/political climate her family and intimates. Although the books, whether they are political like Sara favorable to women. Tzu Hsi had the other (Manchu) concubines are referred Schulman or intensely personal like the misfortune to be born during the wan- to by the title “Lady,” followed by their sadly neglected Kate Millett. ing years of the Ching Dynasty, a peri- Chinese name, Orchid and the first con- D’Erasmo refuses to center her novel od plagued by internal corruption and cubine are known to the court by their on the unconventionality of the family, political unrest, harvest failures and Manchu family names. This first volume yet reminds us in constant small ways, as famine, and European economic and of Min’s projected trilogy covering Tzu life itself does, of her characters’ sexual military incursions. Hsi’s life is framed by two deaths: that of preference and their slightly uneasy fit Primary and secondary sources paint Orchid’s father, Hui Cheng Yehonala, even into a space as emblematically queer differing portraits of Tzu Hsi, ranging when she was 17; and of her 30-year-old as the San Francisco Bay Area. They are from impressions of a wise and compas- husband when she was 24. In the prel- more likely to join the local food coop sionate ruler to the more widely dis- ude, Tzu Hsi, a weary and defeated old than a lesbian and gay task force, to persed portrayals of a ruthless and cun- woman, speaks from her deathbed: “The attend meetings about trees than about ning personification of evil. Min pref- truth is that I have never been the mas- gay bashing. Still, they make routine awk- aces her novel with epigraphs from sev- termind of anything.... My life was ward phone calls to parents, talk about eral of these sources, including Edmund shaped by forces at work before I was the weather to avoid real life, and extend Backhouse’s elegantly Orientalist but born.... My world has been an exasperat- invitations for visits that both aged par- partially fabricated account of her as an ing place of ritual where the only privacy ent and middle-aged child know will avaricious sybarite (China Under the has been inside my head.” never be made. In one small, familiar Empress Dowager [1910]), and the repudi- The elaborate web of social hierar- incident a child who bumps into Nan is ation of Backhouse’s memoir by Sterling chies and political machinations in told, “Say ‘excuse me’ to the man.” When Seagrave (Dragon Lady: The Life and palaces of the Forbidden City shapes Nan turns around, she hears, “Oh. Oh. Legend of the Last Empress of China the character of the young woman who Sorry.” When Chris is 14 and still psy- [1992]), who posits her as merely a vic- would later become the de facto ruler of chologically intact, he makes sure he is tim of circumstance. China during the reign of three emper- “never seen in public with all three of Unlike Seagrave, Min had access to ors. Min traces Orchid’s transformation them at the same time, as if collectively both Chinese and English language from a girl determined to maintain some that added up to something more unpre- sources. Born and raised in China but control over her destiny to a young ventable than any of them did alone.” currently residing in the US, she eschews woman wavering in her commitment to Unlike Chris, I’d love to see all three the extremes of either cultural pornog- a life constricted by empty ritual and of them at the same time. What a pleas- raphy or communist propaganda in burdened by political intrigue. She ure it would be to curl up with Nan and interpreting her research. Although emerges from Min’s imagination as a Marina again. And I’m not dismissing referring to Tzu Hsi as “Orchid” may be perceptive observer of social and politi- this novel when I say that it’s a great book somewhat decontextualized, for the cal culture and an insightful judge of to take to the beach, whether that’s Fire most part, Min resists xenophilic or - human character possessed of a remark- Island or Provincetown or the local phobic commodification of race-based able degree of clarity, compassion, and swimming hole in Diehard, Idaho. A cultural difference. Her descriptions of self-awareness. While this could be a beach book is not necessarily trivial—it’s material opulence and ceremonial excess credible construction, neither the elder- absorbing and hard to put down yet refrain from exotic/eroticization within ly narrator nor the young Yehonala real- doesn’t demand too much of its reader. the context of an East/West polarity. ly comes to life. One problem is that the This is a perfect book to read on vaca- Instead, her depiction of courtly extrav- narrative voice lacks distinguishing fea- tion, but it’s much too good to keep to agance as strange and foreign, both fas- tures that would conjure in the mind of yourself—it should be passed on to a cinating and repulsive, is in the point of the reader a real, flesh-and-blood per- friend (of any gender or persuasion) to view of a young girl from an upper-class son: the old woman—perhaps still arro- gossip about afterwards. I Manchu family. Any “exoticism” arises gant and prideful, or maybe wiser and

