Carolyn Heilbrun, writing under the pseudonym of Amanda Cross, has been turning out mystery novels for many years, and while I’m sure she would be the first to insist that her Kate Fansler detective novels are not great fiction, not even great mysteries, she has certainly found an excellent form for her feminist political commentary. Kate Fansler, the heroine of the novels is, like Heilbrun, a professor of literature, but much more outspoken and brash in her social and political views. Death in a Tenured Position is probably the best known of the Cross novels, and while humorous and fast paced, it is a bitingly accurate picture of the discrimination women faced in universities of the 70s. Her 2000 novel, Honest Doubt, shows that in the most important ways, little has changed since then. But Heilbrun decides to give us an outsider’s view of university life by introducing a new detective, Estelle “Woody” Woodhaven, who has neither Fansler’s social standing nor her experience in the Academy. Woody is a much more blue collar detective, hired by a small New England university, Clifton, to try to find the murderer of a much disliked senior professor and department Chair. Woody is advised to seek Kate Fansler’s help precisely because Fansler does know the intricacies of university politics.
Besides giving us an outside and innocent view of universities, Woody also introduces a topic that Heilbrun obviously thinks is insufficiently addressed by left-liberal politics, namely, the discrimination against fat people. Woody is, herself, a large woman, and while her size has at times given her an advantage in detecting, namely that of being invisible to almost all men and most women, she nevertheless understands the societal bias against being fat.
I collect plump people who are accomplished as well as heavy. It helps to knit up my raveled self-esteem. People seldom realize it, but fat is the only affliction that has never been protected by affirmative action, anti-bias laws, or any other category like sexual harassment, date rape, or domestic violence, though I seem to remember someone once wrote a book called Fat is a Feminist Issue. The point is, it’s okay to say and do anything to fat people short of murder, and to refuse them a job because you think their failure to lose weight is a character and mental defect. They don’t even call it heft-disadvantaged or weightily challenged.
Discussions between Fansler and Woody show just how difficult it is for most even to see fat as a political issue and how tempting it is to suppose that weight is everywhere and always a matter of choice and free will. And while Woody is helping Fansler to understand what it is like to live as a large, indeed a fat woman, Fansler tries to help Woody understand the intricacies of university life and the tenure system. Heilbrun’s way of telling the story of how older men do (both historically and at present) determine who gets hired, fired, and promoted is so witty but also so accurate; I would like to quote long passages rather than trying to overview her descriptions, but time constraints force me to summarize. Woody, ignorant of how universities operate wonders aloud to Kate why Ph.D.s continue to be awarded and graduate schools continue to expand if there are so few jobs available to the new doctorates. Why, instead, don’t universities simply stop or drastically trim the number of doctorates granted? Fansler explains that the universities want the money graduate students bring in (both in tuition and grants and state assistance); they want to maintain their standing in the academic world. In addition, older tenured professors prefer to teach graduate students, folks who are clearly interested in learning what they have to offer (unlike many undergraduates), and even more importantly, they want graduate students to teach all the large lecture sections and survey courses, the real money-makers for universities, but difficult and time-consuming for the senior staff who, after all, are promoted and rewarded not for teaching, but for publishing. Never mind that no one save a few peers actually reads what they publish, since “…what every professor wants is time to research and write a book—any book ... Teaching is not what it is about ... Not after the first few years anyway. And those for whom teaching is a joy, those who don’t long for time off, don’t get tenure; they certainly don’t get the thanks of their academic institution.”
The second of the two Cross novels I’m talking about today is The Puzzled Heart, and while it, too, is all about universities and the sexism rampant within universities, the overriding topic is that of the far right and the tactics they are willing to use to further their conservative agendas. “….the right wing in this country, Christians though they may call themselves, are besotted with their message. They are like fundamentalists everywhere, certain of their correctness and of being ordered by God to destroy those who disagree with that certainty.” Kate Fansler’s husband, himself a law professor and ex-district attorney, is kidnapped by a right wing group and held not for a ransom of money, but instead to extort from Fansler a public denial of her feminist views.
