Recent Reviews
Necessary Lies by Diane Chamberlain
From 1929-1975, social workers in North Carolina possessed to power to petition the North Carolina’s Eugenic Board to allow sterilization of young women who were “feeble minded, epileptic or promiscuous.” With a family member's consent, young women were told they were having an appendectomy only to find out later that they were sterilized. Set in the 1960’s, Diane Chamberlain’s novel Necessary Lies brings to life this tragic chapter in history through the poignant story of two teenage girls, Ivy and Mary Ella Hart. These young girls live with their grandmother on a tobacco farm in rural Grace County. With the grandmother’s consent, Mary Ella Hart has been sterilized. When Ivy Hart learns about her older sister’s sterilization, she worries and wonders if their new social worker, Jane Forrester, will want to sterilize her as well. Ivy has epilepsy.
Jane Forrester, the new social worker, possesses little understanding of the ways poverty and lack of education disempower poor people. Yet Jane has good instincts and a big heart. She is aghast that women would be sterilized without their consent. Though her colleagues feel they are acting in the best interest of their clients (and saving taxpayer’s money), these social workers are impervious to the systemic injustices that are inflicted on women, minorities, and those with disabilities. Recently married to Dr. Robert Forrester, Jane experiences her own alienation in a system that treats women as second-class citizens. Jane must ask permission from her husband to work outside the home and obtain birth control. Jane wants to help others and at some level is assuaging her guilt about her sister's death. The primary plot revolves around the trust that develops between Ivy and Jane.
What I admire about this novel is that Chamberlain gives voice to multiple characters whose lives, through no fault of their own, are filled with pain and suffering. She illustrates the ways in which economic and social systems, based on racism and sexism, benefit those at the top of the economic and political hierarchy. These upper class officials feel empowered to "help society" by perpetuating oppressive systems like the sterilization of poor, disabled, and minority women.
The book is a story about poverty and lack of education and the ways in which upper class people can be callous and cruel to those who are less fortunate. It is shocking that those who have suffered little want to believe that those less fortunate are poor because they do not work hard enough, a theme relevant as we begin 2017. Whatever happened to “There but for the grace of God go I?"
The multiple strands of this story come together to create a gratifying ending. Jane helps the Hart family and finds her own freedom. When decades later Jane is reunited with Ivy, who has escaped the poverty of her youth, Jane writes, “ I thought of how you could look at people and never know what had come before. What trials. What horrors. You couldn’t see Ivy’s impoverished roots, or how close she’d come to having no family at all. You couldn’t see the loss of her sister – a loss that would haunt us both forever. The wounds were deep, and yet they didn't show." And doesn’t that apply to most people? We all have hidden wounds that consciously or unconsciously affect the way we act.
Chamberlain's novel shines a light on a psychological dimension of human beings: the ability to lie to ourselves. After all, oppressors (who can be congenial and refined) often convince themselves that their predations are benign. What is necessary, instead, is genuine compassion and empathy for the plight of others.
The Mothers by Brit Bennett
My son Sam discovered Britt Bennett’s 2016 debut novel The Mothers and gave it to me for the holidays. I am grateful he did. Written by a young woman with a fresh new voice, Bennett’s prose is precise and penetrating. With wisdom and empathy she captures the travails of three teenagers who are struggling to find their places in the world under the weight of grief, a secret, and poor decision making.
Set in San Diego County, these three black teens connect through their involvement with a church in their community called the Upper Room. The “mothers” of the church serve as the collective narrator for the novel and a loose emotional safety net for these kids. These “mothers” observe, critique, love, and serve their church community with graciousness, and pettiness too.
The novel’s three high school kids are naïve and well meaning yet confused teenagers. And for good reason. Nadia Turner’s mother recently committed suicide and Nadia’s father is in a fog. Aubrey Evan’s mother abandoned her and Aubrey now lives with her sister and her sister’s partner. And Luke Sheppard, the son of the Upper Room’s pastor, has dropped out of college due to an athletic injury and feels depressed that his best days are behind him.
