Local Girls by Alice Hoffman

I want to talk to you this morning about a newish book by Alice Hoffman and also to mention a book of contemporary essays by Lynne Sharon Schwartz.

Probably most of you readers of fiction have read some of the little novels by Hoffman. She has a real talent for writing short, easy to read novels that pull the reader along with writing so artful that pages pass by effortlessly. Despite the ease of reading and lengths that invite the busy city reader, there is always substance to her novels as well.

When Clayton asked me what the theme of this novel is, I could find no easy way to describe it, but I suppose one could put it in the coming of age genre. The heroine, Gretel, and her best friend, Jill, find themselves locked in battle with the adults who seem to control them. In Gretel’s words: “It was not simply our neighborhood that we hated, but the entire adult world, which, regretfully, we were soon destined to join.”

In fact, this book is a series of little sketches, more like short stories than chapters in a novel. Hoffman may use this device as a way of covering more years in the lives of Gretel and Jill than would usually work well in a novel. We catch glimpses of the two girls when they are quite young, carrying out middle of the night pranks together and vowing eternal sisterhood. Other quick peaks when they are in the troubling twilight zone between childhood and grown women, Jill succumbing earlier Gretel to the world of boys. And from that point on, only a few sketches of their drifting apart, Jill into much too early motherhood, leaving Gretel lonely, confused, and yet thankful Jill’s life is not her’s.

And beside the story of these two runs a parallel one—two other ‘girls’ who have lived much as Gretel and Jill, but who are already aware of the dangers of men and the perils of being adult women. Indeed, this pair, cousins who are as close as grown-ups as they were as children, provide a depth and substance to the novel that it otherwise would not have had. I won’t be giving away too much of the story by telling you that Gretel’s mother, Francis, is sick with cancer from the time Jill is quite young. Francis’ childhood friend and cousin, Margot, is there for her during the surgeries and treatments, the remissions and recurrences, and she is there for Gretel as well, acting as a second mother, but one far enough removed to be friend and confidant as well. Margot’s skepticism and suspicion of men act as a kind of warning for Gretel, and the depth of commitment between the two older women also provides Gretel with a model of what relationships can be.

As Gretel and Margot learn to deal with the certainty of Francis’ impending death, the reader has a good backseat view, a kind of preparation for dealing with mortality that we must all face. But Hoffman is able to bring all of this off with a kind of humor and grace that adds a generous spoonful of sugar to the medicine. She is also able to describe a lot to us about small town life, about high promise in young people, boys in particular, that gets quickly and quietly snuffed via infatuation with drugs. Gretel’s brother, Jason, is the first in the town to be admitted to a prestigious ivy league school. Unlike most of the other boys in town, he has been serious about school, caring more about science projects and homework than about cars and girls and sports. Everything about his life seems to suggest that he will not be like the other boys and young men, and his sudden love affair with drugs surprises everyone, Gretel more than most. It must be just a phase; certainly he will come to, will realize that college is his way out of this small town, this life.

But enough of the story; the fact that the book is dedicated to Jo Ann Hoffman, 1950–1996, suggests to me that the young mother, Francis, who is dying of cancer is very well known to Alice Hoffman, and all of the sketches have that feel of memoir. The novel is uplifting, quick, and with the same magical quality as Hoffman’s other novels. If you pick it up and read it, you will probably not even notice the message or messages until you put it down.

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Let me mention this morning another book that I am currently reading and that I think all of you who love reading about us, here and now, will love. I have talked about the author many times on this program; her name is Lynne Sharon Schwartz, and she has written some of the best novels of the last thirty or forty years, including Disturbances in the Field, Leaving Brooklyn, The Fatigue Artist and my very favorite book about being a reader, Ruined by Reading. I am a reader, primarily, not a writer, but when I read Schwartz writing about what it is to be a reader in the world, I find myself wishing that I were the writer. Her new set of essays is called Face To Face: A Reader in the World. The very first essay is one about the telephone and the place it has come to occupy in our lives. Schwartz has the same fears and suspicions of the phone that I have, but she can write about those fears in ways that are so perceptive and so funny. One quick quote:

I’ve been told my ‘Hello’ sounds a world-weary, ‘What now?’ note—if not expecting the worst, then at least something pretty bad. This doesn’t surprise me. Our every gesture shows how we anticipate that the world will impinge on us--for impinging it must, and more and more often right at home, assaulting the open gate of the ear. The world’s approach, for me at any rate, is an interruption of the inner dialogue, at once fantastical and mundane, in which I’m forever absorbed.