Of course, I have no intention of telling you how the plot unravels or of which groups are responsible for the kidnapping and eventually a murder. Suffice it to say that there are many opportunities for Heilbrun to show how violence against abortion clinics and abortion doctors is one strand of a right wing agenda, how donations to universities by well heeled conservatives intended to influence hiring, firing and curriculum are another strand in that same agenda, and how even without any overt conspiracy or mastermind the strands work together for a common evil. Always, the plot and the humor are secondary to the social commentary Heilbrun provides.
Sometimes, even with writers whom I like quite a lot, I will arrive at a point where I am convinced that I have gotten from them what I can. I had assumed that to be the case with Richard Russo when I read Empire Falls. After all, he is not a great writer, nor does he have a profound understanding of human nature or of social-political history. And so it was almost an accident that I picked up and began to read his latest novel, Bridge of Sighs. I am now convinced that this is his best novel so far in its ability to create deep, convincing characters, in its understanding of life, and in its social commentary.
Russo’s male characters almost always have a gruffly good-natured quality to them—men who know they have not measured up even to their own expectations, but who muddle along in their relationships and their lives trying to do better while never deceiving themselves into believing that they are more or better than they really are. Usually, they have problems with commitment to spouses or even to lovers, and suggest that the women in their lives would, most likely, be better off without them. Most of them seem to have a kind of Walter Matthau charm to them, likable partly because of their own constant and critical self-analysis. Louis C. Lynch, the lead character in this novel, is again a character in that mold, almost morbidly self-reflective, but in my estimation he rises above the others both in his understanding of the relationships in which he finds himself and in understanding himself.
Louis C., maliciously nicknamed Lucy by his childhood friends, is a slow-talking, deliberate and lonely boy. Like his father, Lou senior, Lucy is big, good-natured and so measured in his delivery that he seems to others to be dimwitted. Add to this that he sometimes has spells, periods of time when he more-or-less blanks out, neither speaking nor moving, and it is no wonder that the people in his small upstate New York town, Thomaston, think he is at the very least odd. His best, and for much of his young life, only friend, Noonan, is Lucy’s opposite in almost all ways. Feisty, brave and dashing, Noonan is chosen by Lucy, latched onto, but always chafes at the affection and attention Lucy beams at him, and is relieved when his abusive, authoritarian father insists that he terminate the friendship. That Lucy’s love for Noonan is unrequited seems only to intensify his obsession, and he manages at a few different periods of their young lives to bring Noonan back into the sphere of his life until finally Noonan escapes not only from Lucy, but from Thomaston and even from the U.S., ending up as a relatively famous painter in Venice.
The reader is introduced to the characters as adults. Lucy has remained his entire life in Thomaston, content and seeing no reason to leave, and is looking backwards over his life while writing a clumsy memoir. His wife, Sarah, also an artist, and far less content with their sequestered small-town lives, insists finally on a trip to Europe where the couple hopes to meet up with the long departed Noonan. As Lucy looks back, the reader is invited to look at the close and loving relationship Lou junior has with his optimistic and upbeat father and at his more troubled relationship with his much more astute and realistic mother, Teresa, or Tessa as she is called by Lou senior. Tessa and Sarah have much in common; both are wise and efficient, understanding the naïve optimism of their husbands and taking steps to avoid the pitfalls that the men’s naivete would otherwise land them in. From the first, Tessa understands that her son’s love and devotion to his friend Noonan is almost all one-sided, and she does what she can to protect him from his own blindness. Likewise, she understands the financial ineptness of her husband, and does what she can to keep the family from ruin.
Through these two strong female characters, Russo is able to make clear (as he does in his earlier works) his conviction that women have an emotional intelligence that most men lack. He also paints his women as stronger than the men, more able to deal with the necessities of life. While the men dream and founder, the women have families, make decisions, and persevere. But there is a price for their loyalty and realism:
They’d both loved their husbands more than anyone even suspected, and in return had been adored. But each of them had walked through and open door, then heard it slam shut behind them and the mechanism lock. While neither regretted her decision, knowing the door was locked was disconcerting just the same, as was the fact that their husbands, if they’d heard that same slam and click, seemed untroubled by it. If anything, knowing that there was no turning back was reassuring to them.