24 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 10-11 / July 2004 regretful—recalling her younger self, a ently to do with words) and then, willful girl at various times amazed, as it breaks and tumbles in the intimidated, or frustrated by the pomp mind, it makes words to fit it. But and ceremony of imperial culture. Fascinating rhythm no doubt I shall think differently next year. (p. 280) ostly, the voice sounds as by Marie-Elise Wheatwind impersonal as that of an While I would argue that one can M omniscient third-person nar- The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the indeed find the rhythm of a piece and rator, and occasionally, as improbable as still “use the wrong words,” Le Guin that of a romance novel heroine: “My Reader, and the Imagination by Ursula K. Le Guin. finds Woolf’s statement profound. limbs became weak and I felt myself Beneath memory and experience, imagi- begin to swoon.” While the narrating Boston: Shambhala Books, 2004, 301 pp., $16.95 paper. nation and invention, Le Guin posits, are persona is not particularly engaging, rhythms to which words move. “And the however, she is extremely informative, I writer’s job is to go down deep enough to providing an abundance of detail about begin to feel that rhythm, to find it, move the dress, architecture, furnishings, food, rsula K. Le Guin’s recent collec- © Marian Wood Kolisch to it, be moved by it, and let it move customs, and rituals of court life. This tion, The Wave in the Mind, is pub- memory and imagination to find words.” impedes the narrative progress, but U lished, appropriately, by Le Guin points to a wave’s parallel image helps recreate the court’s decadent and Shambhala Publications. Although this (“a stone dropped into still water, and the excruciatingly stultifying atmosphere. publisher caters to a number of different circles go out from the center in silence, The characters are not always ren- genres of writing—ranging from meta- in perfect rhythm…”) but feels that dered convincingly, but are still con- physical to poetry and fiction to memoir Woolf’s image “is greater,” because the ceived as complex human beings. and nonfiction—whenever I pick up writer must “recognise the wave...way out Yehonala’s Buddhist ally/rival/friend, something from Shambhala, it’s because in the ocean of the mind, and follow it to Nuharoo, is more concerned with hav- I’m in a meditative frame of mind. I’m shore, where it can turn or be turned into ing a good reputation than actually looking for something akin to deep words, unload its story, throw out its being or doing good. Yehonala observes breathing: contemplative words to soothe imagery, pour out its secrets. And ebb that the interfering Nuharoo “consid- a busy brain. (I’m thinking in particular Ursula K. Le Guin back into the ocean of story.” Le Guin’s ered herself a champion of justice, but of Le Guin’s “New English Version” of idea of ebbing back is as profound as her kindness could do more harm than Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching: A Book About the that, you can’t use the wrong Woolf’s, for although Le Guin offers that good.” Other relationships among the Way and the Power of the Way [1997] which words. But on the other hand here “none of us is Virginia Woolf,” she imperial concubines similarly combine I often return to for its poetic, refreshing am I sitting after half the morning, hopes that all writers have had “at least a viciousness, vulnerability, and moments approach.) The Wave in the Mind, despite crammed with ideas, and visions, moment when they rode the wave, and all of genuine affection. its eye-catching and calming cover art of and so on, and can’t dislodge them, the words were right. As readers we have A large part of the novel reads like a ocean waves, provides more than balm for lack of the right rhythm. Now all ridden that wave, and known that joy.” feminist take on the Cinderella story (for for the brain. Le Guin’s opinions, per- this is very profound, what rhythm which there are Chinese sources going formances, and commentary are is, and goes far deeper than words. n her 70-plus years on this planet, back to about 850), with young Orchid arranged in this volume with an equal A sight, an emotion, creates this Ursula K. Le Guin has given her read- as the spunky heroine. With her willing- measure of whimsical humor, analytical wave in the mind, long before it I ers many worlds to explore—some of ness to defy social customs, she wins the candor, and intellectual depth; like the makes words to fit it; and in writ- them in galaxies and centuries we’ll only affections of a handsome emperor who Tao Te Ching, it’s a book one can return to ing (such is my present belief) one see in the mind’s eye. As an avid reader enjoys conversation and cuddling: “As I for its wellspring of images and ideas. has to recapture this, and set this herself, Le Guin uses The Wave in the Mind spoke, I expected him to become Of the 30 pieces in the volume, only a working (which has nothing appar- to explore the joys of literary relation- enraged.... But His Majesty did just the dozen have been published previously. opposite.... He seemed to be truly affect- Many of those were written for specific ed by my words.” Emperor Hsien Feng purposes, for example as prefaces to the sometimes sounds like the male porn works of Borges (“Things Not Actually “… for every woman who wants to be stars journalist Susan Faludi profiled in Present: On The Book of Fantasy and J. L. heard … Ferguson and Phillips have Stiffed (1999), overwhelmed by pressure Borges”) or Twain (“Reading Young, written the book speaking truth to to fulfill his job expectations: “‘You Reading Old: Mark Twain’s Diaries of power.”—Gloria Feldt, President, come in armies,’ he continued. ‘You Adam and Eve”). Other pieces were Planned Parenthood Federation don’t care how I feel. You come to fill up directed to specific audiences: to the my bedroom and rob me of my essence. readers of the feminist journal Frontiers “…will help you find your public You selfish, greedy, bloodsucking female (“On the Frontier”); for the more analyt- voice, one of the most valuable wolves!’” Orchid responds that she ical enthusiasts of literary criticism in treasures in life.” —U.S. desires pleasure and affection: “I would Paradoxa (“Fact/And/Or/Plus Fiction”); enjoy our business.... I have paid for this or as a piece of mathematical, historical, Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez moment dearly.... I am after nobody’s and unavoidably feminist research essence, but I am hungry for affection!” (“Award and Gender”), given as a talk “…highly readable and enjoyable While a desire for power, wealth, or and handout at the 1999 Seattle Bookfair. … can help all of us to become release from boredom may motivate While many of the previously published more influential.”—Dame Anita Orchid, Min uses this point in the narra- essays were “edited and fiddled with,” Roddick, founder of The Body tive to reinforce a notion of female sex- says Le Guin, some of her newer works Shop/Anita Roddick Books uality that is positive and proactive. were revised and expanded as well— Empress Orchid flips the script on sub- from notes, talks, workshops—or they What Women Seen and Heard will ject/object, predator/victim dichoto- were written as “a reader’s response to a do for you— mies, undermining the bipolarity of text,” or simply for the author’s “enter- — In exclusive one-on-one those paradigms by portraying Hsien tainment.” The book’s four sections, interviews draws on the successful and disastrous experiences of Feng as a sexual object while maintain- “Personal Matters,” “Readings,” dynamic, accomplished women leaders speaking to neutral, indif- ing a sympathetic view of Orchid. “Discussions and Opinions,” and “On The action picks up with the royal Writing,” are arranged more thematically ferent, skeptical, and hostile audiences family’s infamous flight to Jehol to than chronologically, their themes resur- — Breaks down the challenges of gaining credibility as the voice escape the barbarian (British, French, facing and overlapping. of authority and Russian) invasion of Peking and The book’s title is a line of Virginia — Promotes a paradigm shift from a more feminine, subjective Orchid’s rescue from being sealed into Woolf’s—a strand from a paragraph that style to a more strategic approach to influencing others her dead husband’s tomb by the man serves as the book’s epigraph. It sets the — Builds on women’s conversational styles, relational, and story- who will later become her political ally tone for the entire volume and provides based communications to capture audiences’ attention and rumored lover. The book includes a an answer to the question Le Guin is — Flags gender, race, cultural, and emotional issues in public speaking map of the Forbidden City, but would often asked: Where do you get ideas for — Prepares—with memorable sound bites—for meeting the media benefit from more visual aids like your stories? The epigraph is taken from and defusing difficult interview questions genealogical charts and timelines, as well a letter of Woolf’s, written to Vita as a more fully realized narrative voice. Sackville-West. Vita (as Le Guin refers to Women Seen and Heard: Lessons Learned from Successful Speakers Still, it lays a foundation for the upcom- her) has been “pontificating about finding By Lois Phillips, Ph.D., and Anita Perez Ferguson, M.A. ing installments covering periods that the right word, Flaubert’s mot juste.” What ISBN 0-9673300-5-X/ Luz Publications/ 6 x 9/ 256 pages/ $19.95PA/ are of greater historical importance and “Virginia wrote back, very Englishly,” is Business/Leadership; Communication; Self-help/Personal Growth perhaps less subject to romance-novel- worth quoting in its entirety: ization. Empress Orchid ends with a weird Luz Publications, Santa Barbara, CA 93109; Telephone: 805-962-8083; preoccupation with a seemingly mis- As for the mot juste, you are quite Email: [email protected] placed overcoat. Maybe its significance wrong. Style is a very simple mat- Go To: www.loisphillips.com/womenseenandheard.html will be revealed in the next volume. I ter: it is all rhythm. Once you get

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 10-11 / July 2004 25 ships and her understanding of words, ples. “Models like the Austen and the metaphors, and abstractions. Some of her Brontë were too complicated, and people ideas are not new: Writing about orality just laughed at the Suffragette, and the and literacy in “Telling Is Listening,” Le Woolf was way too far ahead of its time.” A novel by chance Guin revisits and expands a previous Because of her comic timing, the essay at essay, “Text, Silence, Performance,” pub- first reads like a standup routine, but by Edith M. Vásquez lished in her earlier nonfiction collection, quickly evolves into an embodiment of a Dancing at the Edge of the World; her poem “second rate” man’s puzzled exploration ¡Caramba! A Tale Told in Turns of the Card by Nina Marie “The Writer On, and At, Her Work,” of identity, sex, beauty, and aging, as well rounds out this volume, as it did in its pre- as Ernest Hemingway’s use of syntax and Martínez. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004, vious incarnation in Janet Sternburg’s The semicolons. The essay ends with the sug- Writer on Her Work II: New Essays in New gestion that inventing an old woman 384 pp., $25.95 hardcover. Territory (1991). Other pieces are brief, “might be worth trying.” personal glimpses of her childhood and As a wise and knowledgeable “old I contemplative life. In one especially mov- woman,” Le Guin is fearless. In “All ing essay (“Indian Uncles”) Le Guin Happy Families” she admits that she once n Lava Landing, the imaginary proselytizing devotee, Javier, who, as it relates what it was like growing up near was “too respectful to disagree with California town of Nina Marie turns out, may actually be her half-broth- the Berkeley campus, the daughter of Tolstoy,” but as a “sexagenarian cynic” I Martínez’ first novel, eruptions— er. Lucha embodies an unremitting Alfred L. Kroeber (who founded the she’s reached a point where she can “ask volcanic and otherwise—promise the female dominance and firebrand amorali- Berkeley anthropology department in rude questions” and admit her “dissatis- constant transformation of landscapes ty with violent implications—she carries a 1901) and Theodora Kroeber (who wrote faction” with the famous opening line of and individuals. Here, love is just another gun and possesses great amounts of pure Ishi in Two Worlds, and Ishi, Last of His Anna Karenina: “All happy families are appetite, one that does not obstruct sex- cocaine. Beyond her desire to bed Javier, Tribe). “Indian Uncles,” a memory alike; unhappy families are each unhappy ual pleasure, personal style, or women’s however, Lucha’s ultimate purpose is to “hedged with caution,” could open a in their own way.” In her essay “On friendships. In fact, Natalie and avenge the cruel rape of her younger book-length memoir. Le Guin, who gives Genetic Determinism,” she pits herself Consuelo, the two protagonists, “realized cousin Fabiola, committed years ago in a modest glimpse of herself, declares she against sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, at the early age of eight, a man is the last Mexico, when Fabiola was a girl. This is “much better at making things up than knowing “an amateur responding to a thing that ought to come between quest, which the cousins embark upon at remembering them.” professional is likely to make a fool of friends.” together, is As for “making things up,” the open- herself,” yet forging ahead. She is trou- Women’s fun suggested to ing line in Le Guin’s first essay, bled by his “sweeping statements” about and friendship them by the “Introducing Myself,” forthrightly states the biological foundations of human is of highest local curan- “I am a man.” Written as a performance behavior, arguing for her own opinions importance in dera, or piece, the essay must evoke laughs as she against his—since his opinions are likely the Mexican work- woman healer. She recom- delivers this line from a podium onstage. to be mistaken for scientific fact. And in ing-class world that mends it to cure Fabiola’s But it is not merely a metaphor about “A War Without End,” Le Guin shares Martínez renders. muteness, which she sees as gender or the exclusive use of the male some thoughts on oppression, revolution, Martínez works indicative of susto, an imbal- pronoun in writing. Le Guin explains that and imagination while resisting the label a special sort of ance resulting from deeply women “have been invented several times “Utopian” in reference to her “invented magic whose first entrenched fear caused by in widely varying localities,” then points societies.” Protesting that “Utopia is far order of business is to trauma. “As a woman and a out that the inventors simply didn’t know too grand and rigid a name for them,” Le liberate the novel from Mexican national, I how to “sell the product.” In her droll Guin claims to write not from the intel- fossilized requirements of advise you to go back to analysis of marketing and distribution lect but “from passion and playfulness.” literary structure such as México. In these cases, I techniques, of course she has ready exam- Yet there are essays in The Wave in the plot and character development. find the only thing that Mind that offer more passion than play- While the cards for Lotería, a pop- really works is venganza fulness and that clearly demonstrate Le ular Mexican game, visually intro- [revenge].” Guin’s “intellectual” reasoning. She cir- duce each chapter of the novel, If Lucha is a true man-hater, YES & NO — cles back to the theme of oppression in even they have little to do with the Lulabell, Javier’s 40-something recipe for a young “Unquestioned Assumptions,” grouchy events of the novel. Its characters mother, is the opposite. She regu- woman’s coming of age about how often she reads manuscripts are hastily drawn yet superbly larly hires male day laborers, con- A Novel by Linda Tatelbaum and books that include her—the read- attired: Hair cuts, new outfits, and verting them into willing sex workers er—in groups she doesn’t “want to whims create an ever-changing lit- at her disposal. On a map of belong to,” listing the top contenders: erary world. Yet the fun and México, she meticulously keeps “We’re all men…we’re all white…we’re games hold a deeper records of her lovers and all straight…we’re all Christian...and meaning and are not ulti- their states of origin. To we’re all young.” mately gratuitous. ¡Caramba! Lotería card illustration. show her gratitude, as well Le Guin takes Woolf’s ideas about celebrates the humanity From ¡Caramba! as working-class solidarity, style being “all rhythm” passionately to and grace of Mexican and Lulabell hosts an annual all- heart, playfully devoting more than one woman-centered conviviality. day extravaganza for their benefit. essay on this. “Stress-Rhythm in Poetry While the