Brave Girl, Quiet Girl by Catherine Ryan Hyde

I started whispering in her ear, but so quiet I wasn’t sure she could even hear me. It was more like making the words with my lips against her ear, but then just this tiny breath of air that was the sound.

I said, “Brave girl, quiet girl.”

She said it back to me, just as quiet, which really surprised me. She stopped her run-up to that big cry and whispered back to me, “Brave girl, kiet girl,” right in my ear. She didn’t really get the kw sound in quiet—I think she was too young to have gotten the hang of that sound--but anyway I knew what she meant so what difference did it make?

Catherine Ryan Hyde’s 2020 novel, Brave Girl, Quiet Girl, begins with a violent car-jacking. Brooke, a divorced single mom is driving her mother’s  expensive Mercedes with her two year old daughter, Etta, strapped into her car-seat in the back, but she is dragged from the car by the thief, and watches helplessly as the car drives off with her daughter still strapped in.

This occurs in the first few pages of this frightening and yet lovely book about Brooke, Etta, and Molly, a sixteen-year-old homeless girl.  Molly is with her also homeless male friend late at night when she spots Etta, still strapped in her car-seat on the sidewalk. With no phone, no money, and no idea how Etta got there, Molly is faced with the daunting challenge of returning the little girl to her family.

I have sometimes put aside one of Hyde’s many novels because it seems just too sentimental, too sweet, too full of pathos. And this novel is certainly high on the pathos scale, and yet it captured me early on, gripped me, and I just could not stop reading it until I was finished.

Molly is homeless and on the streets because she has been tossed out of her home in St. George Utah and told not to return unless, and until, she has shed the devil that she has brought into her family home. Molly, under pressure from her girlfriend, had decided to come out to her mother, and that is what her mother labels bringing the devil into the home.

I won’t divulge much of the story here, but I will tell you that the reader is kept on tenterhooks during the early phases as Molly tries to care for little Etta and to hide her away from other street youths who intend to grab her from Molly and hold her for ransom. Molly had helped raise her two younger sisters, and so is a competent and loving caretaker, but with no funds for food or diapers for the toddler. 

After several very frightening events, Molly is finally able to race after a police car with Etta holding on for dear life, and thus begins the reuniting of Etta with her mother Brooke. Initially, Brooke is angry with the young girl, not understanding why she did not alert the police earlier or find a way to call Etta’s mother in spite of the fact that there is an amber alert out for her. The rest of the novel is devoted to the interactions of mother and daughter and the intervention of a sympathetic female police officer who firmly but gently leads Brooke into a better understanding of Molly’s heroic actions in saving Etta. 

Although Brooke, herself, has a very troubled relationship with her own mother, she assumes that Molly must have done something horrible or unlawful to have provoked her mother in to forcing her from the home. She decides to drive from California to St. George to confront Molly’s mother, and to, hopefully, get Molly back into her family home. 

When Brooke finally confronts Molly’s mother and learns of her super-fundamentalist religious beliefs that treat homosexuality as a dreadful sin and a chosen life-style that can be discarded like a filthy cloak, she begins to reassess Molly and to try to care for her in something like the loving ways Molly has cared for Etta. 

While the plot is what drives this novel, it turns out to reveal a deep understanding of street-kids, and the many different reasons that people find themselves homeless and living on the streets. I find myself very impressed by both Hyde’s excellent story-telling and her desire to talk about social issues and the meaning of love.

Baby Etta loves Molly from the start, and calls out Molly, Molly, Molly whenever she sees her. While it takes much longer for Brooke to begin to see the sterling qualities of Molly, the relationship that develops between the two women is heartening 

I suppose there will be some readers who find this book to be corny and much too sentimental, I thought it to be a beautiful story about love, and redemption. 

