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Review: Looking for Love Author(s): Helen Benedict Review by: Helen Benedict Source: The Women's Review of Books, Vol. 16, No. 10/11 (Jul., 1999), pp. 40-41Published by: Old City Publishing, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4023257Accessed: 23-04-2015 20:05 UTC

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Short subject

Power politics

by Barbara Croft City of Light, by Lauren Belfer. New York: Dial, 1999, 518 pp., $24.95 hardcover.

S ET IN BUFFALO, NEW YORK, in 1901, this ambitious and deliciously compli- cated first novel is part literary

thriller, part love story. It is also a hymn to a great American city riding the crest of its glory. City of Light is extensively re- searched, its world meticulously rendered. In fact, at times readers get almost too much information about tum-of-the- century Buffalo, its conniving citizens and the development of hydroelectric power at nearby Niagara Falls, the environmental controversy that is the focus of the action in this busy, crowded book.

The story is told gracefully by Louisa Barrett, a spinster with a past who, by virtue of her position as headmistress of the Macaulay School for Girls, is one of few women at the center of Buffalo power politics. Although Louisa has status in the community, she is not free to act independently. Rather, her economic dependence upon the goodwill of the school's powerful all-male board of di- rectors and the secrets of her past make her a woman in hiding, a pawn, "a blank slate upon which anyone might write anything whatsoever."

Readers who are tired of the usual heroines-too willful, spunky, charis-

matic and lucky to seem real will want to meet Louisa. Self-doubting, cowed and controlled by an elaborate social system of subterfuge and subtle blackmail, she must make her way carefully, calculating every move. Often she seems passive, even cowardly. She worries about trivi- alities, over-analyzes every decision and disappoints us repeatedly by failing to act in situations where, even given her cir- cumstances, one would expect her to do the right thing. She refuses, for example, to support publicly a Negro woman's pe- tition to have her race represented with dignity at the Pan-American Exposition, held in Buffalo in 1901. More alarmingly, she decides not to inform the authorities when she happens to hear a murderer's private confession.

Yet, this "flaw" in her character is pre- cisely the book's strength. Belfer refuses to gloss over the compromises Louisa must make to survive, choosing instead to ex- plore in depth the network of social mores, subtle threats and economic factors that keep her from acting honestly. "We were such skilled actors," Louisa reflects at one point. "Where had we trained, to develop such skills? A silly question: Every instant of our lives constituted our training."

The plot is complicated, a little plod- ding at times, not easily summarized, and full of twists and surprises no reviewer should reveal. It begins just after the death of Louisa's best friend, Margaret, the wife of Tom Sinclair, director of the Niagara Falls power plant. Margaret's death leaves her adopted daughter, Grace, severely de- pressed, and mutual concem over the girl brings Louisa, Grace's godmother, and the widower Tom into constant contact. Lou- isa has doubts about Tom: is he implicated in the recent mysterious death of Karl Speyer, the plant's brilliant chief engi- neer? Has he manipulated and bribed local officials in order to exploit the tremendous potential of Niagara? Nevertheless, she finds him attractive and, almost against her will, a troubled romance begins.

"The struggle to preserve Niagara Falls was the first major environmental battle in the United States," Belfer writes in a his- torical note. The battle between preserva- tionists, politicians and industrialists to con- trol the waters of Niagara and the poten- tially lucrative electrical power it generates draws Tom into a web of intrigue and gives the book its forward motion. Running par- allel is the slow revelation of Louisa's per- sonal history. Victimized as an innocent young woman by a powerful man-his identity is one of the book's many se-

crets she feels vulnerable and shamed. When another potential suitor, Franklin Fiske, a newspaper reporter who has come to Buffalo to investigate Speyer's death, be- gins to court her, she hardly knows how to react. Then there's the raffish Francesca, a rebellious socialite who offers her a Boston marriage, the tyrannical Miss Love, and a dozen more equally interesting characters.

The scope and complexity of City of Light and its focus upon the workings of society are reminiscent of the nineteenth- century novel, complete with subplots, hidden identities, murder, betrayal, black- mail, and cunning villains. We finish the book astonished by Belfer's agility, her energy and poise in keeping such an intri- cate storyline aloft. 0

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Natural wonder

by Diana Postlethwaite Letters from Yellowstone, by Diane Smith. New York: Viking, 1999, 224 pp., $23.95 hardcover.

L ETTERS FROM YELLOWSTONE iS the first novel by Diane Smith, a Montana- based writer who previously spe-

cialized in science and the environment. With a careful ear for authentic nineteenth-century voices, Smith orches- trates an ambitious range of subjects in this slender epistolary novel: feminism, American history and the nature of scien- tific method.

In 1898, a young medical student from Cornell named A. E. Bartram is hired, sight unseen, for a Smithsonian-sponsored field study in the recently-established Yel- lowstone National Park. To the dismay of expedition leader H. G. Merriam, a bache- lor naturalist from Montana State Univer- sity, "A. E." turns out to be not a man but a young woman, eager to botanize and equally eager to declare her independence from traditional Victorian gender roles.

"1 am so woefully short of staff," Mer- riam writes his mother, "I would embrace the worst laggard or miscreant the scien- tific world has to offer but...what am I to do with a woman? We already have a cook." Alex Bartram makes short work of masculine prejudice. She sets off alone on her first botanizing expedition, joyfully immersed in "the real, physical, living, breathing world," only to be "rescued" by Professor Merriam-whom our heroine must haul off a rocky ledge and bandage with a tourniquet cut from her dress. In her letter about this experience, it's the plants, not the pitfalls, that Alex emphasizes: sci- ence, she enthuses, is "pure rapture." From the get-go, this heroine is a feisty, anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better sort of female; there's little suspense as to whether her single-minded scientific am- bition will triumph over the narrow- minded male establishment.

I found the physical setting of Letters from Yellowstone more intriguing than its central character. Yellowstone in 1898 is a microcosm of national, as weil as natural, history: railroad barons are pressuring Congress for a right-of-way passage through a Park where geological wonders from the primordial stage of the universe compete with an on-site luxury hotel. Yel- lowstone is hopping with "lady natural- ists," travelling Baptists, a trophy-hunting foreign count and the "entire Cody, Wyo-

ming bicyeling club." What happens, the novel asks, when "the last uniquely wild place" on our continent meets the distinc- tively American dream of turning the natu- ral world into a commercial theme park?

Another, equally fascinating, topic ex- plored in Letters from Yellowstone is what could be called the "politics" of science, both economic and interpersonal. One no- table subplot is Montanan Merriam's struggle for financing from the oh-so- eastern-establislhment Smnithsonian. Al- though Alex gets high marks for her inde- pendence, she's got lots to leamn when it comes to her chosen profession. "The aca- demic world, even the world of our expe- dition, is one of science, not sentiment," she proclaims naively at the beginning of her Yellowstone adventure. By novel's end, she has come to understand that sci- ence is undertaken by people working in community, people with emotions. She also leams that a scientific way of looking at the universe is a complement, not a con- tradiction, to the sensibility of a poet or the mythic vision of a native American (to give two examples from the novel). As they complete their expedition, Alex and her colleagues share a speculative picnic under the mountain sky: "What is science, really, but another means of looking at the stars?"; "we gather...some meaningful pat- temr... and with that common understand- ing, we can converse intelligently about the world."

Letters from Yellowstone has its limita- tions. I wished for characters who were less schematic, for prose less stilted (an unfortunate by-product of that nineteenth- century diction), for an altogether bigger book to tackle these enormous subjects (more on the scale of Andrea Barrett's marvelous Voyage of the Narwhal, for ex- ample). But what a pleasure, nonetheless, to spend time in the company of a writer who can "converse [as] intelligently about the world" as Diane Smith. 0

Looking for love

by Helen Benedict White Oleander, by Janet Fitch. New York: Little, Brown, 1999, 390 pp., $24.00 hardcover.

T nROUBLED YOUNG GIRLS make fascinat- ing subjects for fiction. Not only do they embody our culture's con-

flicted attitudes toward women and teen- agers, they tend to be simultaneously poignant and infuriating, endearing and al- ienating. Astrid Magnussen, the young narrator-protagonist of Janet Fitch's ac- complished first novel, White Oleander, is just such a girl. (Perhaps that's why her story appealed to Oprah Winfrey, who re- cently chose it for her book club.)

Astrid's story is refreshingly unpredict- able. The novel is a picaresque tale of her attempts to find love in a successive stream of foster homes, but her adventures fit no stereotype. She is no hapless victim, and her mother, Ingrid, who is as large a character throughout the book as the daughter, is not a drunkard, an addict, or a child abuser. She is a Norsewoman of stunning beauty and selfishness, a poet, a free spirit... and a murderer. Her hold over her daughter provides the central tension of the novel, for even as Astrid is driven from her, she seeks to know, master and

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4 O The Women's Review of Books / Vol. XVI, No. 10-1 1 / July 1999

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I w...{.g s~~~

Janet ~ Fitchl

reconcile herself to her mother right until the last line.

The story begins when Astrid is twelve and living with Ingrid in Los An- geles. This is a dreamy time. The Santa Ana winds are blowing, the poisonous oleander blooming, and Astrid is clearly at her mother's mercy. She waits pa- tiently at Ingrid's poetry readings while her mother selects which shy young man to bring home to bed, waits again until the lover leaves, and waits yet again at work and at home until Ingrid deigns to bestow on her a few moments of atten- tion. Yet Astrid is not exactly unhappy. She is mesmerized by her mother's beauty and by her insistence that the two of them are superior to everyone else-cultivated, cosmopolitan and su- premely literate.

When her mother's icy pride is shat- tered by a lover, however, Astrid's world is shattered, too. Her mother kills the lover-to reveal how would be to spoil some of the intrigue of the book-and is whisked off to jail, leaving Astrid as aban- doned in actuality as she already was emo- tionally. And thus begins her journey through the treacherous world of foster homes, and the strongest part of the book.

What I particularly liked about the novel is the unpredictability of Astrid's foster home adventures. Her own mother is larger than life and at times hard to be- lieve, but not so the foster parents. Some of the most seedy-looking foster mothers are not so bad, and the men involved are never brutish. Nevertheless, adult care- lessness, eruelty and vulnerability harden Astrid until she becomes, at times, as ruthless and eruel as her mother. Yet because all she really wants is love, she is, in the end, forgivable. One of the best aspects of this novel is the sur- prising twists it takes whenever Astrid decides to grasp fate with her own hands.

As much detail as Fitch gives us about each foster home, however, the overarch- ing subject of this novel is the power of motherhood, and the child's struggle be- tween dependence and defiance. At no point do we root for this remorseless mother-in fact, Fitch makes us sympa- thize with Astrid's fantasies of revenge against her. Yet, at the same time, we want this poor giri to find the love she deserves. The principal tension of the novel, the driving force that keeps the pages turning fast, is thus not only what awfull thing will happen to Astrid next, but whether she will ever find any kind of happiness or love. Fitch manages to make Astrid's challenge the challenge of every young girl in the world: to separate and yet keep the love of her mother; to find a balance between need and autonomy; and to force the world to

come to terms with her as a fierce and in- dependent soul. S*

Windows of

opportunity

by Marina Heung Who's Irish? Stories, by Gish Jen. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999, 210 pp., $22.00 hardcover.

F AMILIES, GENERATIONS and habitats have always been Gish Jen's sub- jects. Her first novel, Typical Ameri-

can, tells us how the story of how the Changs arrive in America and enter the af- fluent middle class. Mona in the Promised Land, her second novel, is an extended riff on identity-switching, with one of the Chang daughters, Mona, deciding that she is going to "become Jewish." As the Changs set down roots and build a family, their saga illustrates the process of grow- ing up and acquiring identities in America.

In Who 's Irish?, Jen's new collection of short stories, two are "Mona" stories. The others employ a variety of voices and per- spectives: the grandmother of an interra- cial child, an Anglo-American teaching in China, and a woman anticipating her first child. While Jen's novels depict the new- ness of the immigrant experience as well as the comedy and trials of growing up Asian American, the characters in these stories are often captured in moments of transition, as they try to make sense of their past and anticipate the future.

Art Woo, the computer sales rep in "Birthmates," for instance, finds himself staying in a welfare hotel during a confer- ence. The strangeness of this physical space sets in motion a series of disturbing and absurdly amusing encounters that lead him to a jolting reminder of the distances of race and class, a re-thinking of his failed marriage and a dawning awareness of missed opportunities.

In the final image of "Birthmates," the protagonist glimpses an ominous shadow lurking on the fire escape outside his win- dow. Windows are important in these sto- ries: they delineate the mutual incompre- hension between cultures and supply a metaphor for the psychic spaces marking differences of race, ethnicity and class. In the hauntig story, "Chin,' an adolescent boy living in Yonkers, New York, gazes with fascination through his kitchen win- dow at the Chinese family that lives across the alley from him. Puzzling over the mys- terious household arrangements of his neighbors (why, for example, do they al- ways keep their window closed?), he also begins to articulate his own identity:

They weren't like us who came from Yonkers and didn't have no special foods, unless you wanted to count fries.... I was more interested in why everybody suddenly had to have a spe- cial food. And why was everybody ask- ing what your family was? First time somebody asked me that, I had no idea what they were talking about. But after a while, I said, Vanilla. 1 said that because I didn't want to say we were nothing, my family was nothing. (p. 107)

When the story ends, what he has seen is the ominous reality of parental authority and expectations, which also reflect on his feelings toward his own father.

