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The Equivalents, by Maggie Doherty

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Subtitled A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s, Doherty’s fascinating new book tells of a “messy experiment” at Radcliffe College. President Mary Ingraham Bunting became concerned with what happened to the graduates of this all-women college. Since at that time women were expected to marry and spend their time caring for their husbands and family, these educated women were expected to give up their academic or creative pursuits, or reduce them to hobbies, in order to become what Virginia Woolf called “the angel in the house.”

Remembering her own career as a microbiologist–and now college president–while raising a family, Bunting created the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study in 1960. Fellowships provided a stipend, office space, and a like-minded community to help women advance their careers as scholars and artists while also caring for a family. For a two-year period, the Institute would provide a fellow the prerequisites for creative work, as described by Woolf in her famous essay “A Room of One’s Own.”

Doherty concentrates on a few of the first fellows: poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, writer Tillie Olsen, sculptor Marianna Pineda and painter Barbara Swan. They called themselves The Equivalents per the Institute’s requirement “that applicants have either a doctorate or ‘the equivalent’ in creative achievement.” Her extensive research underlies this engaging story of five very different women and their creative journeys. And the book is so much more: a cultural history of the time, an in-depth look at creativity—what enhances it and what destroys it—and an examination of privilege.

I confess that it is the latter that most interests me because, after all, even in the 1950s and 1960s, while White women in droves were immersing themselves in being housewives, Black and working class women were already working while trying to raise a family. I appreciate that in covering the nascent second wave of feminism, Doherty includes the Black women’s movement. While acknowledging it isn’t “her” experience, she does examine the very real problems Black women had with what became the  mostly middle- and upper-class White women’s movement.

Tillie Olsen’s story provides a needed corrective to Sexton’s upper-class privilege and that of the others’ somewhat lesser privilege. Olsen was “a first-generation, working-class American, an itinerant, and an agitator” who said outright that “the true struggle was the class struggle.” After early publication and literary acclaim, she had been side-tracked by the overwhelming labor of house, family, and dead-end job. Eventually the author of the best-seller Silences, she was alert to all the things that keep us from creating.

The way Doherty sensitively examines these women’s different struggles and achievements lifts this narrative above the ghoulish interest in Sexton’s suicide attempts and the tendency to concentrate on those artists who have been anointed as important—almost exclusively White males at the time, or the handful of women championed by them—to look at a broad range of circumstances and personalities.

She acknowledges the privilege but goes deeper. As Olsen said, “There’s nothing wrong with privilege except that not everybody has it.” This is as true today as it was in the 1960s. Fellowships, grants, prizes are wonderful but not everyone has the resources—time and money—to pursue and take advantage of them. As a single parent working two and sometimes three jobs to support my family, my own writing career had to be mostly put on hold for years.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the creative life and what can inspire or hinder it. It’s also a wonderful portrait of that era and of these remarkable women.

Do you have a room of your own?

Erasure, by Percival Everett

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Several friends have recommended the film American Fiction, and of course I wanted to read the novel first. Thelonious Ellison, nicknamed Monk in reference to the great jazz musician and composer, teaches at a California college and writes dense, experimental novels that attract almost no readers and the criticism that they do not reflect the African American experience. My immediate thought was: okay, we’re in fantasyland. In real life, such a writer would not be able to have a second novel printed, much less—I think it’s four—and retain a devoted literary agent.

As his latest novel racks up rejections from publishers, Monk is incensed that debut novel We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, written by a middle-class black woman who once visited “some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days,” is a huge bestseller and will be a movie. It embodies all the worst racial stereotypes, but is being hailed as a genuine and brilliant representation of the African American experience, a criticism frequently aimed at Monk’s work. Apparently it’s a takeoff on the real 1996 novel Push by a person using the pseudonym Sapphire.

Monk is infuriated not only by the praise and commercial success of this exploitative novel but also by the publishing industry and book-buying public’s obliteration of the experience of the many African Americans like himself. So he writes his own parody of these stereotypes and sends it to his agent using the obvious pseudonym of Stag R. Lee. He assumes everyone will recognise it for the satire that it is, and is shocked when it sells for a six-figure advance and a seven-figure movie deal.

