Women's Voices

Sometimes a character in a book speaks to me so personally that I have a hard time differentiating her thoughts from my own. Such was the case with Laura McAllan, in Hillary Jordan's wonderful debut novel, Mudbound. Here she is talking about her husband, Henry:

"How I wished sometimes that I could join him in his stark, right-angled world, where everything was either right or wrong and there was no doubt which was which. What unimaginable luxury, never to wrestle with whether or why, never to lie awake nights wondering what if."

Laura spoke to me in a way that Olive, in Olive Kitteridge, and Juliet, in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society did not, although I loved both of these books and the strong women who inhabited them. Interestingly, Mudbound and Guernsey take place at similar times (circa 1946), albeit on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean and, culturally, worlds apart. Also interesting is that all three authors (four if you consider that Mary Ann Shaffer, author of Guernsey, fell ill before the books was completed and turned it over to her niece, Annie Barrows, to finish it) tell their stories in multiple voices, although these three women are the most vividly drawn characters.

Jordan's method is the most straightforward, with distinct chapters told in the voices of six characters: Laura, Henry, Henry's younger brother Jamie, and three members of the African-American family that lives on their Mississippi farm - Hap, Florence, and their son, Ronsel. The story hinges, however, on the seventh character in this book, Henry and Jamie's father, Pappy. Pappy is the face of the Jim Crow south. As Ronsel, a recently returned war hero, says:

"Went off to fight for my country and came back to find it hadn't changed a bit. Black folks still riding in the back of the bus and coming in the back door, still picking white folks' cotton and begging the white folks' pardon. Nevermind we'd answered their call and fought their war, to them we were still just niggers. And the black soldiers who'd died were just dead niggers."

As Ronsel struggles with his anger, Jamie struggles with his own demons from the war, where he was a fighter pilot, and Laura struggles to keep her family and her marriage intact despite the grim environment on the farm with Pappy a constant thorn in her side. Jordan won several awards for this book, including the Bellweather Prize as a book of conscience, social responsibility, and literary merit. Read it and you'll know why.

Mary Ann Shaffer's device for presenting multiple voices comes in the form of letters. A book that Juliet once owned ends up in the hands of Dawsey, a man in Guernsey, and this sparks a series of letters between Juliet, Dawsey, and other members of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society. The letters tell how people in Guernsey survived the war and are dealing with its aftermath, but while this could be dark and dreary, the letters lift the story with great humor and marvelous characters.

The structure of Olive Kitteridge – a series of short stories – gives Elizabeth Strout the opportunity to present a number of voices without needing to weave them all together into a coherent single novel. Indeed, the only thing that ties these stories together is the presence of Olive, sometimes as a small, nearly insignificant character. In one story, Henry, Olive’s sweet, sensitive husband approaches her in the garden when he comes home from working at the pharmacy.

“He wanted to put his arms around her, but she had a darkness that seemed to stand beside her like an acquaintance that would not go away.”

Indeed, that darkness, and her unapproachability, coupled with an underlying vulnerability follows Olive through all of the stories. Olive’s persona resonated strongly with several members of my bookclub, I guess in a similar way to how Mudbound’s Laura resonated with me.

During the same period when I met Laura, Juliet, and Olive, I also encountered Eilis in Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn. I’ve been a fan of Toibin since I read The Blackwater Lightship several years ago, a book I though of at the time as perfect. Eilis is a good girl, with strengths that are not nearly so conspicuous as Laura’s; indeed, she allows her mother and sister to ship her off to Brooklyn (for her own good, of course) when she would have preferred to stay in Ireland. She is a master at doing what is expected of her and hiding her feelings. Even when she establishes herself in America, goes back to school to become a bookkeeper, and agrees to marry Tony, a young Italian-American man, she still seems not so much to decide her fate as to accept it. When she returns to Ireland for a visit after a family tragedy, she must decide whether to return to Tony, whom she has secretly wed in Brooklyn, or remain under her mother’s guiding hand, It’s a decision without a clearcut answer, but one she knows she will have to live with forever. Is it made from a position of strength or weakness? That’s the unanswered question in this book; yet while I found this aspect of the book frustrating, I was impressed with Toibin’s ability to portray time and place so convincingly.