In "House, House, Home," Pammie Lee, a thirtyish mother of three, now in her second marriage, reflects on her first mar-

riage. The evolution and dissolution of this relationship to an Anglo-American man twice her age is told as ajoumey through a series of habitats: a Maine cabin, a loft, a suburban house and finally, the "dog house," a cramped space that turns out to be surprisingly intimate and capable of ex- tensions and renovations. In reviewing the past, Pammie comes to see how age, ethnic and class differences infiltrated her mar- riage and affected her faltering attempts to work as an artist and architect.

In the end, this story embraces the "joyous deprivation" of an existence de- voted to family and domesticity. The thought dawns on Pammie that perhaps "her own true gift [is] for household man- agement," and that "the largest drama is behind her." But the "busy boredom" of her life is the template for arresting mo- ments and small epiphanies, such as when she sees a "red and yellow fall day that people drove from faraway brown towns to come see: the kind of day when the world feels full of street corners, because at every one you gape like a tourist at the heart-stopping spectacle which is your very own world, without chlorophyll."

At the end of "House, House, Home," Pammie writes in a note: "1 have, against all odds, become an adult." Although it is al- ways dangerous to read fiction autobio- graphically, one can't help sensing, in this volume, that we are in the presence of an author who has, like her characters, matured. The scope of her vision has broadened, her touch is light but sure, and her feelings for her characters modulate between irony, whimsy and sympathetic insight, but always with a clarity that leaps from the page. 9

l 4.

Gish Jen

The cost of loss

by Annie Dawid A Woman Determined, by Jean Swallow. Duluth, MN: Spinsters Ink, 1998, 264 pp., $10.95 paper.

T HERE ARE 'wo KiNDs of people in the world," says Margaret Donovan, one of two protagonists in the late Jean

Swallow's last novel, A Woman Deter- mined, "those who run over people and say I didn't hit them, they stepped in front of my car, and those who get run over no matter what they do." Before the start of the novel, Margaret, a women's health care adminis- trator, has been badly injured in a car acci- dent. She hires Laura Gilbert, like herself a Seattle lesbian, to sue the driver. A Woman

Determined tells both their stories in a form which attempts the objectivity of non- fiction; in a series of twenty interviews with mn anonymous journalist, each woman un- ravels her personal history, motivation, hap- penstance and circumstance. Ultimately, the novel concems itself with the meaning of justice-political, personal, legal and other- wise-and leaves us satisfied, though not Dptimistic, with its deep probing of two women's lives.

A woman of grand proportions, literally and figuratively, Margaret has devoted her life to others, building a clinic from nothing into a comerstone of women's healthcare. In Laura's words, she is one of "those women who were known by reputation for what they had done and how much they gave to the community, how many evenings they gave up to meetings, how much responsibility they shouldered for how little money." Mar- garet believes in right and wrong, speaks up brashly and brooks no halfway measures. "If we don't take care-and make ways to take care-of each other, we are failing as human beings," she insists.

Complicating Margaret's recovery is the discovery that her ex-lover has bilked the clinic out of an enormous sum of money, jeopardizing its very existence. Rumors flut- ter around Seattle's lesbian community that Margaret has been kicked out of clinic af- fairs for incompetence; her integrity-her most sacred asset-is as wounded as her col- lapsed knee. And her relations with Laura -who attempted a mediated settlement un- satisfactory to Margaret-have ended bit- terly. "1 would have done anything that I could for my client," Margaret declares.

But Laura's side of the story flashes a light into Margaret's blind spots: the limits of a lawyer's power, and Laura's own wounds-which propel her, at the moment

ACCORDING TO HELEN, where archaeology and mythology meet. Helen of Troy tells her own story alter 3000 years. The novel is astonishing, bringing Helen to life as an appealing humian being, as weil as a mythical ideal. P B. Parris, Author The attention to the details of settings and other aspects of Bronze Age Aegean culture is especiallv impres- sive... Jean Marty, Archaeol:gist A book about a strong woman writ- ten from a woman's perspective in an historical context., (It's) just what we need-an intelligent role model and a wonderful addition to our lit- erature-. Tony Weinberger, Teacher

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The Women's Review of Books / Vol. XVI, No. 10-11 / July 1999 4t

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