I leave you to imagine for yourself her view of the ubiquitous cell-phone.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz is a wonderful New York activist, a woman who has had to learn to find a balance between her life as a writer and intellectual and social activist with the demands of being a mother, which she also loves and has freely chosen. She is one of the brightest and most humorous essayists I have encountered. I have always loved her novels, but it takes a very special essayist to lure me away from ficition. She is among the very best.

If you feel forced by your schedule to choose only one of the two books I have talked about, I would recommend the Schartz essays, meatier and more profound, but both are quite worth the read.

The Boy on the Green Bicycle by Margaret Diehl

I want to talk to you this morning about an achingly beautiful little book by Margaret Diehl entitled The Boy on the Green Bicycle. You may have read one of Diehl’s other books, Men or Me And You. I thought both were rather brave explorations of contemporary women questioning and experimenting with female-male relationships, but I can’t really remember much about either of them, and certainly neither prepared me for the soul-searching honesty of this memoir.

I readily admit to being a spoiled reader; even beautiful writing without serious content is insufficient, and I have to confess that serious social and political content is not enough unless written by a genuine word-weaver. Having said that, you may be surprised as you begin to read The Boy on the Green Bicycle, for it is the story of what most of us could only regard as a rich and privileged family, self-exiled from the south to a huge house in New Jersey. Although a large family by today’s standards, four children, three cats and a dog rambling in a huge old home, a devoted stay-home mother with ample funds for food and paid help creates what seem in the early pages of the book to be a culturally rich and stable home. The children range in age from six to fourteen, and the family seems to revolve around the oldest fourteen year old boy. Margaret is the next to youngest at seven as the story begins, and she remembers clearly (and seemingly without resentment) that Jimmy is the favorite not only of the other three children, but of her mother as well. Wise and compassionate beyond his years, he does not bully or dominate his younger siblings, but instead allows them into his world. Popular with other children as well, both boys and girls, the younger children seem quite content to hang suspended in his halo.

As you know, I hate giving away stories, but you would be unable to read any of the little jacket blurbs on this book without gleaning that Jimmy is the boy on the green bicycle, and that it is his death which is the compass point of the story. One reviewer is quoted on the cover as saying that this book is almost dangerously beautiful, and as odd as that comment seems, I soon came to see its accuracy. The events of the book are not happy, nor is the life of either the young Margaret or the shadow of the adult Margaret hinted at but not described in the book. Still, the writing, page by page, is stunning, and one can easily see the budding artistic genius of the author. Even tragedy is transformed into incandescent beauty through the word magic of this writer.

Indeed, in the early chapters of the book, one easily forgets the ominous warnings on the book-jacket and simply enters into the charmed life that Jimmy seems able to provide for himself and his siblings. If there is a shadow lurking over these pages, it is that of the father—a book publisher in New York who brings back from the city a fast-paced and anxious self-absorption that daily interrupts the smooth flow of family life. Around him, Margaret cannot but feel in the way, ungainly, ugly. At best, she is invisible when he is in the house, but even her invisibility is tenuous, and in spite of her fear of displeasing him, without quite knowing why, she desperately wants his attention. She lurks and spies, listening in on the conversations of her parents, afraid of being caught, but coveting the world they have together.

Let me allow Margaret to speak for herself of her father:

When he entered the house he was vibrating. His broad shoulders, big boxy head, the whole square picture of him, enhanced by square black glasses, square briefcase, and coat and hat, was in jerky motion beyond what was necessary to cover ground. He used too much force shutting the door, called out loudly for my mother, set down his briefcase, and let his hands free to shake for awhile.

Those hands! Thrust out in front of him as if he were desperate to get rid of them, two inches of slender wrist exposed. This was not a tremble. This was like something out of the movies, like propeller blades, back and forth, churning the air. I didn’t think of them as signaling an illness. What I thought was that they were bewitched, they had power.

