Recent Reviews
The Atomic Weight of Love by Elizabeth J. Church
Though not as groundbreaking as Virginia Woolf’s A Room Of One’s Own, or The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Elizabeth Church’s debut historical novel The Atomic Weight of Love, published in 2016, beautifully captures the life of a woman seeking autonomy and agency over her personal and professional choices while living in the southwest in the 1940’s and 1950’s.
Meridian Wallace is a precocious only child whose curiosity about the natural world consumes her. Her parents indulge and engage with her as if she is an adult, ableit a small one. When Meridian's father dies of a heart attack at age 43, Meridian and her mother stagnate emotionally. But Meri perseveres and pursues a degree in physics at the University of Chicago with the hopes of becoming an ornithologist. The complex communication patterns of crows captivate her. Without really understanding all of her motivations, she marries her physics professor Alden Whetstone - a man that age of her father at his death - and moves to Los Alamos, New Mexico where her new husband is working on the government’s top-secret Manhattan Project.
Though Alden Whetstone is a kind and caring person, he directs and dominates the activities of his wife. When they first meet, he seems attracted to Meri’s brain. But by the time Meri moves with him to New Mexico, he has forgotten Meri’s impressive intellectual capabilities and is surprised that she is not finding fulfillment in cooking and sewing. Other academic wives with advanced degrees adapt to their limited roles, but Meri struggles to find any fulfillment in the suffocating social norms of this scientific community. When Meri defers an opportunity to pursue her Ph.D. at Cornell, Alden seems indifferent. Though Alden understands nuclear physics, he cannot understand the idea that Meridian is his equal. Even nice men can be sexist.
They are both victims of the times, but he has the power and she does not.
When Meri meets Clay, a Vietnam war veteran ten years younger, he exposes her to a new perspective on the world. Clay’s sense of freedom and empowerment embolden Meri and encourage her to think about her life in a different way. Clay symbolizes the generation that repudiated the prior cultural conventions and ushered in a new social order. Nonetheless, Meri loves both men and choosing between them weighs heavy.
I enjoyed this thought provoking book and it reminded me why the women’s movement of the 1960’s took hold with such ferocious energy. In addition, one can feel Elizabeth Church’s love of the topography of New Mexico and the birds that inhabit the landscape. At times the dialogue seems forced, but overall I recommend this engaging book about yearning for romantic love, intellectual engagement, and personal fulfillment in a world governed by policies and societal expectations that stifle the potential of women.
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford
Jamie Ford’s perfectly titled book, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, inspired and touched me. Based on historical facts, the novel is about a middle-aged man reflecting on his childhood in Seattle during World War II. While in grammar school, Henry Lee becomes fast friends with Keiko Okabe and they bond over their non-Caucasian identities. Henry is Chinese and Keiki is Japanese, a not so remarkable fact in 2017, but a defining one in the 1940’s. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the United States government orders more than 125,000 Japanese-Americans to be “evacuated” from the Coast to ensure they are not spying for the Japanese. Distraught and confused by the edict, Henry races to the train station to see Keiko before she departs. Henry says, “Each person wore a plain white tag, the kind you’d see on a piece of furniture, dangling from a coat button." This description is a powerful reminder of how fear and racism can result in cruelty and injustice. Keiko and her family are taken first to a temporary relocation center outside of Seattle, and then to a permanent relocation center in Idaho. Possessions of the Japanese families were left at the Panama Hotel, a gateway between Chinatown and Japantown. (The hotel still operates today.)
Henry misses Keiko and feels the eeriness of her nearby empty neighborhood without the Japanese families. Henry’s immigrant parents don’t understand Henry. They simply want him to be perceived as American. When Henry wants to take a bus to visit Keiko in Idaho, Henry knows his parents will be opposed. Henry’s mother says, “You, me, all of us risk going to jail if we help them. I know you have a friend. The one she calls on the telephone. The one from the Rainer School? She is Japanese.” Henry worries about Keiko and wonders how she would cope if she were sent back to Japan; Keiko doesn’t even speak Japanese. Henry navigates his way to see Keiko and her family. They exchange long letters for months until eventually the letters mysteriously stop and they lose touch. Henry stays in Seattle, falls in love, marries, and has a son. Henry has made a sweet life from a bitter circumstance.
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is rich with history; jazz, multiculturalism, an eclectic cast of characters and several plot twists. It explores racism and xenophobia and the painful distance that can exist between immigrant parents and their American offspring. At its heart, this novel is a story about Henry and Keiko’s love in the midst of WWII when they were powerless to affect the trajectory of their lives. The book also explores Henry’s journey toward an understanding of the frailties, vulnerabilities and complexity of his parents whose rigidity and fear hurt him. Though Henry did not have the life he envisioned with Keiko, he exhibits restraint, kindness, and a generosity of spirit. And after his beloved wife Ethel dies of cancer, Henry visits the dilapidated Panama Hotel and finds a couple of Keiko’s possessions in its basement. He wonders where she might be living. Without spoiling the ending, I will say that as I finished the last page, I hoped that Jamie Ford was working on a sequel.
The Dive from Clausen's Pier by Ann Packer
Published in 2002, The Dive From Clausen’s Pier by Ann Packer is a rich exploration of the emotional dynamics of a young couple, their families, and their group of childhood friends after a traumatic accident. Packer creates characters for which I feel great empathy as they attempt to deal with a tragic situation. Her book reminds us that impulsive actions can change a person’s life.
Mike Mayer and Carrie Bell have lived in Madison their entire lives. They met at 15 and have been dating through high school and then four years at the university. Both are kind and conscientious. Their relationship has been one of thoughtfulness and tenderness. Now engaged, Carrie deflects and delays each time Mike asks about selecting a date. Not without inner conflict, she says, “I was hating myself because none of it felt right anymore. For so long I had thought of him as necessary ballast that would keep me safe. Now that ballast was holding me down, holding me back. I wanted lightness, freedom.” She also explains the stifling feeling she carries about their life in Madison, “We might work at banks and libraries and car dealerships but somehow the trappings of adulthood were merely that for us, merely trappings: the truth about us seemed to lie in the fact that we were still closest to the people we’d known since childhood." Feeling constrained by the confines of her hometown, Carrie imagines a wider world filled with stimulation and unpredictability. She has been emotionally distancing herself from the people she loves.
Mike feels Carrie’s love ebbing. On a picnic with their friends, Mike attempts to get Carrie’s attention by making an uncharacteristically spontaneous dive into a familiar lake. The water level is low and tragedy strikes. Mike becomes paralyzed.
The novel explores how people respond to their responsibilities in a time of crisis and chaos. As Mike deals with his physical paralysis, Carries becomes emotionally paralyzed. Everyone in her life tells her to be strong for Mike. A few months after the accident and burdened by constant hospital visits, Carrie feels the weight of Mike’s accident crushing her and she impulsively leaves Madison for New York. Though young, impetuous, and vulnerable to the vicissitudes of her heart, she needs to get away from the shrinking world of Madison to sort her feelings. Carrie loves Mike and she wants to support him. Yet, should she be disloyal to her own desires and simply marry him? Except for her mom, few people in her tight circle knew of her diminished feelings toward Mike. They think she simply left Mike in his time of need.
Carrie doesn’t offer the insights of an older, wiser woman. Yet, I admire that she seeks to understand herself and reflect on the choices she made and why she thinks she made them. She struggles to imagine if it would be harder to stay with her quadriplegic fiancé or harder to abandon him when he needs her most. And she berates herself for even thinking about leaving him. She wonders how, prior to the accident, Mike could have felt so content with the predictability of their planned lives. She reviews her own father’s abandonment of her mother when Carrie was three.
Carrie has experienced a different kind of trauma. She is only 23 years old. But rather than shrink from pain and conflict, she attempts to search her soul and determine what she should do next. Packer doesn’t offer us a simple happy ending. But like the rest of the book, it is satisfying to watch Carrie wrestle with the complexity of her commitments, her conflicts, and her emerging consciousness.
