Entry 07: Difficult Women
1. Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch by Rivka Galchen (2021)
Writing this book, the author faced a dilemma of sorts: How does a writer portray the mother of a seventeenth century genius? Rivka Galchen is up to the challenge.
The protagonist, Kath, is the mother of a genius, smart in her own right, yet she can’t be too erudite — in the 1600s a woman of the burgher class wouldn’t have been well read, nor exposed to the musings of brilliant philosophers. Rivka Galchen shows Kath making wry observations about the people and the natural world around her, in ways both humorous and fitting. Kath’s a strange woman, as even her famous son acknowledges. She lacks tact and diplomacy, so it’s believable when the people of her town misconstrue her actions. Oh, and they’re a self- serving lot, to be sure! With a voice that is unconventional, acerbic, fresh and surprising, it’s a pleasure to follow the internal thoughts and perceptions of this character.
I especially enjoy the author’s use of the element of surprise. Most authors are intelligent, so it follows that the characters they create are intelligent as well — but it’s the rare person who can surprise. Just as Johannes Kepler was a man with an extraordinary intellect, we, as readers, want to discover that his mother is extraordinary too, in her own right.
When a bunch of superstitious hacks bring preposterous charges against her, Kath must figure out how to respond. She must summon a finesse she hasn’t previously demonstrated; her life depends on it. This dilemma — being accused of witchcraft, and wondering how the character will respond — is gripping. Galchen can’t veer too far from the historical record, of course. Perhaps her most satisfying achievement as an author is that she definitively answers the question about whether old women deserve the sustained attention of readers. This one certainly joins my personal list of perverse older women, feisty, unconventional characters such as the protagonist of Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk; the eponymous Olive Kittridge by Elizabeth Strout, and now Riva Galchen’s Kath. There’s a great deal to enjoy in literary novels told from a quirky older woman’s POV.
Kath makes interesting choices that defy expectations, especially considering the circumscribed, socially restrictive paths available to her as a woman of her time and place. By the end of the book, I was satisfied. In order to not spoil the ending, I’ll just say that the perceptiveness with which Kath understands her evolving relationship with Simon, despite his lapses, is deftly handled, even poignant. This is an impressive novel. ****Highly recommend.
2. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (originally published 2009; 2018 is the English translation)
This might be the quirkiest murder mystery you’ll ever read. In a remote hamlet in the mountains of Czechoslavakia, the narrator, Mrs. Janina Duszejko — although she does not like this name, and does not accept it — lives a quiet life, worrying over deer who come to graze close to her house. The hamlet is snowbound from October to April, and most residents clear out, leaving the narrator to serve as caretaker for their properties. Janina lives a solitary, snowbound existence, but for a handful of neighbors, whom she has nicknamed Oddball and Big Foot. She is of an age where she is concerned about the possibility of “having to be removed by an ambulance in the Night.” But one of her neighbors will be the first to drop. The narrator’s account of events introduce readers to her use of colorful nicknames and ungrammatical capitalizations, such as in the following description: “As I looked at Big Foot’s poor, twisted body I found it hard to believe that only yesterday I’d been afraid of this Person. To say I disliked him might be putting it too mildly. Instead I should say that I found him repulsive, horrible. In fact I didn’t even regard him as a human Being.”
Yes — Big Foot has turned up dead. After, the narrator hears his dog howling and enters the yard to find her tied to a wall with string. Janina cuts the string and carries the dog home. Oddball, it seems, has a son who is a policeman, and this son is shocked to learn that Janina and his father had touched Big Foot’s body, interfering with the investigation. The investigation proceeds, but soon additional bodies start piling up. Odd, but one tableau includes numerous… deer prints.
A “sense of crime [is] hanging in the air.” Through it all, the narrator, a retired bridge construction engineer, embarks on a love affair, teaches classes at a school, indulges her study of astrology and horoscopes, writes rambling letters to the police, and continues her role as caretaker. She cares more about animals than about people… until she meets the right people. She befriends a young woman who works in a thrift shop and her relationship with Oddball deepens into friendship. Stumbling across a dead boar in the woods, she takes offense that animal bodies are used for shoes, meatballs, sausages, bedside rugs. We learn that she once had dogs, whom she refers to as her Little Girls, and they went missing. She was afflicted by“Ailments” and spent a few months in a hospital. For a year, she couldn’t walk at all. She concludes that, with so much suffering, the psyche has evolved as a sort of information filter that protects us from the weight of all our knowledge. We come to understand that Janina is more than quirky — she's a downright unreliable narrator.