When he could manage it, he lit a cigarette, a Lucky Strike, from the red-and-white package. After a few inhales, he’d look through his mail. Mostly long white envelopes addressed to A.C. Diehl. I had already investigated them. Bills. It surprised me that the world was not afraid of him ... Daddy’s arrival set the house into a glassy panic, which lasted all evening--yet the roar of his car, the shaking of his hands! Of course I can’t speak for the others, but I know they felt it. The engine of his sensual life. The fury and sobbing of a machine that is not being used properly, whose wheels will mount the curb as in all your favorite movies. What if he caught me spying? would he kill me? Sometimes he chased us, enraged, bellowing—took off his belt to whip us.

She speaks of her conviction that her father wants the children to disappear, wants her mother for himself alone, though none of this surprises her five and six and seven year old self; she supposes this is as it must me, simply the way fathers are.

He was there in the doorway, exuding that bewildered fury that was his most characteristic response to us. What was it like to be him, coming blinking into a room where his children saw him as the enemy? In my case, an enemy I secretly loved, felt so tender toward, protecting, yet no less scared or angry. I wanted him, but at a distance, not right next to me. I couldn’t stand it. His force field, the inverted nine-tenths of his rage, melted me inside, my ordered self fusing so I could barely think or know, so that I would be, for the length of the dinner, insane.

But if she fears and loves her father, she loves and trusts and wants to be swallowed up by her beautiful and calm, order-peace-making mother. All of the children vie to sit by the mother at table, where it is safe. If her descriptions of her father are frightening, and made more frightening by her acceptance of his indifference or rage as the norm, her descriptions of her mother are a lovely and soothing counterpoint. Her mother brings books and crystal and beauty into the home, and if she has a husband who frightens her children (and even her), she has a son who loves and adores her and supplies the loving attention lacking from her steam-engine husband. Indeed, Jimmy is the hope, the solace, the salvation for all of them—until he is struck down on his green bicycle, taken from them, leaving them to shatter and scatter into pieces.

And from Jimmy’s death on, this is a sad little book—a meticulous description of the effect of his death on her parents, of her father’s madness, precipitated if not caused by Jimmy’s death. I won’t tell you any more of the story, except to warn you that it is, indeed, sad, though the sheer beauty of the writing and the creative spirit of the little girl growing into the exquisite weaver of words that she becomes makes the reading worthwhile.

This is not, I think, a profound book, nor does it have much to tell us about world politics or important social issues. And yet, it is one that I could not put down once I started it, and I feel oddly enriched for having read it. When I think back over it, I think of precious stones, of words strung together to form gems, and you can be sure that I will read anything else that she writes.

The House Gun by Nadine Gordimer

I want to talk to you this morning about an author whom you have probably read in the past, but whom you may have forgotten since apartheid ended in South Africa. The author’s name is Nadine Gordimer, and the name of the novel is The House Gun.

In my estimation, Gordimer is one of the giants of the 20th century. Unlike artists who insist that they don’t want their work ‘tainted’ by political content, hinting that such works then become simply propaganda, Gordimer is and has always been a political writer. Indeed, her works were banned in her own country until apartheid came to an end, including the novel that won her the Booker prize in England--a wonderful novel about the colonization and exploitation of Africa, entitled The Conservationist.

Gordimer understands very well that the explo

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itation of Africans did not end with the official end of apartheid; she understands economic imperialism as well as anyone, and she knows that it does not end by government edict. Gordimer is not a writer for those who read simply to be entertained; not only is she tough politically, she also writes dense and complicated prose that requires close attention even of experienced readers. Often enough, her writing is simply page after page of stream of consciousness, the stream varying from character to character. Like a very few writers can do, instead of saying everything as slowly and as carefully as possible, Gordimer is an optimal user of the language, and she says as much as she can as fast as she can and invites her reader to keep up with her. She has an incredible vocabulary, a wonderful understanding of world economies, a fine grasp of (even very esoteric) philosophy, and an awe-inspiring grasp of human psychology.

There is no formula for understanding this novel short of close attentive reading. Two upper middle class white South Africans, a woman doctor and her upper level businessman husband are sailing comfortably along in their lives, drifting from each other (as old couples often do), often enough as bored with themselves as with each other, and despite rather liberal political leanings that make them cluck and shake their heads over events they read about in the paper or catch on the telly, they do very little other than send the occasional check to ‘worthy’ causes. They are above the fray. And then, out of nowhere, they are summoned one day to the police station and told that their precious only son has been charged with murder. Though they know, of course, that there must be some mistake, some confusion, they hurry to his side to rescue him.