Late In The Day by Tessa Hadley

It is always such a pleasure to stumble onto a writer previously unknown who absolutely commands attention. Tess Hadley is such a writer. Today I want to talk about her 2019 novel Late in the Day. I am so struck with her writing and her wisdom that I find trying to review her work daunting, and I’m not at all sure I’m up to the task. Like the great author, Elizabeth Bowen, whom Hadley deeply admires, Hadley writes primarily, even exclusively, about domestic scenes. While her characters may be more brilliant and creative than most people, what she tries to describe, carefully, minutely, are the everyday concerns of people living intimately together. 

Christine and Lydia have been devoted friends since their early twenties, and their two husbands, Alexander and Zachery, are nearly as close. Zach and Lydia own a small but well known art gallery. Christine is an artist and her husband Alex is a teacher and art dealer. The foursome are as close as any four friends could be, and are drawn even closer in that each has a daughter of roughly the same age who grow up together in the bosom of that extended family.

Suddenly and unexpectedly, when all four are in their fifties, Zach dies of a heart attack, and  in the aftermath of his death, Lydia moves in with Alex and Christine and the two daughters Grace and Isobel stay in Isobel’s flat. All agree that Zach is the most irreplaceable, the glue binding them together. At first, it seems that the loss of Zach will bring the other three closer together, and in many senses it does. But eventually, due to entanglements from their pasts as well as the different ways they cope with the loss, the relationships begin to fray.

The story is far too complex to simply gloss, and it is not really the story or its outcome that matter most to Hadley; it is the almost minute by minute transformations that she expertly reveals. I first started reading this book in 2019, but gave up on it after about fifty pages; it just seemed too complex, and I’m sure I moved on to something lighter and less demanding.  This is not a novel that can or should be read in small snippets of weeks or months; like another book of hers (The Past), it is best read in a sustained manner, not quickly, but with rather complete attention. 

In broad terms, suffice it to say that when Christine and Lydia first met Alex (who was himself already married), it was Lydia who became obsessed with him, who felt she must find a way into his life. 

But Christine felt how Alex didn’t respond to this charm [of Lydia’s] as he was supposed to. Lydia’s audacious frankness, her wide-eyed delivery, complacent like a purring cat, which had been so confounding to other men, didn’t impress him. In Alex’s presence , so perfected and adult, Lydia’s cleverness seemed flawed and home-made, embarrassing like a precocious child’s.

And so it is Christine who ends up marrying Alex, though as the story unwinds, it becomes obvious that the flame in Lydia for Alex lies smoldering through the years to come. 

There is much discussion among the friends and their little community of intellectuals and artists about the nature of art, of what constitutes great art, and with the question of whether women can be serious artists. 

Lydia put in her own remarks among the men, and they all deferred to her, but Christine saw that they didn’t quite take what she said seriously—not because they thought it was stupid exactly, but because her appearance blocked their attention, like a dazzle of sunlight in a reflection off glass. They were exaggeratedly solicitous and encouraging when the girls spoke, as they were with one another. There was a danger, Christine thought, that you might end up performing for them, like a curiosity—and Lydia was inclined to show off if she had an audience.

Eventually, the situation devolves into a love triangle, or perhaps I should say a love quadrangle. Angers and resentments boil up over many things. Zach comes into a great deal of money (which allows him to buy the art gallery and to begin to buy and trade prestigious artworks). Rather than being envious of Zach and Lydia’s wealth, it is Zach’s attempts to help the other couple financially that begins to cause rifts in their relationship.

Hadley is not one to tie things up neatly in the end; like real life, things are left dangling and incomplete. “Alex had said once that she (Christine) ought to give up her hope of wholeness, of a meaning, because it was naïve.”

Letting herself into the flat she was glad to be alone. Solitude and silence had begun to be sensuous pleasures for her. It would have been awful in that moment to give false explanations to anyone, perform the sociability she did not feel. Instead she slipped off her shoes before she walked around the rooms, as if she didn’t want to intrude even her own presence noisily.

Besides her four novels, Hadley has also published several volumes of short fiction. I intend to read all of her work. She is a rare find and a superb writer.

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.