Choosing a Path

The setting is bleak.  It is a rural town in Ireland where residents are not well off.  Factories are closing and people worry about paying the bills; it is cold, windy and gray.  But it is Christmas and people have strung lights, baked something special, shared with their neighbors, enjoyed the warmth of their homes.

The hero, Bill Furlong, owns a business that delivers coal throughout the community. In his 40s, he is having a bit of a crisis – what is it all for?  He looks back on his childhood.  He was the illegitimate son of a single mother who through the kindness of her employers was able to keep her job as a maid in a wealthy house.  They all lived together, and the family treated him well. But the question of his father’s identity plagues him.

One of his deliveries on Christmas Eve is to the convent where unwed mothers work in the laundry.  The nuns also run the only good girls’ school in the area, a school that his own daughters attend.  It is at the convent that he encounters a different kind of crisis.  Bill has seen something he wishes he could ignore.

Earlier on this Christmas Eve day, he had received an unexpected present. Now he must make a difficult choice. How much is he willing to sacrifice to give a gift in return?

Much goes on in Shiprock, New Mexico, that day. A high-level US cabinet secretary in charge of uranium mining contracts may be coming, and the police are on high alert. A cult that opposes any type of mining has rented space nearby to “build a sweat lodge and meditate.”  Meanwhile, Manuelito’s sister, a home health aide, is worried about one of her “oldies” who has disappeared with her grandson.

The detectives have to deal with a lot in one short time period, but the plots are straight forward and easy to follow.  The best and most distinctive part of Hillerman’s mysteries are the warm descriptions of Navajo culture, seamlessly woven into the story.

But what did the women think of this label?  Maybe they were gifted artists themselves and wanted, and deserved, to be recognized as more than someone else’s inspiration. 

These are the women Lori Zimmer writes about in I’m Not Your Muse. She gives brief summaries of women artists whose work was overshadowed by men – their husbands, lovers, or business partners – because of the societal norms of the times. Her subjects represent a variety of arts from architecture to embroidery to circus performer to writer to painter. 

Her righting of an historical wrong, the subordination of the female partner, is a worthy endeavor.   The problems with the book are that the stories are oversimplified and there are so many individuals mentioned that I forgot the first few after I read about more and more.  What the book does well is give an idea of the breadth of the problem in the art world of the 20^th century and whet the appetite to read more about particular individuals.  

I especially liked the ending where she talks about Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Kati Horna, artists who escaped WWII to become expats in Mexico. There they formed a tight friendship where they helped and supported each other, personally and in their work.  Zimmer writes, “In a society when women still struggle for equality a quarter of the way into the twenty-first century, we should look to Carrington, Varo, and Horna, who chose to uplift each other, to collaborate rather than compete, to celebrate one another instead of letting society put them against each other.”  Amen to that.

While reading this book about talented women, I came across this old New Yorker cartoon: