When God Was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman

It’s nice sometimes to read a book just for the delight of it; When God Was a Rabbit is full of delight as well as some wonderful observations on life. I’m sure a lot of you will remember Judy Blume’s wonderful little novel: Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.  Winman’s novel is in that lofty company. 

It’s a book about a young girl, Elly, and her brother who is five years older than she. Oh, and about a rabbit she is given and without any intention of sacrilege, she names God. Elly often gets into trouble at church, questioning things she should not. When she asks her mother if God loves everyone, “’Of course he does,’ my mother replied.” But her mother is alarmed by the question, and questions further.

‘Do you want to talk about anything?’ she asked quietly, reaching for my hand. (She had started to read a book on child psychology from America. It encouraged us to talk about our feelings. It made us want to clam up.) 

‘Nope,’ I said again through a small mouth. 

It had been a simple misunderstanding. All I had suggested was that Jesus Christ had been a mistake, that was all; an unplanned pregnancy.

‘Unplanned indeed!’ screamed the vicar. ‘And where did you get such blasphemous filth, you ungodly child?' 

‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘just an idea’

When told that God does not love those who question his divine plan, she stops attending church. Elly’s father, a religious skeptic, encourages Elly’ rebellion against religion. “’You don’t have to go to Sunday school or church for God to love you ‘Or for anyone to love you. You know that, don’t you?’ 

‘You’ll understand that as you get older,’ he added. But I couldn’t wait that long. I’d already resolved that if this God couldn’t love me, then it was clear I’d have to find another one that could.

After befriending an 80 year old man in her neighborhood, she decides she’d like to be Jewish. She and her best friend, Jenny Penny, and her brother form an hilarious threesome as they skip through their youths. When her father wins a football pool and is suddenly a rich man, his life changes little except that he buys a new Mercedes with tinted windows. When Elly’s mother insists that the car is not them, says she won’t ride in it and then insists that either the car goes or she does, and she does.

I read this book several weeks ago, and one problem with putting off reviews is that by the time I got to this one, I had forgotten much of the story. Instead of simply going through my underlinings and notes, I started the book over, and was as delighted by it on second reading as on the first. This caused me to recall that whenever I used novels in my classes, I always reread each novel as my students were reading it for the first time, wanting not simply to refresh my memory, but to share in the emotional impact of the books which I could not do simply by writing a description. 

Winman was an actress before she became a writer, and it is obvious in the script quality of her dialogue. 

There was no great epiphany, no precise moment when I swapped the spoken word for the written word. I had been acting for twenty-three years and had always written, but mainly in script form, as most actors do.

Fortunate for us readers that she decided to write fiction, and fortunate too that her debut novel was this coming of age tale. While simply a lovely frolic for the most part, there are also darker passages when Elly describes the very different home-life of her best friend Jenny Penny. The simplicity of the writing  makes believable that it is the story of a young girl, but it also allows for a really lovely naivete, a refreshing and revealing innocence. Elly tell us that she divides her life into two parts, the first before she met Jenny Penny, and the rest after that friendship began to blossom. 

She featured not at all during this [early] period and I realize she was the colour that was missing. She clasped the years either side of this waiting and held them up as beacons, and when she arrived in class that dull January morning it was as if she herself was the New Year; the thing that offered me the promise of beyond. But only I could see that. Others, bound by convention, found her at best laughable, and at worst someone to mock. She was of another world; different. But by then, secretly, so was I. She was my missing piece; my compliment in play.

Elly could have been describing herself here rather than Penny, and for this reader, she opens up a new and refreshing world.

Girl In The River by Patricia Kullberg

It is with great pleasure that I talk with you this morning about a splendid novel by a good friend and fellow Old Mole, Patricia Kullberg. I’m not sure how this novel slipped by me in 2015, but it did. While at lunch with another Portland feminist and leftist, Johanna Brenner, in the course of our conversation Johanna asked, “Have you read Patsy’s novel?” No, I was ashamed to say, I had not, and could not really recall it ever being mentioned to me. The novel is Girl in the River, and besides being a rich historical novel about Portland and about the work of one particular Portland woman, it is a wonderfully told story.

Since I knew Patricia had been a physician and Medical Director for Multnomah County Health Department, I expected her novel to be well researched and historically significant, what I did not quite expect was how totally captivating her story would be and how convincing and well fleshed out her characters are. Her main characters are Mabelline (a.k.a. Mae Rose), Mae’s dear friend Trudy, and Dr. Ruth Barnett. Although Patricia hastens to tell the reader that her characters are fictitious and the story a product of her imagination, there can be no doubt that Dr. Barnett is modeled on a real woman—a woman who helped hundreds of women terminate their pregnancies. For many years, Dr. Barnett maintained her clinic under a “longstanding arrangement between the legal establishment and the abortionists.. So long as no woman died, the law looked the other way…And no patient of Ruth Barnett’s had ever died. She was the best. Everyone knew it, from the mayor to the street sweeper.”

Mae comes to know Dr. Barnett because she and Trudy are very sought after prostitutes who are very much a part of the high society of Portland, and Dr. Barnett is also a well known part of that ‘high society’. Mae’s mother ran a boarding house in a small town in Portland, and Mae is her do-everything helper; she helps in the kitchen, cleans the rooms and looks after her hard-working mother. When Mae’s mother, Lilly, dies quite young and unexpectedly, “a man with a pressed shirt and clean nails showed up at the Rose Home for Mill Hands and Lumberjacks. He’d come to take possession not of Mae, but of her home. He was from the bank and had papers to prove they owned it.” For a time she turns to a man she already knows for help;  “She went to live with Mr. Goshorn and his six striplings.” Fortunately for Mae she is able to extricate herself fairly quickly from that slave-like situation, and soon finds herself on the streets of Portland with no money and no real means of employment. She is soon arrested for vagrancy (the catch-all charge used to incarcerate the poor and jobless.” She finds herself in Rocky Butte jail without bail or any likelihood of freedom. Already an avid reader, she is hopeful when she hears that:

Rocky Butte had a library. Mae, picturing the colossal, wood-paneled room of the library downtowns with stacks and stacks of books, had been excited until she surveyed what the jail had—five copies of the Holy Bible; two guides to reading it; several manuals on household crafts, half of which Mae could have written herself; a couple dozen novels like Little Little Women and Pollyanna; and several issues each of Dime Detective and Screen Book, dog-eared and torn up.

Without giving up too much of the story, suffice it to say that Mae is eventually rescued by a woman named Trudy who admits to Mae that she is a prostitute and counsels her to avoid pimps at all costs, and suggests that Mae go into business with her (under the protection of a Madam). “…Mae decided maybe she didn’t mind the big bucks and being her own boss, the fun and the glamor. She liked being admired. She didn’t give a hoot about being loved. Not by a man.”

Mae and Trudy have quite a good life together and genuinely love each other, though Trudy always seems to want more from Mae than she can honestly give.

The descriptions Patricia Kullberg gives of Portland street life and the web of political and police corruption shine with authenticity, and she often quotes or paraphrases from news stories of the time, adding to the veracity of her story.

Eventually, Mae wants out of prostitution, and she manages to talk Dr. Barnett into taking her on as an assistant. Certainly a big step down in income and in the luxuries of her daily life, but for the first time she has work that is deeply meaningful to her, and works for a woman she genuinely admires.

This is a rich and wonderful story; once I started it, I read it up in two days and felt in its thrall for many weeks after. I don’t think I have done justice to the complexity of this tale nor the relationships that Mae has with both men and women. I will close by quoting from the epilogue:

Ruth Barnett continued to perform abortions after she was arrested and her clinic shut down in 1951. She never turned a blind eye to a woman in trouble. She was repeatedly arrested and hauled into court, but did not exhaust her legal appeals until 1967. At the age of seventy-eight and suffering from malignant melanoma, she became the oldest woman ever sent to prison in Oregon. She was paroled five months later and died in 1969, less than four years before the landmark decision, Roe vs. Wade.

Writing this book was obviously a labor of love for Patricia, and it has been a labor of love for me to read it. We can only hope she writes more fiction to go along with her many nonfiction articles and collaborations.

I have been talking about Patricia Kullberg’s novel, Girl in the River. 

Necessary Lies by Diane Chamberlain

I want to review for you an excellent though often very sad novel by Diane Chamberlain, Necessary Lies. There are two primary  narrative voices. Ivy, a fifteen year old girl who lives on a tobacco farm and takes care of her intellectually challenged sister, Mary Ella,  her grandmother whom everyone calls Nonnie, and her nephew, Baby William, Mary Ella’s infant son. Jane, the other narrator, is a recently employed social worker for the state of North Carolina, and Ivy, her sister and the household are some of her first clients. Jane has just married a doctor who is not at all happy with her taking a job at all, let alone one in which she deals with welfare recipients and even people of color. 

Mary Ella has her baby out of wedlock and refuses to name the father. Mary Ella is a beautiful blond girl who is intellectually challenged, and although the reader is not informed of this until fairly far into the novel, she has already been sterilized (under the pretense of an appendectomy) due to her low IQ, and her being on welfare. Nonnie, the grandmother has agreed to the sterilization because she thinks the family simply cannot afford another baby, and May Ella shows no signs of changing her behavior with the boys who chase after her. Mr. Gardiner, the owner of the tobacco farm allows the family to live for free in a tiny shack on the farm; he also allows a black family headed by a mother, Lita, to live in a similar shack with her three sons, one of whom is almost completely blind. Nonnie lives in constant fear that Gardiner will force them to leave the house and to stop giving them produce (which they refer to as a little something extra). Both girls work on the farm for very low wages, and even the grandmother, much hampered by arthritis, works some in the tobacco barns stripping and wrapping tobacco leaves. 

It is only after some weeks on the job that Jane learns of the eugenics program in North Carolina. She is just beginning to gain the trust of Ivy when she is told by her superior that the state is preparing to take away Baby William. She comes to learn that Mary Ella has already been sterilized, although Mary Ella has not been told, tricked into the procedure and told that she simply had an appendectomy. Ivy is the good girl who worries about the promiscuity of her pretty sister and the declining health of Nonnie. Mary Ella has a wonderful relationship with her infant son, but she is neglectful and the State decides that Baby William is in danger living in the household.

Soon, Jane is fighting on two fronts, fighting her husband and his family over her work which they find unnecessary and demeaning, and her superiors who think themselves entirely justified in performing sterilizations without informing the victims for a variety of trumped up reasons, but most of it coming down simply to their being on welfare. 

Although Ivy does well in school and seems quite bright to Jane (certainly bright enough to keep her family together and fed),  IQ tests brand her her as low normal, and when she, despite her success in school and her general rule of staying away from boys also turns up pregnant, Jane is instructed by her superiors to draw up a petition for sterilization of Ivy at the time she is to give birth to her baby. Ivy has been in love with the Gardner’ youngest son for much of her childhood, and when he insists that by pulling out before ejaculating, she will not/cannot get pregnant, she defers to his “wisdom”. Because Ivy is a minor, she does not need to consent to the sterilization or even to be told about it. Her grandmother is essentially forced into giving permission by the threat of losing her home and her welfare checks.

When Jane informs Mary Ella that she has been sterilized and threatens to tell Ivy what will happen to her when she gives birth, she is summarily fired for insubordination. Her husband wants out of the marriage, and it seems her life is about to come completely apart.

I have probably already told too much of the story, but there are a number of wrinkles I have not touched on and that make for a very complex ending to this novel. What is very clear is that Diane Chamberlain has thoroughly researched the eugenics program in North Carolina, and as she says in her author’s note: 

From 1929 until 1975, North Carolina sterilized over seven thousand of its citizens. The program targeted the “mentally defective,” the “feebleminded,”  inmates in mental institutions and training schools, those suffering with epilepsy, and others whose sterilization was considered “for the public good”. 

While other states had similar programs, most of them stopped performing state-mandated sterilizations after World War II, uncomfortable over comparisons to the eugenics experiments in Nazi Germany. North Carolina,, however, actually; increased its rate of sterilizations after the war.

While in the early years of the program, the focus was on institutionalized individuals, it shifted that focus to women on welfare later on and became a tool for reducing the welfare rolls. It also became more and more targeted to African Americans. By the late fifties, 64 percent of those sterilized were African Americans.

While it is obvious that Chamberlain’s main focus in this novel is the eugenics program, she creates very believable characters and spins out an intriguing story. I applaud her bravery in informing those of us who are not as historically educated as we should be about  this woeful program. 

I know I have painted a bleak picture here, but this is really an excellent novel and one that deserves a wide audience. I have been talking about Diane Chamberlain’s 2013 novel, Necessary Lies.