title promises a connection “Lulabell’s Twelfth Annual Dinner for and Prose” explains rhythm by breaking between the “tale” and “turns of the Ranch Hands and Day Laborers” is the sentences from the fairy tale “The Three card,” the comedic lack of any connec- grand occasion of the novel. But Lulabell Bears” into syllables alongside excerpts tion inverts expectations and conven- is not exempt from the life-changing from writers including Jane Austen, tions, resulting in a hilarious meltdown of clime of Lava Landing, and eventually she 256 pages • $14.95 • 0-9654428-2-9 (pbk.) Charles Darwin, Gertrude Stein, J. R. R. gender, culture, and tradition. Through decides to forsake her lifestyle to settle Tolkien, and Mark Twain. Following close Martínez’ authorial sleight of hand, use- into monogamy with Beto. In order to Open to Paris, 1969. Drop graduate student Naomi Weiss on the heels of this essay, “Rhythmic less customs vanish right and left. Even accomplish this, Lulabell provides Beto into a broth of medieval history and Pattern in The Lord of the Rings” engages characters’ names are comically abbrevi- with the necessary ingredients to place contemporary political turmoil. in a close reading of Tolkien’s use of rep- ated: Don Pancho, deceased father of her under a love spell—self-determina- Flavor with the twelfth-century love affair of Abélard and Héloïse. etition, an analysis that is both personal Consuelo and denizen of purgatory, tion through self-enchantment. Tie an 1137 manuscript into a bundle (Le Guin has read Tolkien’s trilogy aloud becomes simply “DP,” giving short shrift True-Dee is a transgender hairstylist with a failed librarian who begs to all three of her children) and expansive to Mexican customs of formality and and fashion connoisseur whose quandary Naomi to transcribe his treasure, and an eminent professor who traded (along with her attention to rhythm, beats, paternal hierarchy. In life a chronic wom- consists of convincing Juan, whom she Jews to the Nazis for valuable books. and images, she concludes with a brief anizer in his Mexican pueblo, DP now meets at Lulabell’s party, that she is for all Throw the bundle into the broth with review of the film). “Collectors, wanders a purgatory where ESL classes intents and purposes a woman whose a mysterious older woman who can’t remember her own story. Rhymesters, and Drummers” also pays are mandatory and English-only rules are male appendages falsely identify her with Sprinkle with two French feminists. homage to Woolf’s style in fiction, but strictly enforced. He is eventually freed the male gender. It is in Juan’s room, Simmer for one semester. here the focus on rhythm has less to do from purgatory through the actions of home to a whole group of laborers and ALSO BY LINDA TATELBAUM with syllables than with visual imagery Natalie, to become the patron saint of crowded with their mattresses, that True- and the music of prose. “To me a novel drunks and prostitutes. Dee’s body is revealed, in a love scene Carrying Water as a Way of Life: can be as beautiful as any symphony,” Le Natalie’s liberation of DP, like several that is one example of Martínez’ use of A Homesteader’s History Guin concludes. It can be “as complete, other male-female relationships in the bold sexual humor throughout the novel: 0-9654428-0-2 (pbk.) $9.95 true, real, large, complicated, confusing, novel, indicates Mexican women’s author- Writer on the Rocks— deep, troubling, soul enlarging as the sea ity over men. Lucha, a drug trafficker and They lay down on Juan’s mattress Moving the Impossible with its waves that break and tumble, its former prison inmate, lords it over Javier, and crawled under the blanket and 0-9654428-3-7 (pbk.) $12.95 tides that rise and ebb.” Le Guin’s The a born-again, celibate, Christian mariachi True-Dee allowed Juan to unbutton Linda Tatelbaum Wave in the Mind invites readers to remem- who falls helplessly in love with her. No her pink frilly blouse, to unhook ORDER FROM: ber the joys of the imagination and to ride longer in prison, where she enjoyed sexu- her matching lacy brassiere, and to ABOUT TIME PRESS ABOUT those waves, not just in the pages of al relations with other women, Lucha now uncover her pride and joy, her bos- TIME 207-785-4634 PRESS www.colby.edu/~ltatelb books but in art, music, dance, and the satisfies her sexual drive with an array of oms, her boobis, her chichis. She body’s breath, again and again. I men. Her obsessive goal is to seduce her had developed them herself, really

26 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 10-11 / July 2004 developed them. They were not The Bookshelf falsies. She had done with hor- The Bookshelf provides a sampling of books of interest by and about women that we’ve received in our office recently. For a more mones what some extensive listing, please visit our website, www.wellesley.edu/WomensReview. women can only do with silicone Inge Joseph Bleier and David E. Gumpert, northern coast of the Dominican Republic, more on instrumentalists than vocalists, the and payments. Inge: A Girl’s Journey through Nazi Europe. Brennan examines through personal interac- interviewers addressed everything from All the more Grand Rapids, MI: William B. tion the motivations of sex workers, their career development and influences to ques- proof that she Eerdmans, 2004, 277 pp., hardcover. In clients, and those connected to them. She tions of sexism and other social difficulties. was indeed a his introduction, Gumpert explains that his investigates why Dominican and Haitian Each interview is preceded by a short intro- woman trapped family is better at writing than other forms women move to this tourist spot to pursue duction to the artist and followed by a brief in the trappings of communication, and this work is the the work and how their perceptions of the discography. A compilation CD is included of a man’s body. result of their attempt to reach some clo- mainly European tourists influence their with the book. sure on the events of the Holocaust, which decisions. Supporting both themselves and Kim Gutschow, Being a Buddhist Nun: The (p. 222) continued to affect even later generations. other family members, these women often Struggle for Enlightenment in the Himalayas. Beginning with the 66-page manuscript by hope to turn the client-worker dynamic into Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Juan faints when his aunt Inge, Gumpert spent ten years a real relationship, with all the stability, and Press, 2004, 333 pp., hardcover. he discovers True- doing research to fill in the gaps left in the sometimes even the emotional attachment Gutschow lived for three years among a Dee’s penis; but narrative at the time of her death. He gath- that implies. The prologue follows a woman group of Buddhist nuns in the Indian True-Dee merely ered letters, pictures, and other information. who cares for herself and four other girls Himalayas, aiming to gather first-hand “shrugged her Inge’s manuscript is about her adolescence, (one of whom is her daughter), living in a information about their lives and to hear From ¡Caramba! shoulders, grabbed from her fear of capture to her romantic broken-down shack without any water sup- their stories. An ethnographer, she arrived her blonde bouf- attachments. She was sent off to live with ply and only one bed. She develops a mar- in the village of Karsha on foot with two fant, and made a wealthy relatives in Brussels in January 1939 riage-like relationship with a German man, years of training in classical Tibetan from beeline for her 1972 Chevy Malibu when the Nazi threat became unbearably and for a while things seem to be going Harvard and petitioned to be allowed to live Super Sport.” clear. After a few years of being sheltered smoothly. However, it becomes clear that among the nuns. This was her first intro- by the Swiss Red Cross, Inge was discov- her finances are still as shaky as ever, as this duction to the democratic decision-making artínez increasingly deploys ered and taken into custody. After an relationship has none of the security of a process of the nuns, as she had to await deus ex machina devices like unsuccessful attempt at escape in January real marriage. When her “husband” eventu- permission from the full assembly of nuns. M True-Dee’s car in the final 1943, she managed to flee in October of ally leaves her, she is back where she started, Having received that, Gutschow moved into chapters. She apparently has no room that same year, eventually immigrating to but with an additional child to feed. This the nunnery to live as an apprentice, per- for or interest in resolving characters the United States where she spent the book is part of a series on the political, cul- forming menial tasks. Between 1991 and and scenarios. Rather, the novel’s end- remainder of her life. The unpublished tural, and economic practices in Latin 2001 she spent a total of 39 months in memoirs of Irene Frank of Brussels America that aims to increase understanding Zangskar and Ladakh, including some par- ing consists of a variety of unforeseen (teacher to Inge and others in southern about the realities of life in Latin America. ticularly harsh winters. Slowly proving that decisions, disasters, and turns of fate. France), and Edith Goldapper Rosenthal Wayne Enstice and Janis Stockhouse, she wasn’t going to be a disruptive element, Natalie and Consuelo inherit the Big (friend) as well as other works and docu- Jazzwomen: Conversations with Twenty-oone Gutschow made friends among the nuns Cheese factory, where they had worked, ments were consulted for the final work. Musicians. Bloomington, IN: Indiana and the people of the village. She observed when owner Cal McDaniel dies sudden- Denise Brennan, What’s Love Got to Do With University Press, 2004, 368 pp., hardcov- the gender hierarchy not only in the secular ly, and they discover that he has named It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the er. Enstice and Stockhouse endeavor to world but among the religious orders as them as his beneficiaries. Realizing that Dominican Republic. Durham, NC: Duke remove the mantle of obscurity that the well. The monks directed the action and the Lucha is not at all ready to requite his University Press, 2004, 280 pp., paper. women of jazz have long labored under nuns lived to serve, although some resist- love, Javier finally frees himself from Traveling to the town of Sosúa on the and bring them into the spotlight. Focusing ance to this has cropped up recently. his obsessive attraction to her and decides to become a gold prospector. True-Dee’s hair salon is demolished by a group named The Sons and Daughters of San Narciso, a sect that The Gilda Stories: A Novel believes in a doomsday volcanic erup- tion. In the end, the entire cast of by Jewelle Gomez major characters leaves Lava Landing. Lucha and Fabiola go to Mexico to 1991 Lambda Literary Awards avenge Fabiola’s childhood rape; for Lesbian Fiction and for Lulabell and Beto decide to take a road Lesbian Science Fiction/Fantasy trip in his tow truck; Natalie and Consuelo ride off on an adventure; and Elegant, dark, sensual a major earthquake takes place. All in all, despite or perhaps because Still the only novel of its kind — of its facile (yet spirited) characters and 13th anniversary edition available now plot, ¡Caramba! uninhibitedly portrays the flimsiness of sex and gender norms. With “Much more than the autobiography 256 pages/ PA$12.95/ Fiction its Mexican vernacular feminism and car- of an extraordinary woman, this is the nivalesque gusto, ¡Caramba! creates humor story of a century of French history. www.firebrandbooks.com out of what Martínez convinces us are Sand’s Story of My Life is a delight to www.jewellegomez.com the all too serious matters of language, read.” –Germaine Brée authenticity, and folk wisdom. “Sand recounts her own saga with ¡Caramba! contains a remarkable great gusto and unflinching honesty, number of linguistic turns-of-phrase, and without any kind of self-pity. This proverbs, and colloquialisms that are splendid translation is a landmark derived from the Spanish language and achievement. It manages the feat of Mexican culture. Traditionally, these being both scrupulously faithful to the ~Write and save your child’s vivid portrait of a child’s days as lived, and carry conservative moral messages or original as well as highly readable.” stories – before you forget. parenting as it’s experienced. Nourish yourself as a parent while –Gita May Kelly DuMar, M.Ed., is a Harvard- restrictive gender values. But Martínez creating a gift your children will educated counselor and certified treasure for years to come.~ emphasizes individual interpretation, “A work which fully does Sand jus- psychodramatist who has been facilitating endowing them with new feminist and tice.” – Henri Peyre Before You Forget: Diary Door Workshops for almost 20 cultural import. The sheer number of The Wisdom of years. She is a Fellow in the American Writing Diaries for Society for Group Psychotherapy & what she calls “artifacts,” including Story of My Life: Psychodrama and a Member of the The Autobiography of George Sand Your Children - “Lotería cards, maps for the armchair By Kelly DuMar, National Association for Poetry Therapy. A Group Translation edited by traveler, handwritten letters, newspaper M.Ed. TO ORDER, Knock on www.diarydoor.com or clippings, and The Guide to the Rockola, Thelma Jurgrau go to Amazon.com 1168 pages; unabridged and with index Before You Forget listing every song on the jukebox,” shows you how to apply the wisdom of *Before You Forget at www.diardoor.com form an impressive display of personal journaling to parenting, inspiring *Subscribe to Kelly DuMar’s free, monthly $25.95 paper + $4.00 shipping you to record stories of their milestones, Diary Door Newsletter at diarydoor.com (Free Americana in two senses of the word. (NY residents add 7% sales tax) rites of passage, and the ingenious, poetic, shipping on Before You Forget for ISBN 0-7914-0581-8 and hilarious things your children say and subscribers!) In English, Americana is a genre of pop- Red Pail Press, Inc. do as they grow up. Author Kelly DuMar ular American culture. In Spanish, State University of New York Press ISBN 0970840101227 shows even a too-busy parent how to pages; 6 x 9; $14.95 PA Americana is a feminine noun that indi- c/o CUP Services, PO Box 6525, begin—amidst the daily activity of life with www.diarydoor.com cates American citizenship. In Ithaca, NY 14851 children at home—to record priceless and Martínez’ hands, these intertwining (607) 277-2211; Visa, MasterCard, mundane moments that together shape a concepts assert a new Latina feminist American Express cultural presence. I

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 10-11 / July 2004 27 Herta Nagl-Docekal, Feminist Philosophy. any relevant field. Successful teaching experi- funded residential fellowships each year Boulder, CO: Westview, 2004, 250 pp., ence required. Review of applications will designed to support scholars, scientists, paper. In a “post-feminist” world in which Classified begin August 25, 2004. Interviews will be artists, and writers of exceptional promise women are equal under law, Nagl-Docekal scheduled during Fall 2004. Scripps College and demonstrated accomplishment. Radcliffe details the still very much in existence gen- is one of 7 members of The Claremont Application Office, 34 Concord Avenue, der hierarchy that keeps women philoso- Book your classified ad at www.wellesley.edu/ WomensReview or e-mail [email protected] Colleges cluster, located 35 miles east of Los Cambridge, MA 02138; 617/496-1324; fel- phers out of higher pay brackets and politi- cal discourse. Drawing on her extensive Angeles. In a continuing effort to enrich its [email protected]; www.radcliffe.edu. knowledge of German, English, and French academic environment and provide equal WRITING COACH AND EDITOR. Get philosophy, she challenges the tendency of Music educational and employment opportunities, that article or book into print with help from philosophy in general to dismiss feminist Women’s Music. Laura Powers, Emmy- Scripps College actively encourages applica- author praised by Charlayne Hunter-Gault, ideas. She advocates developing a broad phi- nominated, “Legends of the Goddess”: tions from women and members of histori- Gloria Steinem, Maya Angelou. Dissertation, losophy that includes the work of feminists. www.laurapowers.com. Haunting, ethereal. cally underrepresented groups. A C.V., letter fiction, self-help, essay, book proposal—you Natalya Reinhold, ed., Woolf Across Cultures. of application along with the names and con- name it, I’ve edited it. www.JoanLester.com; New York: Pace University Press, 2004, tact information for 4 references, should be (510) 548-1224. 