Without their mothers, Nadia and Aubrey struggle with feelings of isolation and shame. They both feel inferior because their mothers chose to leave them. They don’t often discuss their missing mothers, but find comfort and connection with each other and become like sisters. The narrator says, “It was strange, learning the contours of another’s loneliness. You could never know it all at once; like stepping inside a dark cave, you felt along the walls, bumped into jagged edges.”
In high school Nadia dates Luke. Their relationship ends due to an unexpected circumstance and Nadia’s imminent enrollment at the University of Michigan. Aubrey takes classes at the local junior college and Luke waits tables at a local restaurant. Before long Aubrey and Luke are in a serious relationship. The years pass and neither Nadia nor Luke tells Aubrey about their high school romance. Their motivations are not malicious. Neither of them wants to hurt Aubrey. Seven years later, Nadia returns from the University of Chicago Law School to attend Luke and Aubrey’s wedding. When Aubrey becomes aware of Luke and Nadia’s prior relationship and their unfinished business, her pain is excruciating. The betrayals affect the entire Upper Room community.
It is hard to read about Nadia and Luke’s poor choices. Bennett makes you feel anger and empathy toward them at the same time. Nadia is more isolated than Aubrey and makes worse judgments. Despite her strong intellect and warm personality, her wounds are deep. Nadia seeks to sabotage her own happiness at every turn. Like a Shakespeare tragedy, she seems doomed to destroy not only herself but those who love her most. The "mothers" help these motherless girls, but there is only so much they can do. There are no grief counselors, social workers or psychologists in the story; just kids and adults doing the best they can with the lives they were given.
The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George
As this tumultuous year comes to an end, I decided to read Nina George’s The Little Paris Bookshop. After watching this book stay steady on the New York Times Bestseller List for over a year, I thought a book about books might bring me comfort. Though the novel seems to be two novellas competing for control of the plot, it is a worthwhile book to read if only to remind us that literature can be a powerful and healing force.
John Perdu’s bookstore is a floating barge tied to a dock on the Seine River in Paris. Perdu views his bookshop as a “literary apothecary.” After his first love leaves him, his heart is broken and he spends his days selecting books that will hopefully mend his customers’ broken souls (and at some level his own). With an almost psychic sense of what ails a customer, he zeroes in on which book might heal that person. The premise is a bit overdone, yet that experience resonates with anyone who has felt the comfort of a powerful book.
Here are my two favorite Perdu quotes about books:
“I sell books like medicine. There are books that are suitable for 1 million people, others for 100. There are even medicine – sorry, books – that were written for one person only.”
“I wanted to treat feelings that are not recognized as afflictions and are never diagnosed by doctors. All those little feelings and emotions no therapist is interested in, because they're apparently too minor and intangible. The feeling that washes over you when another summer nears its end. Or when you recognize that you haven't got your whole life left to find out where you belong. Or the slight sense of grief when a friendship doesn't develop as you thought, and you have to continue your search for a lifelong companion for those birthday morning blues. Nostalgia for the air of your childhood. Things like that.”
Of course, like most people, Perdu’s intuitive directives don’t apply to himself. When the married woman he loved left him twenty years ago, he retreated into his bookshop and didn’t open the letter she left him. His view of her is naïve and immature (and did I say she was married?). But Perdu's overwhelming grief and fear caused by her departure prohibits him from opening the letter (a form of literature) that would have brought him some solace.
In the second part of the novel, Perdu unties his bookshop barge and begins both a physical and emotional journey to confront his feelings about the ending of that relationship. As his new friend Catherine states, “Everybody has an inner room where demons lurk. Only when we open it and face up to it are we free.” And that is what Peru does. He faces his demons and is able to start another chapter of his life. On this adventure, he begins to understand more about himself and the way he copes with pain. He concludes that his parents’ divorce affected him more than he realized and that his acute sensitivity rendered him emotionally paralyzed.
The second half of the book is less charming and concludes too neatly. Yet being in the presence of John Purdu and his two traveling companions as they float down the Seine discussing the importance of love, the meaning of life, and books that matter, it is easy to be swept away with them.
