In The Women, Kristin Hannah offers a tribute to the young nurses who served in Vietnam. The first half of the book takes us right there, to the heat, sounds, the terror, as medical staff deal with so many wounded young men. The second sees them come home to an angry anti-war nation.
Frankie is a privileged young woman, newly graduated from nursing school in California, raised in a patriotic family whose generations of men have gone to war. When someone suggests that today, women can be heroes also, she idealistically enlists in the Army and is sent to Vietnam.
We see her character change, quickly, as she encounters the unimaginable reality. Although she comes home physically uninjured, she never recovers from that time. She endures the deaths of a family member and several close friends; she is betrayed by the love of her life and abandoned by her parents; she suffers from PTSD before the term has been defined; she is unable to get help from the VA because “there were no women in Vietnam.” But she does have the two close women friends she served with in Vietnam.
The novel is a bit overdone as Hannah tries to give as much of the wartime experience as possible to her one main character. It isn’t the most powerful war story I’ve read, but it is a worthwhile one about a group of women who deserve the honor of being remembered.
The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Toibin starts with a happy portrayal of a family’s evening in rural Ireland. Hugh and Helen are having a party. A large crowd of Hugh’s friends come; there’s plenty to eat and drink; many additional six packs are brought; several of the guests are pipers and fiddlers; a gang of children run around outside.
But happiness is not the subject of this Irish novel. Helen is not so gay at her party but feels a sense of disquiet. Toibin continues in this vein when he introduces a visitor the next day. He is her brother’s friend who has come to tell her that the brother is dying from AIDS. She is asked to give the news to her estranged mother and grandmother and to go to him.
The brother’s illness controls much of the plot, but it is the relationships among Helen, her mother and her grandmother that are the crux of the story. Neither of the two women were invited to Helen’s wedding or have met her husband and children; she hasn’t seen them in years. There is a painful, suppressed rage, each towards the other. Toibin places them in a situation where they are forced to interact to help the brother, and maybe to vocalize some of their feelings of fear, rejection, and anger carried forward from the past.
When Sandra Cisneros went to college, the literature she studied didn’t reflect a reality she recognized. She determined to write her own story in the voices she knew from her childhood, growing up poor in Chicago. The House on Mango Street is that story.
Vignettes, two or three pages long, start when Esperanza is a young child. Each paints a revealing slice of life in her family and then the larger Mexican community. Together they are the coming-of-age story of a bright young woman observing the poverty-stricken world around her.
In the tenth anniversary edition, the author writes a perceptive introduction about her eventual move away from home. “I was undergoing several changes of identity. For the first time I was living alone, in a community very different in class and culture from the one where I was raised. This caused so much unrest I could barely speak, let alone write about it.”
These phrases caught my attention as I have been thinking recently about the many cultural changes that have occurred in the last fifty years in our country: women’s equality and their expanding roles; protected minority rights in education, housing, jobs; LGBTQ being recognized and celebrated; white men’s traditional positions blamed and challenged. There are also technological changes – safe abortion; advent of the pill and the subsequent sexual revolution; in vitro fertilization.
These changes threaten our most basic identity, leaving us, as the author says, full of unrest. It may be a partial explanation for why many want to “go back to how things were” when they understood their roles more clearly. Fifty years may not be enough time for a culture to adapt and incorporate so many fundamental changes. Progress, unfortunately, is not a straight line.
One new word I learned this season is psephology – the scientific study of elections.
I also relearned a word I used in 2016, atavistic. It means reversion to some ancient instinct – such as “atavistic fears.” A need to return to the strongman with a club.
One of my favorite columns from the NYT, For the Love of Sentences, evoked some lively images about the election. One of the best was this wistful one, which hoped that Harris would win in spite of many American men’s desires:
“Their sense of world order is about to be undone by the women in their lives grabbing democracy by the ballot box. (When you’re a registered voter, they let you do it.)”
Another vivid sentence: “In Western Europe, many see America’s presidential election this year…as something more like a soccer game between a mid-ranking team and a herd of stampeding buffalo. Sure, the buffalo might win — but not by playing soccer.”
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