Customer Reviews

Our Kind

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I'm not sure why this book didn't win the National Book Club Award. I have read three of the other finalists and this is, by far, the best of the bunch. It is a "must read" for women of all ages.

I am a bit younger than these women - our age group spanned the time before the Feminist Movement and after. We were on the cusp. Therefore, some of the things which affected these women where "preached" to my age group, but many of us were lucky and escaped. We went back to school and finished our educations, and, when our husbands left or died and our children grew up, we had other places and things to which to turn, and now we have new memories to replace the old ones. I am surprised that, none of the reviews I have read mention Viv. She, of all the characters, is the most poignant for me. Viv is the brilliant, but poor girl, who is awarded a full scholarship to Smith. However, it is the time when young women went to college to earn their MRS. degree, and, in spite of being championed by a pair of women professors and pushed toward graduate school, she hears the "siren call" and marries a month after receiving her undergraduate degree. He is a non-entity and soon becomes colorless in her eyes so that, after he is no longer a part of her life, she can't even remember what he looks like. However, she remembers vividly, half a century later, the professors - how they looked - how they spoke to her - how angry they were when she gave up her birthright to get married. Now she runs the "book club" for the ladies and watches the sessions dissolve into "niggling" and nonsense spoken by women who will never be as bright as she, and who just don't understand the inner meanings of the books they read.

This is a book which should be on the reading lists of every Women in Literature class in this country, and it teaches lessons which should never be forgotten by any woman of any age.

Although Walbert does not pinpoint her location, various clues lead me to believe that this book is situated around Wilmington Delaware or Philadelphia, a milieu I am very familiar with. The portraits of these women are drawn with such accuracy I feel I could provide their true names, including my mother. Since she still lives there with her cronies from her youth, husbands and children either gone or scattered, through these stories I have a truer insight into her life than I have gotten from the weekly telephone conversations we share. I know this is a very subjective review, but it is rare that a book has hit me at such a personal level.

Kate Walbert's Our Kind is a delightful gem, a wonderful work reminiscent of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, a novel several of the characters in this novel discuss at a book club. Both novels focus on the circularity of time, but Walbert's novel also focuses on the ravages of time, particularly on this collection of women in the novel. These women were married in fifties and now are all alone, deserted by husband and children by death, by divorce, by choice. Time is running out for them, but not many of them acknowledge that. Time swirls by them, the past comes back, they relive it, it repeats itself. These are wealthy women, not usually pitied, yet their stories echo with horrible tragedy, much death, many sadnesses. The narrative in the novel is lyrical without being too much or two twee. Walbert has done an excellent job; Our Kind is an excellent, moving novel.

"Our Kind," Kate Walbert's novel-in-stories about the psychological malaise afflicting women who became adults in the 1950s and who are now confronting life in their 60s, never achieves its intriguing premise. Walbert's individual stories lack coherence; her prose tends to be overwritten, precious or overly obscure; her characters rarely invite sympathy or compassion, much less understanding. Though Walbert intends "Our Kind" to provide insight into the genuine existential dilemmas aging women experience, the novel is really little more than a litany of sorror that poor little rich girls -- now women -- encounter.

Each character, whether she be physically disabled, ditzy, an artist, a widow, cancer-stricken, jaded or booze-addled, has been "led down a primrose lane, then abandoned somewhere near the carp pond." Forsaking intellectual aspirations and career possibilities contemporary women now presume as birthrights, these erudite, Smith-educated, polished (like prized apples) and repressed (orgasm-starved) characters chose or had chosen for them a life of taking "dictation from war heroes in grey suits." Their college curriculum consisted of the "3 G's: Grace, Grooming and Grammar. Some of us dropped out before Grace." They did everthing their men asked them to: be homemakers, silent hostesses, acquiescent sexual partners and mothers. Yet, somewhere, by middle age, the wheels had fallen off. The women of "Our Kind" keen with pain and betrayal.

Their collective voices form a chorus of sorrow and lament, not the presupposed aria of joy, contentment and fulfillment they had envisioned hearing. "Our Kind" is a filled with an ineluctable sadness and no small amount of unresolved bitterness. The women, budding with excitement in their 20s, now have gone to seed. And what a disparate assortment of seeds...hair greying, unspoken anger bubbling over, regrets denouncing false hopes. Their loneliness slaps them daily across their reconstructed faces.

Each character, because of Walbert's preculiar, ill-chosen style, never fully articulates her angst. Yet, we can imagine them in their earlier lives, seated at their elegantly-arranged dinner tables, designing and executing parties to further their husands' careers, painfully aware that genuine conversations (like those savored with their professors in the Seven Sister Colleges) will never involve them. Their very lives are in perpetual deferment.

All the elements for significant story telling are here. Walbert's bon-mots, sprinkled at the end of each chapter ("our hearts worn down by the slow drumming of blood," "we are...a school of fish too old to spawn but desperate to swim back upstream"), indicate a writer with great talent. Yet, "Our Kind" disappoints. Its structure, lack of narrative drive and choice of affluent, suburban, east-coast women (far removed from most American women's experiences) doom to the novel to be as satisfying as a furtive tryst with a hired pool boy.

Because of the award nomination and short-story format, I bought this book. I found it boring, honestly. I thought this might be the case because I'm a man and this is about women (though that's not stopped me enjoying books by Amy Tan, Joyce Carol Oates, Jhumpa Lahiri, or Sandra Cisneros but I was thinking there I must be reading something wrong). However, I felt vaildated when my mother - an avid reader - read it and complained about the pace and characters as well. Fortunately, it's a short read so it wasn't a long waste of time.