I won’t be telling you much of the story if I let you know now that the son confesses to the killing! Apparently, he has killed a young man who lives with him and a group of other young people in a house and cottage rented by the whole group. The gun used in the killing has been located, tossed apparently carelessly into the bushes outside the house. Somehow, a woman with whom the son has been involved is at the center of things, having apparently slept with the murdered man, rather publicly, on a divan in the living room of the house, and now the man is dead.

When they visit the son, full of condolences for him and outrage at the obviously mistaken authorities, he is oddly calm and quiet, not denying the charges, not reassuring his parents of his innocence. And what is even worse, the semi-rich white couple are told to hire a black attorney who is famous for handling such cases. As the story begins to unfold, this clean, white, upstanding couple has to admit first that their son has done the killing (or will not deny it), and, even worse, that he has also been involved homosexually with the man he is accused of killing! What is worse, the charge of murder, or the sordid details of his bisexual life? And which of the parents is to blame for the twisted behavior of the boy?

The father, at least, has the refuge of his childhood Catholicism which he has not discarded despite his wives half amused, half disgusted dismissal of all such superstitious nonsense. Is it her fault, he wonders, that the boy has turned out so? She has been a rather cold mother, occupied so much with her patients and her practice and her (isn’t it unfeminine) lack of spirituality? Both parents ask questions, of themselves, and if not overtly of one another, then in their covert reveries. And this facile and too well dressed African attorney who asks such personal questions, and implies so much with both what he says and what he doesn’t, what are they to make of him?

I think rather than trying to tell you more of the story, I am simply going to read a rather lengthy passage which I hope will give you the flavor of the entire novel and of the questions these people have to ask themselves. The Senior Counsel referred to is the attorney, Hamilton Motsamai. The writing is abbreviated, a kind of short-hand stream of consciousness style, and I think this one passage will give you some feel for the whole and for the attention required by the reader. I only hope I can read it in a way that will carry its sense and its impact.

As you know, Senior Counsel said. But what concern had it been of theirs, except in the general way of civilized people—privately uncertain whether crime could be deterred without the ultimate retribution—dutifully supporting human rights and enlightened social practices where these had been violated in the country’s past. There had been so much cruelty enacted in the name of the State they had lived in, so many fatal beatings, mortal interrogations, a dying man driven across a thousand kilometres naked in a police van; common-law criminals singing through the night before the morning of execution, hangings taking place in Pretoria while a second slice of bread pops up from the toaster—the penalty unknown individuals paid was not in question compared with state crime. None of it had anything to do with them. Murderers, child batterers and rapists; if Dr. Lindgard [the wife] once or twice had professional contact with their victims and related to her husband the damage that had been done, neither she nor he had in their orbit, even remotely any likelihood of knowing the criminal perpetrators. (And perhaps, after all, they ought to be done away with for the general good?)

The Death Penalty. And now, too, it still seemed to have nothing to do with them or with their son. They had been obsessively preoccupied with why he did what he did, how he, one like themselves, their own, could carry out an act of horror—they had been unable to think further, only abstractly, confusedly now and then half-glanced at what a penalty could be, for him. The penalty had seemed to be the prison cell they had not seen, could not see, and the visitors’ room which was the only place of his material existence, for them. Even Harald; who in his religious faith, concerned himself with the act in relation go God’s forgiveness, and committed the heresy of denying that this grace, for the perpetrator, exists: ‘Not for me.’ The Death Penalty: distilled at the bottom of the bottle pushed to the back of the cupboard.

Hamilton Motsamai has left them. Door closed behind him, footsteps became inaudible, car must have driven away through the security gates of the townhouse complex. He was all there was between them and the Death Penalty. Not only had he come from the Other Side; everything had come to them from the Other Side, the nakedness to the final disaster: powerlessness, helplessness, before the law. The queer sense Harald had had while he waited for Claudia in the secular cathedral of the courts’ foyer, of being one among the father of thieves and murderers was now confirmed ... The truth of all of this was that he and his wife belonged, now, to the other side of privilege. Neither whiteness, nor observance of the teachings of the Father and Son, nor the pious respectability of liberalism, nor money, that had kept them in safety—that other form of segregation—could change their status.

Well, a sample at least of this wonderfully complex novel, whether or not my reading did it justice.