While it is obvious that Russo admires the women in his own novels (and no doubt in his own life), there is a kind of essentialism that I find troublesome. I think he tends to forgive his male characters (and himself) for their faults in relationships by suggesting that it simply cannot be helped—men, given who they (by nature) are, simply cannot cope as their better and stronger women can. It is women who must finally understand the children, and help the men try to understand themselves. And while he suggests that men are probably more trouble than they are worth, something rings false in his analysis.
A commentator for the New York Post remarks that this book is very much in the Russo pattern but “is a departure into deeper, almost philosophical realms.” Yes, and why say “almost philosophical,” as if only philosophers and not mere writers of fiction can do philosophy? Russo does wax philosophical in this novel, and he does try to deal with real problems of economic oppression and racism and sexism, even daring at a few points to write in the voice of black characters. While there is still something myopic and unsophisticated about his political commentary, this is a novel that tries to look back and sum up what has occurred in this country in the last century, tries to expose some of the rifts in the American dream. Certainly, the novel has an intellectual maturity I did not find in his earlier works while preserving the humor and light-handedness of those novels.
Let me leave you with a longish quote that I think evidences some of Russo’s philosophical maturation in this book:
Odd, how our view of human destiny changes over the course of a lifetime. In youth we believe what the young believe, that life is all choice. We stand before a hundred doors, choose to enter one, where we’re faced with a hundred more and then choose again. We choose not just what we’ll do, but who we’ll be. Perhaps the sound of all those doors swinging shut behind us each time we select this one or that one should trouble us, but it doesn’t. Nor does the fact that the doors often are identical and even lead in some cases to the exact same place. Occasionally a door is locked, but no matter, since so many others remain available. The distinct possibility that choice itself may be an illusion is something we disregard, because we’re curious to know what’s behind the next door, the one we hope will lead us to the very heart of the mystery. Even in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary we remain confident that when we emerge, with all our choosing done, we’ll have found not just our true, destination but also its meaning....
But at some point all of that changes. Doubt, born of disappointment and repetition, replaces curiosity. In our weariness we begin to sense the truth, that more doors have closed behind than remain ahead, and for the first time we’re tempted to swing the telescope around and peer at the world through the wrong end ... To see a life back to front, as everyone begins to do in middle age, is to strip it of its mystery and wrap it in inevitability, drama’s enemy ... And yet not all mystery is lost, nor all meaning.
Hendricks begins her novel with a wonderful if somewhat enigmatic quote from Collette: “It is the image in the mind that binds us to our lost treasures, but it is the loss that shapes the image.” Now all we have to discover is what has been lost, and how that loss has shaped the image.
There have been a number of very well written novels on the perils of growing up as flower children in the 60s and 70s. Many of us who were already grown tend to remember the courageous and in many ways successful student movements, the birth of the Black Power movement and the sense of empowerment of young people in this country and around the world. All too often, I think we turn a blind eye to the difficulties for many of the children who grew up in both urban and rural communes. One book that comes immediately to mind is Joelle Frazier’s excellent little autobiographical novel, The Territory of Men, in which she describes just how harrowing it could be for a young child hovering on the fringes of all night or all weekend parties at homes that were not your own—drugs and so-called free love just through the curtain, in the next room. Unlike Frazier, Hendricks is not moved from home to home, town to town, still she describes well how even the relative stability of an established commune provided too little protection and guidance for the children.
I was born at sunrise on June 3, 1971, on a commune near Taos, New Mexico. Delivery was accomplished with the help of a midwife as my mother squatted, panting, on her mattress, surrounded by her commune sisters, panting in sympathy, cheering her on.
The men had hovered in the kitchen all night, playing cards and drinking, smoking, drifting in and out of the birth room unnoticed, like ghosts.
The girl’s mother, Gwen, remained on the commune long after almost all others, including husband, son, and daughter had left, convinced that what she gave her children was a better life and better values than they could possibly have had in a more conventional household. She names her girl child Soleil, but even the name (which the girl quite promptly changes to Sunny once she realizes that neither her teachers nor her classmates will ever say it right) seems to her to be a curse rather than a blessing.