This book consists of interrelated stories about a group of women friends who married and started families in the 1950's. The stories are beautifully written, and I found myself continually marking pages for prose that I wanted to reread.

This is also one of those novels that is about Time. You see entire lives having been lived, and it makes you think about your own mortality and accomplishments.

I ended this novel with a heavy heart. Despite the fact that I am too young to have remembered the 50's, I felt like I had known these women, and their own angst and frustrations became mine.

Highly recommended.

Anyone who picks up a collection of short stories knows going in that the stories will probably be uneven in quality, that the odds of the author hitting her mark in all of them is pretty slim. Running a group of stories together so that they focus on the same group of characters in the same setting can help increase the sense of narrative, the sense of concern over characters we see repeated, but it is no less open to the same problem as any group of disparate stories--unevenness. That's the case here with Our Kind, despite its being labeled a novel.
The interconnected stories detail the lives (past, present, and impending future) of a group seldom highlighted in such compassionate terms-well-off divorced women who came of age in the 50's and are now in their later years, musing on husbands who left, daughters who came and went, past lovers, past opportunities, past crafting moments. In the best of the stories, there is a truly heavy sadness and poignancy about the characters and their situations. In the less effective stories, the reader sees them at best indifferently, at worst as near-caricatures or cliches. The plots vary as well, some tightly focused and sharp, others seeming a bit light.
Walber uses the group as a collective narrator, though each has their individual stories and moments. On the one hand, the characters tend to get lost as individuals, lessening the impact of the various tales. Many of them end up a bit airy, a bit ephemeral. On the other hand, one gets a greater feel for, as the title puts it, "their kind". And this sense of kind rather than person grows cumulatively as each story is related, whatever the quality of the individual stories. Overall, the style varies nicely from lyrical and poetic (especially in descriptions of landscape marked by time or the descriptions of the daughters) to sharp and oh so dry. While the more dry and/or somewhat bitter parts will have you chuckling or laughing out loud, it is the more lyrical and sad portions dealing with the many ravages of time (daughters grown up and distant, friends lost to death and disease, the loss of beauty, etc.) that are the true heart and strength of the book. The passages surrounding watching the daughters grow up I thought were by far the strongest and made the book worth reading on their own, despite its flaws.
Individually, as mentioned the stories vary in quality. Some are simply exceptional, others seem flat or at times a bit forced/cute. The good outweigh the bad, but it's a slim book and more than one of the stories are weak, thus the mixed review. To make matters worse, the concluding story is perhaps the weakest, or is at least one of the weaker ones, so the book leaves you feeling a bit disappointed.
It's a very quick read, and its pleasures are many. In the end, I wanted to know at least a few of the characters more intimately and wanted a much, much stronger conclusion. Recommended highly for the strong portions, which as I said make it well worth the read, but with the caveat that the effect as a whole is a mixed bag.

What happens to the wives of the upper middle class when they hit old age, after the decoupage classes and country club eras? This extraordinary novel in stories, told in the unusual first person plural, paints a haunting picture. The subject matter is fresh and the writing is first rate. Kate Walbert has great talent and a keen eye.

I was either a working wife or single mother so I do not identify with the "ladies who lunch" set. However, being a "woman of a certain age," I did identify with some of the attitudes. Best idea: have a "girls-only" party where everyone wears their wedding dress. (It's not like you're going to wear it again.) I read this because it is series of short stories (some only a few pages) which interlock; characters repeat; incidents in one are recalled in another. Interesting technique.

Quotes:

"She has never had any choice in the matter; it has been laid out for her, encoded in her cells like the pattern on the bone china handed down and handed down, again. Life as it will be women: first the husband, thin legs and big hands, a way of correcting of small then larger ways--directions, instructions, certain ways of behaving--and then the children, their sparrow throats veiny from birth, opened for worms, chattering, screeching, wings wet and folded against their bony bodies until they have eaten enough to fly, the nest she made for them downy at first, as if in a picture book, cotton-filled, soft, then hardening with time, the thorns hidden within the cotton seed, the red-brown twigs and sharp nettles there all along."

"...the very definition of her body, the limits of her arms and legs--her silhouette, her shadow, the way she appears to the world. The lumpiness of her now, the ungainly extremities: her skin gone prickly, her bones already softening, bending, her hair thin and colored. A woman of a certain age, tucked into panel stockings, zipped in wool or cotton, warmed by a sweater or, on certain days, a silk scarf. At times she is even painted--red lips, bronze eyelids, a thin, black line within the lashes--to be presentable. But perhaps he sees, or rather hears, what others miss; what she has always known: There are gardens here, gorgeous, complicated landscapes."

I just did a 24 hour turn around of "Our Kind" by Kate Walbert. I was interested in checking her out because her new book, "A Short History of Women", got such a glowing review in the NYT Book Review a couple of weeks ago. It's about a group of 70 somethings looking back on their lives as mothers/wives in the 1950's and 60's, but also, about their current lives. As you get clearer on the backstories of the characters - what they did in their younger years and how the choices they made effect their lives now - it really starts to come together very powerfully. Not all of the characters receive the same back story treatment, so I was left wondering about some of them, and wished there was more. You have to drop some of your stylistic conventions when reading and just go with the flow - there are images that take your breath away, and an undercurrent of disturbance that is not comforting, but well worth the effort.