Related News
Discovering feminine mystique and sharing a legacy of echoes
By Leah Hager Cohen |
June 21, 2009, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
NEARLY everything about Kate Walbert's new novel is wickedly smart, starting with the title: "A Short History of Women." Does it connote modesty or grandeur? "Short" sounds modest. "History" sounds grand -- grandiose, in fact, when affixed to a work of fiction.
But "Women" clinches it: modest, then. After all, what more trifling subject could one elect to research? Such, at any rate, is the prevailing view in the world inhabited by Walbert's characters -- all five generations of them.
One of the book's accomplishments is that it persuades us that this sentiment holds no less currency in 21st century America than it did in late Victorian England. But Walbert's primary concerns, unlike those of some of her characters, aren't political.
Her writing wears both its intelligence and its ideology lightly. No manifesto, this is a gorgeously wrought and ultimately wrenching work of art.
Like her last novel, "Our Kind," "A Short History of Women" consists of linked stories: in this case, 15 lean, concentrated chapters that hopscotch through time and alternate among the lives of Dorothy Trevor Townsend, a British suffragist, and a handful of her descendants.
Several of the stories have been previously published; most could stand alone. Yet together they coalesce into more than the sum of their parts.
It is Walbert's conceit that while the oldest and youngest generations never meet, they share a legacy of echoes: objects and phrases that repeat mysteriously, and with increasing significance, across the decades.
This spare novel manages, improbably, to live up to its title: it delivers a reasonably representative history of women.
What is that history? What are its implications? And why should we care about them?
Consider Virginia Woolf's dictum: "This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room."
If you think this belief is dated, think again. Just two months ago, Joyce Carol Oates told The New York Times Magazine why violence is so often the subject of her fiction.
"If you're going to spend the next year of your life writing, you would probably rather write 'Moby Dick' than a little household mystery."
But "Women" clinches it: modest, then. After all, what more trifling subject could one elect to research? Such, at any rate, is the prevailing view in the world inhabited by Walbert's characters -- all five generations of them.
One of the book's accomplishments is that it persuades us that this sentiment holds no less currency in 21st century America than it did in late Victorian England. But Walbert's primary concerns, unlike those of some of her characters, aren't political.
Her writing wears both its intelligence and its ideology lightly. No manifesto, this is a gorgeously wrought and ultimately wrenching work of art.
Like her last novel, "Our Kind," "A Short History of Women" consists of linked stories: in this case, 15 lean, concentrated chapters that hopscotch through time and alternate among the lives of Dorothy Trevor Townsend, a British suffragist, and a handful of her descendants.
Several of the stories have been previously published; most could stand alone. Yet together they coalesce into more than the sum of their parts.
It is Walbert's conceit that while the oldest and youngest generations never meet, they share a legacy of echoes: objects and phrases that repeat mysteriously, and with increasing significance, across the decades.
This spare novel manages, improbably, to live up to its title: it delivers a reasonably representative history of women.
What is that history? What are its implications? And why should we care about them?
Consider Virginia Woolf's dictum: "This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room."
If you think this belief is dated, think again. Just two months ago, Joyce Carol Oates told The New York Times Magazine why violence is so often the subject of her fiction.
"If you're going to spend the next year of your life writing, you would probably rather write 'Moby Dick' than a little household mystery."
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