307 pp., paper. Inspired by the Virgina submitted to: Professor Susan Seizer, chair, Feminist editor. Ph.D. Prize-winning author. Woolf Across Cultures symposium in Job Opportunities Backstrand Chair Search Committee, Box Twenty years’ experience editing every imagi- Moscow that the editor attended in June 1056 Scripps College, 1030 Columbia nable kind of writing. References provided, 2003, this book gathers together articles SCRIPPS COLLEGE, Claremont, CA, discussing the cross-cultural importance of 91711. Professor of Gender and Women’s Avenue, Claremont, CA 91711. including many happy WRB readers. (510) the author’s work. Topics addressed range Studies (with initial appointment to the 524-7913; [email protected]. from the reception, success, and signifi- Backstrand Chair). Scripps College, a If you’re not afraid of joy, you might be cance of Woolf’s work within various cul- women’s liberal arts college with a strong Travel ready for Life Coaching. More information tures, to the new worlds opened up to a interdisciplinary tradition, invites applica- from: Karen Schneiderman, Ph.D. Women’s reader by the act of translation, to gender tions for a tenure-track senior scholar to be Europe too far? Come to Montreal! Studies; [email protected]. identity within a specific work. appointed at the rank of Full Professor for Lindsey’s B&B for Women, 4-star rating. Michèle K. Spike, Tuscan Countess: The Life and appointment beginning in the 2005-06 aca- Elegant, restored Victorian; walking distance Extraordinary Times of Matilda of Canossa. demic year to fill the newly endowed position to everything. www.lindseys.ca; (888) 655- New York: Vendome, 2004, 300 pp., 8655; [email protected]. paper. Written partly as a travelogue, and in Gender and Women’s Studies. This posi- tion also includes appointment to the Vacation home. Sea Ranch, Northern partly as a biography of a woman of some- The Women’s Review what mythical proportions, Spike crafts her Backstrand Chair for an initial ten-year peri- California. Weekly. Use 10 miles ocean book as a journey of discovery about a od with possibility of renewal—the tenure of bluff trails. Email: alexismontana2003 of Books @yahoo.com. woman and the place in which she lived. the position is independent from the Classified Rates: Matilda of Canossa (1046-1115) was the appointment to the chair. We are looking for Carol Christ, She Who Changes, Re-IImagining Countess of Tuscany and lover to Pope a proven scholar whose research and teach- the Divine in the World (Palgrave-MacMillan, $1.25 per word (1-3 insertions) Gregory VII. One of the most famous ing interests reflect an ongoing critical 2003), leads two programs in Greece: $1.15 per word (4-7 insertions) tales that is told of her is how she fought engagement with gender and feminist theory. Goddess Pilgrimage in Crete and Sacred $1.05 cents per word (8+ insertions) the armies of the German king, Henry IV, The successful candidate will demonstrate a Journey in Greece. Ariadne Institute, P.O. through this alliance and humbled him Box 303 Blue River, OR. 97413;(541) 822- I All classified ads must be prepaid. Phone completely. Matilda’s memoirs were put commitment to interrogating the intersec- numbers and e-mail addresses count as two into verse and entitled Vita Mathidis by a tions of gender with such categories as sexu- 3201; [email protected]; www. words, abbreviations as one word each. Benedictine monk; they are now to be ality, nationality, race, ethnicity, physical abili- goddessariadne.org. ty and/or class status. Our program values Sunny Greece! Small island house! found in the Vatican Library. The fron- I Copy must reach us by the 5th of the Weekly, monthly. On isolated terraced tispiece of the book shows her in full regal perspectives that honor both the historical month prior to an issue cover date (e.g., May splendor, between the monk delivering his mountain slope overlooking sea. Breathtaking origins of Women’s Studies and its more 5 for the June issue). work to her and a sword-bearing military recent expansions into Gender Studies, sunsets, moonsets. Dramatic hikes. Marvelous man. Her literary and military ambitions Feminist Studies and Queer Studies. peace. Moonrock: (740) 986-6945; email: I Advertising is accepted at the publisher’s seemed to coexist quite comfortably judg- Participation in the interdisciplinary pro- [email protected]. discretion. Services and products have not ing by the artwork in the countess’s honor, grams of the College is desirable. The posi- been tested; listings do not imply endorse- especially the many stone carvings that can tion includes a five-course annual teaching ment by The Women’s Review of Books. be found throughout Italy. In accordance load and participation in the Scripps Gender with one of her final wishes, the monks of Miscellaneous For more information or to place your ad, San Benedetto Po in Mantua distributed and Women’s Studies program and the call Anita at 781-283-2560 food to the poor on the first Monday of Intercollegiate Women’s Studies program of Fellowships available. The Radcliffe or email [email protected]. every month for 500 years. The Claremont Colleges. Ph.D. or appropri- Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard —Bethany Towne ate terminal degree required, and may be in University awards approximately 30 fully

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