Meanwhile, he is wrestling with family issues. His mother and sister in Washington, D.C. need his help, while his brother is suffering the personal and professional fallout of having come out as gay. Presenting a paper at a conference in D.C. gives him the opportunity to see his mother and sister, but also entails encounters with bitter literary rivals of his own.

A big chunk of the book is a complete version of his surprisingly successful novel, which I found painful to read. Well, I didn’t read more than the beginning and the end. I began to think that Everett’s real purpose with this novel was to laugh at all the snobby readers who agreed with Monk’s anger at the praise of anything reinforcing these heinous racial stereotypes, and then devoured and praised an example of the same.

Oh, and look! Commercial success for Everett’s book and now a movie deal. Very meta.

Everett also inserts the complete paper Monk presents at the conference, a send-up of semiotics. A little of each was enough. Satire that goes on too long becomes boring. On the other hand, I thought the frame story of the family was well done, especially the mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s. I began to think that this would have been better as a good novella or even a short story.

A little more thought led me to the realisation that—trying not to give away too much here—Monk in the frame story is actually doing the same things his protagonist in the parody does and experiencing the same frustrations; only the details are different. More meta; interesting, but not enough to sell me on including all the dreck.

Another thing I liked about the frame story was the representation of a writer’s mind. Every now and then Monk would get a story idea and create a short scene for it, or a thought would prompt him to create a short dialogue between two historical figures, philosophers, artists, etc. Plopped right into the story, these were brilliant. Been there, for sure.

There were a few more fantasyland moments, undercutting the supposed realism of the frame story. Overall, though, I found a lot of the book hilarious, boring at times, infuriating at others. A good workout!

Have you seen American Fiction or read the novel on which it’s based? What did you think of them?

Go, Went, Gone, by Jenny Erpenbeck

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Like Antonia in Alvarez’s Afterlife, Richard, a widower, has just retired from his career as a college professor in what was formerly East Berlin.

Perhaps many more years still lie before him, or perhaps only a few. In any case, from now on Richard will no longer have to get up early to appear at the Institute. As of today, he has time—plain and simple . . . his head still works just the same as before. What’s he going to do with the thoughts still thinking away inside his head?

Such transitional moments in our lives roll grief and possibility, loneliness and freedom into a turbulent mess. The first thing in Richard’s mind, however, is the calm lake on whose shore he lives, and the man who recently drowned there, his body never found. All summer everyone has avoided the lake: swimmers, fishermen, boaters. Nobody talks about it; they just stay away. It stays calm.

On a chance trip to Alexanderplatz, he doesn’t notice the African refugees staging a hunger strike there until he sees them on the news later. He didn’t notice them because he was thinking of the Polish town Rzeszów, which had a system of tunnels, essentially a second city underground, originally built in the Middle Ages where Jews took refuge when the Nazis invaded.

Moved by the refugees’ refusal to speak or give their names, the academic in Richard stirs to life: Here is a project! He decides to learn who these men are by interviewing them. Through Richard we hear their voices, their stories, and learn about what it is to be a refugee.

I loved Erpenbeck’s Visitation and looked forward to this novel. The beginning is brilliant. Her imagery and profound insight moved me deeply and had me marking page after page. However, the story slows as Richard starts tangling with bureaucracy and coaxing the refugees to talk to him. It’s a difficult tightrope for a writer: to reflect the tedium of the situation without boring the reader.

The story picks up again as we get to know the refugees individually, and as Germany’s bureaucracy begins to close in on them, narrowing their chances of being granted residence and thereby a work permit. As a lawyer whom Richard consults says, “The more highly developed a society is, the more its written laws come to replace common sense.”

Most members of my book club agreed that, while this was a challenging read, partly because of the pacing in the middle and partly because of the subject matter, it was also an important book to read. We all learned a lot, even those who already worked in refugee services. Those who read through to the end found it a worthy cap to the story, and were moved by the generous responses of the friends with whom Richard shared his stories of the refugees.

We talked about the symbolism of the drowned man. Like the Polish city, there are hidden things here as well as things we turn our eyes away from. When do you become visible? What do you have to do?

When you do become visible, as when Richard listens to the men and shares their stories with his friends, things do change—minds change.

I also found much here about communication woven into the story. Some have to do with the refugees’ struggle to learn German and Richard’s to learn some of their languages. Some have to do with how words are like borders: mutable signs, or written in sand, the way the boy from Niger learned his own language, lost when the wind blows.

The Italian laws have different borders in mind than the German laws do. What interests him is that as long as a border of the sort he’s been familiar with for most of his life runs along a particular stretch of land and is permeable in either direction after border control procedures, the intentions of the two  countries can be perceived by the use of barbed wire, the configuration of fortified barriers, and things of that sort. But the moment these borders are defined only by laws, ambiguity takes over, with each country responding , as it were, to questions its neighbor hasn’t asked . . .  Indeed, the law has made a shift from physical reality to the realm of language.

The border between life and death is here too: the chances that determine which side we will land on, the ghosts that cross over. Richard is sometimes nostalgic for the lost world of his childhood in East Berlin, before the wall came down. As one member of my book club noted, perhaps that early grounding in communal living makes Richard more open to caring about the fate of these others. Indeed, the novel calls out the weakness of capitalism: its callous disregard of the common good.

As Mary Oliver asked: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” Here is one man’s answer.

What novel have you read that illuminates one of the great political issues of our time?

Dark Bird, by Sam Schmidt

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Sometimes you start a book, and you cannot stop until you have turned the last page.

That is what happened to me reading Schmidt’s new collection of poetry. In fact, it begs to be read as a whole. It begins so innocently, with a tree—“An ordinary tree”—a tree in winter, in a graveyard across from the author’s home. A tree with a crow in it.

Of course I thought of Haworth. The first time I visited the home of the Brontë sisters, a bleak day in the dregs of winter, I was shocked to find that their front yard was actually a cemetery. The Brontë parsonage lay right up against the graveyard and, beyond it, the grey stone church, and everywhere the crows, hoarsely screaming and rising in the air at my intrusion.

These poems stand up to the comparison, even to the echoes of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Eleanor Farjeon, and others. The reader is pulled in, made complicit in this openness to the world as we move through the year from winter to winter. One poem begins:

A tree revolves among faces.
When I open my eyes, it’s back as it
was. It was never a god in disguise.
It won’t reveal
a passage through. An exit
out. It’s not a young
woman—or an old one—
transformed.

Everything I look for in poetry is here: language that sings, lines concise and perfect as a snowflake, themes that speak to the universal heart of human existence, and surprising images that range from fairytales to news stories. Some of the images recur, spiraling into new meaning each time they appear.

I love that these poems circle around a graveyard. Anywhere we walk is a graveyard, isn’t it? Layers of rock and older civilisations, beings that came before us. They represent the geology of time, personal time and the earth’s time.

In my review of Schmidt’s previous collection, Suburban Myths, I praised the depth of emotion and experience in his work. Here he achieves that depth partly by the brilliance of his writing and partly by the force of his themes. Even more striking is how vulnerable the author allows himself to be and, therefore, how intensely powerful each poem is. Wrestling with demons from childhood, coming to terms with a father’s criticism and your own child’s independence, navigating a decades-old marriage—the more personal the poems are, the more they open us to ourselves.

He balances between silence and speech.
Between hope that he
might talk his way
into friendship with the sky. And
despair that he’s asking too much.

These songs invite us to walk through this world bookended by graveyard and family home. We enter, not a wood, but a single tree. We bang on the doors that are shut and unearth what is buried within us.

What poetry collection have you read that you kept reading and rereading?
 
 

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a copy of this book free from the author. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

A Study in Scarlet Women, by Sherry Thomas

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There have been so many takeoffs on the Sherlock Holmes stories that I was wary of one more. However, this series puts a new twist on them by giving the detective’s character—sharp, analytical, unemotional—to a woman.

With such characteristics, Charlotte Holmes does not fit Victorian England’s definition of a proper upper class woman. Her parents are eager to marry her off, which is the last thing she wants. She comes up with a plan to craft a life where she can exercise her remarkable mind without the constraints society puts on women.

However, when that falls through, her backup plan leaves her disowned by her family and a social outcast, until a chance meeting with the remarkable Mrs. Watson opens another possibility. As her family’s social world is rocked by three unlikely deaths, and her father and sister become suspects, it becomes up to Charlotte to find a way to clear them and find the real murderer.

I delighted in the skillful way Thomas has worked in elements of the original canon while staying true to the time period. A woman cannot be a detective, forcing Charlotte and Mrs. Watson to craft a truly inventive workaround. Plus, the characters spring to life—each one unlike what you’d expect, full of flaws and fun and surprising gifts. The mystery itself is engrossing as well.

Usually I avoid novels that use real people or other author’s characters. The former feels invasive and the latter lazy. However, I’m glad I made an exception here. These stories are truly original and a lot of fun. I’ve now read seven in the series and look forward to reading the others.

While I enjoy all the characters and plots, Charlotte herself is what keeps me reading these books. She is a most unusual woman, as you would expect from someone with Sherlock’s personality and gifts. She stands out even more in this time period—the first book takes place in 1886—when women’s roles were much more constrained than now. I enjoy seeing how she handles ever more difficult situations.

If you’re looking for a new mystery series to entertain you while the cold weather keeps you inside, give this book a try.

What mystery series are you enjoying these days?

Purgatory Road, by Charles Coe

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One autumn day when I lived in Massachusetts, we took the children to Purgatory Chasm, a park in Sutton with a playground, nature trails, and the chasm itself. Only some of the adults and older children attempted the difficult path between looming rock walls. There were strange and unworldly formations: deep clefts, overhanging boulders. I found it unsettling.

I remember that feeling whenever I drive past the exit for the chasm, and again when I heard Charles Coe read from his new collection of poems. In the title poem he explores his early understanding of purgatory, summoning with characteristic vibrancy “the dust-covered relics” of his Catholic schooling. As in the best meditative essay, we engage with him as he sorts through these memories and carries them forward into a new understanding of what it means to be us, today, in this damaged world.

Coe’s superpower in these poems is his generous heart. Small things that strike his attention, such as a truck that won’t start in a grocery store parking lot or a woman talking to herself on a traffic island, lead us to understand what it is like to inhabit someone else’s life. Channeling Forster’s call to “only connect,” Coe’s poems from 2020’s lockdown trace what we’ve lost and our attempts to communicate across the void.

In other poems, he invites us to recognise how it feels to be a person of color is our society. He writes feelingly of his father being belittled by a young white drugstore clerk in the 1960s, and what he understands now of the difficult terrain his father had to traverse.

He writes too of his own experiences. He shares with us the everyday things that, unlike the great glacial gush that created Purgatory Chasm, wear away at one. It might be a stink eye from a doorman or an uncurtained window at night. The six-line poem “Things White People Have Said to Me” begins:

You’re so well-spoken.
You don’t seem like you were raised in a ghetto.

In “Blocked” he writes about an encounter in the parking lot. The tone of this poem, as in others, is one I struggle to achieve. Because it is calm, aware, restrained, we reading it are free to feel our own outrage, our own concern about possible consequences, and our own recognition that we are all imperfect beings.

Coe’s sense of humor inflects many of these poems, sometimes wry and subtle, sometimes flat out hilarious, as in “Butt Dialing Jesus” which begins:

There was a time when voices emanating from my pants
would have caused concerns. But now I simply shrugged
and pulled out my phone . . .

It is a joy and a comfort for me to read such poems. Their effect on me is similar to that of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, which reminded me of the goodness in this world and its people. While Coe notes the rocks that litter our path and the walls that rise around us, his generous warmth and humor become welcome companions on this journey.

What poems have you read that were both a comfort and a joy?

Unvarnished Life, by Yenna Yi

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After a full day at the Brattleboro Literary Festival, immersed in poetry from many different voices, I turned to my friend Yenna Yi’s recently published book, one of three poetry collections. Her poems draw on her background as a psychotherapist to celebrate life’s joys and cope with its blows.

She’s also the author of Ring of Fire, a memoir of 14 years living on a catamaran with her husband and two sons sailing the globe. One of the poems in this book recalls that time. “The Stormy Sky” begins:

I remember the days in 1985 . . .
Waking up dancing on the liquid fire
Of gale force wind in the Tasman Sea,
The home of wind—wet, wild,
Lost in the valley of waves,

We held onto the halyards
Of the jittering canvases . . .

In another poem, “In the Stealth of Darkness” she tells us: “I’m haunted and besieged / By life’s gifts and punishments.” Yet she finds solace in poetry, the words “forging their way/ Into my heart like a river / Through stone.”

In other poems she examines the uses of memory and the restorative powers of nature. She explains the title in her author’s note, which says in part:

. . . I call my early childhood unvarnished—roughhewn between [the] aftermath of WWII, Korean War, poverty, family separation and loss . . .

However, I find beauty in unvarnished life—turning a shed into a home, making a dress out of rag and drift wood into art . . .

With these poems she delves into the experiences of a lifetime, finding that “A blemished bowl wants to be mended, / A healed scar adds another layer of skin.”

What poems are you turning to as the days draw in and the nights linger?

Haven, by Emma Donoghue

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My horror at the devastation wrought by evangelical “Christians” (who eschew the basic tenets of Christianity) in the U.S. made this novel tough going for me. I couldn’t get past my outrage that anyone would submit themselves to torture and starvation in the name of religion when salvation—an earthly one to be sure—was so easily available.

Donoghue, author of Room, has constructed another story where people are confined in a tiny location, dependent on the whims of an all-powerful tyrant. In 600 A.D. Cluain Mhic Nóis, an Irish monastery, hosts a visiting holy man, perhaps the holiest man on earth: Artt, legendary for having read every book in existence and surviving the plague with the loss only of a finger.

While there, Artt has a dream—surely a holy vision!—that he should found a new monastery on a remote island off the Irish coast, far from the earthly temptations that have, in his view, corrupted Cluain Mhic Nóis. The dream/vision/mandate from God further commands that he take two of the monks: Cormac, an older man who came late to religion and is fond of telling stories, and young, impressionable Trian, who was given to the monastery at 13.

They fetch up on a stony isle that it is hard to imagine anyone could survive a week on, though the author’s note assures us that it is indeed the site of a medieval monastery. The fascination for me was in the various ways they—mostly Cormac to be honest—find to survive in this hostile environment. Trian, too, captures the heart with their sweetness and love for everything—birds, fellows, mussels, God. Artt is just, in my opinion, a self-righteous, narcissistic blowhard, convinced that he alone is the conduit of God’s word.

Well, obviously I’m the wrong audience for this book. I could hardly bear continuing to read of their hardships, knowing that civilisation—with, sure, its evils, but also actual sustenance and shelter—is only a short boat ride away. The writing is gorgeous but the story infuriating.

I have my moments of thinking like Artt that the world is incurably decadent, and wanting to preserve some small piece of what life could really be like. But this is not the way. And I’m far too practical to take my minions, even if I could bear to have minions, away from necessities like food, water and shelter to create religious monuments. Nor could I ever sacrifice others to my vision of my own greatness.

So, while I admire the prose, the story left me cold. No, not cold, but a turbulent mix of emotions: frustration, anger, sadness, a hint of longing. The book challenged me to think outside my own box, a challenge I guess I failed. Stil, I’m left thinking of John Lennon’s Imagine: no religions, nothing to die for.

Have you read a novel that challenged you?

Lilacs Still Bloom in Ashburnham, by Fred Gerhard

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A new chapbook from my friend Fred Gerhard is subtitled Songs of Spring. Like that season, the poems in this tiny book carry sweetness and renewal.

Some of the poems are about everyday happenings, like children gathering dandelions, infused with a whisper of philosophy. Others are tributes to poets, their ideas and voices carried forward into today.

In some poems, striking imagery or unusual word choice captures the reader’s attention. Here’s the first stanza of “Moss.”

I once loved a woman who loved moss, knew moss,
and why the softest moss lay between the
rain-worn stones of indecipherable lives—

The natural world fuels these poems with its grandeur and generosity, its small gifts and minor delights. The beneficent effect of paying attention to the world around us provides a melody for the collection, as in the title poem where the narrator says: “I blossom / breaking my green walls.”

At a time when every bit of news arouses a mix of fury, despair and determination, these poems are a salve to the spirit.

What books or poems do you turn to when you despair at the state of the world?