In fact, this novel is the story of Sunny’s bitterness concerning how she was raised and of her flight from her mother and all that her mother embraced. But in telling the story, Hendriks adds a layer of mystery to Sunny’s life via her handsome partner, almost husband, who wheels and deals in the world of venture capital. He starts small businesses, or seems to, only to sell them quickly and move to another such venture. Questions from Sunny about his business ventures are quickly turned aside; sometimes there is a lot of money, sometimes none. Quite aside from the secretiveness and mystery of his business concerns, almost from the start, the relationship is compromised by too little communication and the boyfriend’s apparent total conflation of touch, even comforting touch, with sex. And then quite suddenly he is simply gone, presumed dead, and there are lots of angry men looking for him. One after another, these men confront Sunny, convinced that she must know more about her boyfriend’s shady deals than she is letting on. Sunny decides to uproot, run, disappear, in one fell swoop leave behind her mother and that hippy commune past as well as the precarious and seemingly dangerous present.
And what a move, what a change—from the deserts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas to the islands off the coast of Washington and a little town called Harmony, which, ironically, is also the name of the commune on which she was raised. Working in a restaurant and surrounded by women who have, due to their own pasts and soured relationships, escaped to this island existence, Sunny is essentially reborn. The attention and care that she receives from this group of women is so genuine and warm, so unlike the confused and selfish attention she is used to from men. One reviewer quoted on the book-cover says that Hendricks “calls to mind Barbara Kingsolver in her affinity for wise women and the power of close female friendships.” And while I would not compare Hendricks social and environmental insights with those of Kingsolver, she does write very well about relationships between women.
Eventually and painstakingly, these women coax Sunny out of her shell of secretiveness, and as they gain her trust, they also gently and gradually persuade her to attempt some reconciliation with her mother. What men, her boyfriend in particular, could not do with sex, the women seem to accomplish via cooking. In fact the theme of cooking and baking weaves through this story; as Sunny says, “I believe in baking the way some people believe in God. It’s usually what I turn to on those days when the very thought of reality is enough to send me diving back under the covers.” Baking is also the thread that leads her back to her mother, helping her to recall the good things she has inherited from Gwen, despite what she sees as the disorder and chaos of life on the commune.
In the end, at least for me, the mystery that is supposed to lead the reader along, keep the pages turning, is heavier than the actual plot will bear. And the final resolution is neither quite convincing nor sufficient to justify the ominous tone set early in the novel. Add to this that the book is a hundred pages or so longer than it needs to be, and the net result is a satisfying but less than profound read. Hendricks has written other novels (also, it seems, with cooking as a major theme), and this book was good enough to make me want to at least start the others. She does have a talent for describing the restorative nature that relationships between women can have, and she does a good job of calling into question all overly rosy views of what commune life was like for the children raised on them. And if not profound, the novel is entertaining and easy to read.
Carolyn Heilbrun, writing under the pseudonym of Amanda Cross, has been turning out mystery novels for many years, and while I’m sure she would be the first to insist that her Kate Fansler detective novels are not great fiction, not even great mysteries, she has certainly found an excellent form for her feminist political commentary. Kate Fansler, the heroine of the novels is, like Heilbrun, a professor of literature, but much more outspoken and brash in her social and political views. Death in a Tenured Position is probably the best known of the Cross novels, and while humorous and fast paced, it is a bitingly accurate picture of the discrimination women faced in universities of the 70s. Her 2000 novel, Honest Doubt, shows that in the most important ways, little has changed since then. But Heilbrun decides to give us an outsider’s view of university life by introducing a new detective, Estelle “Woody” Woodhaven, who has neither Fansler’s social standing nor her experience in the Academy. Woody is a much more blue collar detective, hired by a small New England university, Clifton, to try to find the murderer of a much disliked senior professor and department Chair. Woody is advised to seek Kate Fansler’s help precisely because Fansler does know the intricacies of university politics. 
The second of the two Cross novels I’m talking about today is The Puzzled Heart, and while it, too, is all about universities and the sexism rampant within universities, the overriding topic is that of the far right and the tactics they are willing to use to further their conservative agendas. “….the right wing in this country, Christians though they may call themselves, are besotted with their message. They are like fundamentalists everywhere, certain of their correctness and of being ordered by God to destroy those who disagree with that certainty.” Kate Fansler’s husband, himself a law professor and ex-district attorney, is kidnapped by a right wing group and held not for a ransom of money, but instead to extort from Fansler a public denial of her feminist views.
