Recent Reviews
Dancing with Einstein by Kate Wenner
In this haunting and engaging novel by Kate Wenner, we meet 30-year old Marea Hoffman as she sorts out her complicated childhood and attempts to settle into an adult life. After graduating from Barnard and traveling the world for seven years, Marea lands in New York City hoping to find some peace and permanence.
Marea visits four therapists: a Freudian, a Jungian, a political psychologist, and a general psychotherapist. Wenner’s one-woman jury on the efficacy of therapy does not reach a verdict, but it is fascinating to observe the process. That Marea has carried the weight of her family’s burden is never in doubt by any of her therapists. The therapists offer Marea four approaches for excavating her life and she in turn reveals four different versions of herself. Through the combination of these experiences and her openness to self-analysis, Marea begins to engage and understand the feelings she has spent her life avoiding.
When Marea was twelve years old, Jonas, her scientist father, died in a car crash after he dropped her off at school. Uncertainty lurks in Marcea’s mind. Was it an accident or suicide? She attempts to study that ride to school with her kind and gentle father frame by frame, like watching a film in slow motion. She also remembers the tension and fighting in her family’s home in Princeton, New Jersey where her father now worked after designing the detonators for the nuclear bomb dropped at Hiroshima. Marcea’s mother was a committed Quaker and opposed his involvement in such violent pursuits.
Edward Teller and Robert Oppenheim make cameo appearances as they wrestle with the moral implications of their destructive creation. A light moment in an otherwise heavy life is when Jonas’s new colleague, Albert Einstein, shares Sunday dinner with the Hoffman family. On those evenings there is joy, music, and lightness in the Hoffman home.
Marea is a sensitive young girl who has recurring nightmares about nuclear holocaust. Or is she dreaming a vision of her father’s trauma? Her Dad speaks little of his life in Vienna, but one day at their Quaker meeting he stands and says, “I do what you all despise me for – because God made both good and evil. You ridiculous people who do not believe that the Russians are our enemies will go to your slaughter like sheep, like my own father and mother, both murdered for the crime of being Jews.” Jonas does not seek to hurt people by participating in the country's nuclear program. He simply believes Einstein and his wife are naïve to the evils of the world.
After a seven-year absence, Marea returns to visit her mother in Princeton. In attempting to reconnect with her only child, Ginny Hoffman shares her husband’s letters with Marea, which leads to a new level of understanding between the mother and daughter. This adds another dimension to the forces shaping Marea, but one that is less well developed and thus less convincing.
Wenner’s novel is dark, compelling, and fascinating. How could it not be? She explores both the moral musings of scientists about the development and use of the atomic bomb and the varied and complex approaches of psychologists in understanding the human psyche. An excellent read.
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.