For all her quirkiness — because of it? — she inspires devotion. By the end, her band of misfits form a sort of a family. Her friends see her for who she is. She receives an unlikely marriage proposal, and the book concludes with a satisfyingly preposterous ending, as her friends demonstrate their worth. Unreliable or not, spending time with this character is a pleasure. **** 1/2 Highly recommend.
3. The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri (2013)
The “Lowland” here refers to a swamp: murky, a wasteland, until it is given a new purpose, a new life via development in modern times. In its pre-developed state, it’s a place to hide; it’s where the garbage and detritus of people’s lives is thrown. The Lowland is a beautifully written book that invites us, during the course of 412 pages, to examine the lives of people who fail to examine their own lives. The Lowland is a portrait of a difficult, unnatural mother — which poses a challenge to the reader, as she is prickly and hard to access. Guari does not ruminate on her emotional state or her past, and there are no flashbacks interspersed throughout the text. There are no heroes here, only emotionally stunted people. For readers who turn to fiction expecting an emotional payday, then the takeaway from this novel is to exist, as a reader, in tension until the end, when the author reveals episodes of Guari’s past. If the author had not withheld this information but had allowed readers to access it right away, this would have been a different book altogether, the emotional impact would have been diluted. Instead, Lahiri forces us to grapple with a character who is exasperating.
These characters aren’t exactly passive, rather they are emotionally dead, walled off, shut down. This is not always a satisfying reading experience. This is Lahiri’s intent — she insists that we experience Guari the way that Bela experiences her mother. In this way, perhaps, we empathize with Bela even more. The precipitating event that explains Guari’s life and choices is revealed at the end. Once the reader absorbs this, we see Guari more clearly and realize that her guilt keeps her from connecting to her daughter. She was so young. These people live with ghosts, and they themselves are like ghosts.
At the end, when Bela becomes a parent herself, she tells Subhash that it made her love him more, because now she understands the full weight of what he had done.
The writing is spare and elegant, restrained; Lahiri won a Pulitzer, she’s a great writer. This is a book for readers who are willing to wrestle with a text, willing to experience a struggle. There is reward at the end, but it doesn’t come easy, readers must earn it. ***Recommend
4. Circe by Madeline Miller (2018)
From the moment she’s born, living in her father’s halls among the progeny of the Titans of Greek mythology, Circe’s an outsider, ugly and unwanted. Her nymph cousins gossip, pursue flirtations and affairs, collect bracelets, and taunt her — for her curiosity about the outside world, for her concern over mortals. The tenderhearted Circe comes to realize she’s a witch. With this discovery, the others fear her. There’s power in her strangeness. She learns to embrace it.
For generations, uncanny powers have been attributed to those weird “others” who don’t conform or fit in. This review of Circe appears under “difficult women” — but the truth, of course, is that Circe is so relatable. In fact, it isn’t Circe who is difficult; she’s just a poor fit for the shallow, patriarchal culture she finds herself in. We identify with Circe, that’s Miller’s feat, she makes her so human. The patriarchal culture she rails against is not so different from our own. Slipping into this novel, we enter a magical realm, enchanting yet familiar. Her gods squabble, their foibles larger than life: pride, pettiness, jealousy, vanity, love. Slowly, Circe comes into her own, harnessing her power, using it to her purpose. The contours of this story and its characters — the Minotaur, Daedalus and Icarus, Prometheus, Apollo, Athena, Hermes, and the rest are familiar, we know them from Homer’s Odyssey — but Miller fleshes out these heroes and monsters, imbuing them with emotional depth. In this luscious tale, Miller’s prose washes over us, like clear water on a sultry day. You might not want to return to reality after. ****Highly Recommend
5. Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller (2021)
A mother, loving as she may be, makes selfish choices then lies to cover her tracks. Because of these choices, her children seem stranded on an alternate timeline, unequipped to navigate the modern world of wi-fi, green forms, and bureaucracies. The novel reads like a fairytale, and the twins have been set an impossible task: struggling to thrive in a modern world where everything is stacked against them, including their own bodies. Unsettled Ground resonates on this fairytale level, while casting a spotlight on modernity and asking us to consider how to live a meaningful life. While Maid is a powerful indictment of the inhumanity at the root of American social support systems, owing to our own societal ambivalence over those who need help and whether they are deserving, Unsettled Ground, set in rural England, is a gentler portrayal of a community. The help on offer and the people offering it may be flawed, but most are well-intentioned, save for a couple of n’er do wells. Oh, the humanity.
An excerpt from the English folktale, “Scarborough Fair,” is the epigraph, the author’s nod to the impossible tasks her characters face. This is a twisty, slow-burn of a book about family dynamics and the secrets those closest can keep, and an intriguing portrayal of two difficult women. In the first chapter, we meet Dot on the day of her death, then we learn more as her children piece missing bits of her story together. We are told there will be lies to untangle right from the beginning. Dot’s death is the precipitating event, from there luck, both bad and good, kicks in, and it’s the careful balance of these two elements that creates exquisite tension. Jeanie and Julius are in their early fifties. Jeanie grew up sheltered, she’s had limited opportunities to engage with the larger world. She’s more comfortable with plants and animals than with people, and is at her best when playing folk songs on her guitar and singing. When things go south for the twins, we root for Jeanie, prickly as she may be, because she’s more sinned against than sinning. When her beloved dog, Maude, goes missing, I grieved almost as much as Jeanie does herself.
This book made me cry, and there are few books that pierce me this way. I’m still unpacking how the author achieves this; Fuller doesn’t follow a set formula so much as she skillfully layers an accrual of circumstances: omissions from the past, unsettling incidents in the present; the characters’ unique blind spots and proclivities, into a wonderfully rich and many-layered confection that teeters as the plot builds to its crescendo. It’s a virtuoso performance.
This is a very compelling book; a socio-economic thriller. How low can the characters tumble? I’ll read more by this author. Highest rating *****
6. Vladimir by Julia May Jonas (2022)
This comic novel about an aging English professor — she’s the “I” of the story, but we never hear her name —is rife with keen observations related to marriage, gender, sex, academics, power dynamics, snobbery, academic one-upmanship, and the youth culture in universities today. Warning: the cover photo might mislead some readers! If immersion in an academic milieu isn’t your thing, this won’t be for you. I found it very engaging. And funny! Julia May Jonas writes with an acerbic voice that cuts to the bone — yet her professor’s saving grace is her capacity to care: for her daughter, for her needy, errant husband, and for her students, too.
We access the professor’s unfiltered thoughts and emotions as she’s asked to stop teaching until her husband’s hearing is resolved (he’s the Chair of the English department). Then we observe her ability to set her grievances aside and communicate with her students; she takes their concerns seriously. For there have been complaints about her husband’s sexual affairs with students — none of these took place after the university explicitly banned teacher/student relationships — or so the narrator believes. (There’s always the tension of how far to trust the transgressor.) His affairs were conducted with her vague understanding, awareness, complicity — and she herself engaged in affairs, and almost left her husband and their daughter. Now she tolerates an open marriage because her husband is needy and she’s happy to have him divert his attention elsewhere, leaving her more time to read and write. But she never expected to be caught up in the fray. Should she be held accountable for her husband’s actions? A vocal subset of her students seem to think so.
An obsession with a new colleague, Vladimir, takes a hilarious turn, but this whole plot line never gets too dark; the climax is milked for comic potential.
Our aging protagonist rages against feeling she’s no longer as desirable. She invests so much effort into obsessing about her appearance. It felt exhausting, although real. I prefer the professor when she’s acerbic, not insecure; when she steps up and cares for others. She’s a roiling mass of heady contradictions, and this is a fun read if you enjoy spending time with complex, challenging, Difficult Women. ****
More Difficult Women: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout; My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh….