Wild Life by Molly Gloss

I admit I was pierced with loneliness. There is something about a lighted room when you are standing outside it in the cold night.

Good morning readers. Although I was already aware of what a fine writer Molly Gloss is from having read her novel Jump-Off Creek, I must admit I was stunned by the depth of her wisdom in her 2000 novel Wild Life. Writing as Charlotte Bridger Drummond, or simply C.B.D., Gloss creates a character who is tough, independent, and a fully fledged feminist. Set in the early 1900s in a small logging town on the borders of Oregon and Washington, Charlotte is a widowed mother of five boys who supports her family by writing women’s adventure novels. Charlotte is fiercely independent; she wears men’s clothes, smokes cigars or a pipe in public, eschews domestic tasks as far as possible, and creates for herself a private writing space, a room of her own.

Charlotte is irreverent and often very humorous in her descriptions of men and of their laughably absurd views of the weakness of women.  The men in the logging camps are fond of telling tall tales about Wild Men of the Woods, and while Charlotte, herself, is not opposed to to wild-west tales, she is scornful of the way men tell their stories as attempts to scare women and children.

The novel is as much about writing as it is about the adventure Charlotte goes through when she joins a search party looking for a young girl, Harriet, who has been lost in the woods and who loggers claimed was carried off by a huge, hairy ape-like animal. As the story begins to unfold, it transpires that Charlotte, herself, becomes separated from the rest of the search party.

Quoting Samuel Butler as she begins to describe her life lost in the wild, Molly Gloss begins to prepare her readers to suspend disbelief and allow her to spin her story.

When anything in [my books] is strange and outre, it is probably drawn straight from nature as close as I could draw it; when it is plausible, there is probably no particular and especial foundation for it.

Even the domestic help Charlotte has hired to free her up from many domestic tasks is outwardly disdainful of Charlotte’s lack of femininity,. and scolds her for spending so much time away from her children and locked in her writing shed.

She was half inclined to cry at being unable to devote herself entirely to her work, though she considered the work only a means to an end, which was the support of her family. In later years she would discover that the work was everything to her—everything—but now she tossed and tossed, trying to explain and defend something that shifted and was elusive; and at such times she has secretly—horrifyingly—wished for a calamity that would free her of the weight, the otherwise inescapable burden of her maternity.

If I had been born a man, I would have created for myself a world full of work and egoism and imagined that my whole life belonged to me. But since I was born a woman, I suffered the usual girlish desires and aspirations; and I believed that my life should eventually be joined to a husband.

Both a mother and a wife by the age of twenty, and then within ten years a widowed wife and mother of five boys. All of this novel is peppered with stories and quotes from women about what they are expected to write about.

I have said nothing yet about Charlotte’s life while lost in the wild, and I don’t intend to reveal much of that story to you. Suffice it to say that Charlotte , starving and near dead is taken in by a family of human-like creatures who allow her to hunt and gather with them and who cause her to question her previous beliefs about the relations between humans and creatures of the woods. If you are a reader wholly opposed to fantastical literature, then this may not be the book for you, but I would also remind you of the splendid books of Ursula K. Le Guin, and invite you to suspend for a time your skepticism.

Gloss may well be describing herself, or Le Guin, or countless other women writers  as she speaks in the voice of C.B.D.:

As a thoroughgoing Feminist and a woman who has herself thrown over the traces of domestication as much as can be done without risking arrest, I do my best to swim against the tide. For heroine of a scientific romance, I will always choose the scientifically inclined daughter or sister of a world-renowned anthropologist; and for the western romance, look for a girl who can ride and shoot, a ranch girl born and raised in the West…

Although I, myself, have in the past rejected most fantasy writing,  in the past couple of decades I have been more open to fantasy fiction as a vehicle for environmental issues, for women’s fiction, and simply for the delight of the stories.

This is a book I could well have reviewed simply by stringing together quotes from the novel. It is a wonderfully humorous novel as it pokes fun at men and holds up to the light expectations of women not only of the West or of days gone by, but of us-here-now.

A Piece Of The World by Christina Baker Kline

Over the years, certain stories in the history of a family take hold. They’re passed from generation to generation, gaining substance and meaning along the way. You have to learn to sift through them, separating fact from conjecture, the likely from the implausible. 

Here is what I know: Sometimes the least believable stories are the true ones.

Christina Baker Kline was fascinated with Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World from the time she was a little girl, and the fascination remained as she grew into the wonderful writer she is today. I share that fascination as I’m sure many of you do. There is something austere and haunting about the painting. As Kline says in her Author’s Notes: “Throughout my childhood I made up stories about this slight girl in a pale pink dress with her back to the viewer, reaching toward a weathered gray house on a bluff in the distance.”

In her fictionalized account of Christina, Kline tells the story of a girl who is crippled from childhood on—victim of a degenerative disease that renders her more and more unable to move much or to care for herself. While Kline is adamant that her novel is fiction, nevertheless it is obvious that she has researched both Wyeth and Christina extensively giving the book the feel of autobiography. The character Kline creates is austere, unsentimental, and fiercely private.

Alvaro, Al, is Christina’s brother and eventually her caretaker; he gives up his own dreams and even his hopes for a wife and family of his own to care for his sister. As a very young girl, she is cared for by her father, but he is embarrassed by her ‘infirmity’ and so keeps her out of school and pretty much sheltered from the world.

I want more than anything for Papa to be proud of me, but he has little reason. For one thing, I am a girl. Even worse—I know this already, though no one’s ever actually said it to me—I am not beautiful.

On top of that, there’s my infirmity. When we’re around other people, Papa is tense and irritable, afraid that I’ll stumble, knock into someone, embarrass him. My lack of grace annoys him. He is always muttering about a cure.

His shame makes me defiant. I don’t care that I make him uncomfortable. Mother says it would be better if I weren’t so willful and proud. But my pride is all I have.

Christina knows that her father was drawn to her mother because of her mother’s great beauty, and thus always feels judged as both awkward and ugly.

Through a friend whom Christina mentored as a young girl, and who comes back into her life as a young woman, she is introduced to the then young and unknown painter Andrew Wyeth, who lives in the shadow of his already famous father who is well known for his illustrations. Young Andrew begins to hang around the house, sketching the house and the farmland around it. He sketches Al doing his chores. He is allowed to convert an unused bedroom into a studio and becomes a kind of fixture. “He doesn’t see us as a project that needs fixing. He doesn’t perch on a chair, or linger in a doorway, with the air of someone who wants to leave, who’s already halfway out the door. He just settles in and observes…He understands why I’m content to spend my days sitting in the chair in the kitchen, feet up on the blue-painted stool, looking out at the sea…There’s more grandeur in the bleached bones of a storm-rubbed house, he declares, than in drab tidiness.

Andrew also suffered from an ailment that caused him to walk with an awkward gait, and although she refuses his requests to paint her, she is comfortable in his presence and comes to see him as a friend to both her and Al.

There is a lovely slow pace to this novel, and I found myself often looking at the print of the famous painting in the back of the book. What is it about the painting that makes it so magnetic and yet so sad?

Although Andy hangs around the brother and sister for thirty years, Christina only allows him to paint her after many years of refusal.

Again from the Author’s Notes:

For the next thirty years, Christina was Andrew Wyeth’s muse and his inspiration. In each other, I believe, they came to recognize their own contradictions. Both embraced austerity but craved beauty; both were curious about other people and yet pathologically private. They were perversely independent and yet reliant on others to take care of their basic needs: Wyeth on his wife Betsy and Christina on Alvaro.

There is little action in this novel, and it takes some getting into, but you readers will eventually be as drawn to to the novel as to the famous painting, and for much the same reason.

The Butterfly Girl by Rene Denfeld

I want to talk to you today about a book that is at once extremely sad and incredibly lovely. The book is The Butterfly Girl, by Rene Denfeld. Ms. Denfeld is an author, journalist and licensed public defense investigator. I have previously reviewed her other two novels, The Enchanted, about death-row inmates, and The Child Finder. I won’t tell you too much about the story-line since it is a kind of mystery, and I would not want to be a spoiler.

There are two primary narrators in this novel: Naomi, an investigator who specializes in finding lost children, and Celia, a twelve year old girl who lives in a sort of community of street children. Naomi has decided she will not take another case until she finds her younger sister with whom she was abducted years before. Naomi escaped, but her sister did not. She has no picture of her sister and no name, but she is determined to find her. Naomi remembers very little of her own escape, but one lead has led her to Portland, Oregon, and it is there that she continues her search.

Celia is on the run from an abusive stepfather and a mother who is an addict. While she occasionally checks in with her mother, she is afraid to give away her location.

Celia disappeared inside herself. She was used to doing that. She could make herself vanish even as she stood there, just another street urchin with no future in sight. 

Celia who believed in nothing but herself and the butterflies, knew that the worst fears of the streets were always real. You can find that out the hard way, or you can be watchful. 

Naomi and her husband Jerome are staying with one of Naomi’s old friends while Naomi continues her search. She wakens from a dream of still being in captivity, and hearing the voice of her sister “back there. In that place.”

She breathed out in relief that the dream was over but still felt the anxious echo of the call. 

I’m getting closer, she thought. This is why she was here in the city with Jerome. After almost a year of searching for her long-lost sister, their investigation had brought them here.

Celia and her street friends Rich and Stoner sleep under an overpass at night, and offer each other friendship and what protection they can provide.

When Celia first encounters Naomi on the streets where Naomi is asking questions of street people in hopes of coming up with some leads, Celia does not trust this well dressed and seemingly assured woman, but eventually as the story unwinds she begins to trust her, and Naomi, for her part, cannot ignore this streetwise child even though she is on her own search.

Denfeld is an incredible writer, not simply sympathetic to the street people, her connection is much deeper. She could be describing herself as she describes Naomi during a period in her investigations.

Naomi was standing outside the Aspire shelter. The smeary brick, the narrow streets, the shapes huddled in the doorways—all felt familiar to her now. She has crossed the threshold. The world of the missing had become her own world. She knew the regulars, the bruised-cherry alcoholics, the families on nodding acquaintance, the street kids like Celia.

There is no condescension in Denfeld’s dealings with the homeless, no us/them dichotomy. No wonder she can create such believable characters, can give the reader views from the inside.

As in her novel The Child Finder, Denfeld is intrigued by and describes meticulously how children who are held captive and cannot escape may create a kind of escape with their minds. Celia escapes via her world of beautiful butterflies, her guides and guardians on the streets. 

If you take a burrowing animal and deny it anything but a glass cage, it  will break its  own claws in the madness to escape. Naomi, who once had no escape, had created one with her mind.

Margaret Atwood, who is herself an amazing and deeply insightful author says of this book, “A heartbreaking, finger-gnawing, and yet ultimately hopeful novel…”

I have no intention of telling you in what ways the novel is hopeful or of revealing much more of the plot, but I am certain you will find this a socially significant and rewarding read. In her acknowledgements Denfeld credits libraries for her books and for her salvation. Like many of us she finds books to be a window into a better world.