A liberating read
By Danzy Senna |
July 3, 2011, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
IN the opening chapter of Carolyn Cooke's "Daughters of the Revolution," two young men go kayaking off the coast south of Boston. It is 1963 and both men are graduates of the Goode School, a redoubt of WASP privilege. One of them, Archer, comes from money and the other, Heck, comes from moderate means and continues to struggle. Heck packs sandwiches for them both in hopes that Archer won't suggest they eat at a restaurant; when the weather turns bad, he notices that Archer has helped himself to the only life jacket in the boat. Issues of entitlement become a matter of life and death.
The book that spills forth from this dramatic scene suggests that, as Robert Penn Warren once wrote, "you live through … that little piece of time that is yours, but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that are simultaneous with yours. It is, in other words, History, and what you are is an expression of History."
In her first book, "The Bostons," a well-received collection of interlinked stories, Cooke explored New England characters struggling within the confines of class. "Daughters of the Revolution" covers similar territory - adding gender, in particular the second-wave feminist movement - but, though presented as a novel, seems caught between forms.
Cooke's characters are a diverse lot: an aging white headmaster named Goddard (or "God," in case we missed the symbolism), who is intent on keeping girls out of the Goode School; a self-possessed black girl named Carole, who is accidentally admitted; Heck's young widow, who becomes God's typist and lover; and her daughter, EV. Through their interactions, Cooke shows how social transformation can be less a forward march than a messy, halting dance, with sometimes awkward partners.
Unfortunately, the characters often feel like overdetermined types. Even when Cooke explores God's point of view, he remains a straw man, his every observation seemingly calculated to reveal how sexist men of his sort were. Carole remains more a politically correct wish fulfillment than a flesh-and-blood character: always ready with a zippy comeback or some wise self-analysis, and oddly undaunted by her position as the first black girl at the Goode School.
By contrast, when Cooke turns to EV's point of view, the issue-driven flavor of the prose falls away, and the writing shimmers with intimate and revealing detail. The uncertain atmosphere of her childhood is summed up by a single vivid memory: "Before we went to bed, we stood empty bourbon and milk bottles in front of the door, then waited in the night to hear glass break." Later, when EV (now a young woman living in New York) buys a pair of expensive red heels, she keeps them on the table, like a still life.
Unlike Carole, the supergirl she befriends, EV may not be perfectly empowered, but she does pose some good questions. Watching her mother wax her eyebrows, she asks, "Doesn't it hurt?" Her mother's oddly cheerful response: "Like hell." Through EV, we come to understand the paradox at the heart of Cooke's story: a wave of half-liberated women entering the world before it was entirely ready to embrace them.
The book that spills forth from this dramatic scene suggests that, as Robert Penn Warren once wrote, "you live through … that little piece of time that is yours, but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that are simultaneous with yours. It is, in other words, History, and what you are is an expression of History."
In her first book, "The Bostons," a well-received collection of interlinked stories, Cooke explored New England characters struggling within the confines of class. "Daughters of the Revolution" covers similar territory - adding gender, in particular the second-wave feminist movement - but, though presented as a novel, seems caught between forms.
Cooke's characters are a diverse lot: an aging white headmaster named Goddard (or "God," in case we missed the symbolism), who is intent on keeping girls out of the Goode School; a self-possessed black girl named Carole, who is accidentally admitted; Heck's young widow, who becomes God's typist and lover; and her daughter, EV. Through their interactions, Cooke shows how social transformation can be less a forward march than a messy, halting dance, with sometimes awkward partners.
Unfortunately, the characters often feel like overdetermined types. Even when Cooke explores God's point of view, he remains a straw man, his every observation seemingly calculated to reveal how sexist men of his sort were. Carole remains more a politically correct wish fulfillment than a flesh-and-blood character: always ready with a zippy comeback or some wise self-analysis, and oddly undaunted by her position as the first black girl at the Goode School.
By contrast, when Cooke turns to EV's point of view, the issue-driven flavor of the prose falls away, and the writing shimmers with intimate and revealing detail. The uncertain atmosphere of her childhood is summed up by a single vivid memory: "Before we went to bed, we stood empty bourbon and milk bottles in front of the door, then waited in the night to hear glass break." Later, when EV (now a young woman living in New York) buys a pair of expensive red heels, she keeps them on the table, like a still life.
Unlike Carole, the supergirl she befriends, EV may not be perfectly empowered, but she does pose some good questions. Watching her mother wax her eyebrows, she asks, "Doesn't it hurt?" Her mother's oddly cheerful response: "Like hell." Through EV, we come to understand the paradox at the heart of Cooke's story: a wave of half-liberated women entering the world before it was entirely ready to embrace them.
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