Kate Walbert: Generation Gap
I had mixed feelings about the book A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert. Walbert is a beautiful writer who crafts sentences that are crystal clear, sharp, and illuminating. Reading her is a pleasure of the senses, a full retreat into the world she creates and I was quickly absorbed by the first chapters of the book. In fact, I just loved the chapters about the first Dorothy and her life as a girl, as a student, a lover, a mother, and as a suffragette. I also loved the chapters about her daughter Evelyn, especially Evelyn’s time spent at Madam Lane’s school in the north of England during and after World War I. But as the book wound on and the subsequent generations of Townsend women got their say, I became disturbed and unhappy.
After the rich layers of the first Dorothy and Evelyn, I found the subsequent Townsend generations to be flat and uninteresting. They were one-dimensional stereotypes (are they supposed to be archetypes?) of the frustrated suburban housewife, her under-ambitious daughter who relies on Prozac and paid help to get by, and her over-ambitious daughter who was too busy working to spend time with her own daughter, now grown up and at college and facebooking (stereotype or reality?). The men in the novel are crippled, inadequate, absent, or very tragically dead (Father Fairfield and a son, James) and useful only for blame.
What disturbed me most of all is what emerged as the theme of the book: that women are miserable. It was the connection that runs through the different narratives, this thread of female disquietude. I can’t believe that Walbert would want to argue that disquiet, dissatisfaction, and discombobulation run in the veins of all women, but her novel sure reads that way. I would argue that we are all, across genders, born discombobulated and dissatisfied. We pass through a brief period of having all needs attended to (hopefully) and puberty kicks our dissatisfaction back into gear and we begin the lifelong effort to define ourselves through family, friends, and work. With luck and work and help from others, we find a degree of satisfaction and a measure of peace.
Certainly the women of the first Dorothy’s generation had few outlets for self-discovery or definition, and hence Dorothy’s very real frustrations and my awe in the face of her bravery. I found her every bit the measure of Florence Nightingale, held up throughout the book as beacon of possibility. The first Dorothy follows a drastic course to define her life (a course cited by further Townsend generations of proof of their own pudding, which I found repugnant, especially on facebook: do people really think they can ride on the actions of their ancestors?). The generations subsequent to the first Dorothy have opportunities she could never have dreamed of and yet they persist in an emotional anorexia that had the taint of self-martyrdom and the bad smell of self-pity.
I’m sure Walbert didn’t intend to raise the question of whether the first Dorothy would have done what she did had she known what the future women would make of their lives. I’d answer, “not bloody likely.” Given that suffrage is about responsibility, about making reasoned choices and standing behind them, it seems wasted on women who dodge responsibility and keen on blame.
I was captivated by the story of the first Dorothy and her daughter Evelyn. I only wish I could have had more of them, and of the son Thomas. I wanted gaps filled in as to why the complete falling away of family, why the alcoholism and isolationism and denial. Perhaps the reason is obvious — their mother did what she did, after all — but I craved more from these children of Dorothy and would have gladly traded what felt like the nonsense of the next generations for more of the early Townsends.
When I first read the chapter about Liz as a short story in The New Yorker, I really liked it. I found the characters jarringly believable, the writing both fluid and neat, and the mood fully evocative of the times we live in. But as a chapter in this novel, the piece about Liz jarred me in another way: it just did not seem to fit in with the rest of the book. Liz fell quite flat in the context of the book and of her ancestors.
Kate Walbert does write beautifully. Her evocations of moments in history — World War I deprivation in England, brutality in a prison camp in World War II, and the wild day of chaos and celebration in New York City the day Japan surrendered — are simply stunning. Walbert’s writing is like the best fall apples, crisp, clean, and delicious, and she worked real magic in the story of the first Dorothy and her family. Unfortunately, the succeeding generations fell too far from the tree, and while not rotten, were mealy and mushy, and just a bit wormy.
