Customer Reviews

A Short History of Women: A Novel

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

There are some books that I like because they are satisfying in all ways. They are neat, tidy, and don't miss a trick. There are other books that I love because they are unsatisfying, even unsettling. This is such a book. It has left me wanting more. More from the author (I will be looking into her other books for my summer reading), but also wishing the book went on longer, giving me more and more about these characters she has crafted. I want more not because they aren't fully developed (because they are), but because I want to follow these characters even longer.

I have to say that this is one of my favorite reads in a while. I loved the sliding around through history (from 1898 through 2007), living with different generations of the same family, sensing the way women's lives and issues have changed (and not changed). Because of the sliding and shifting that does occur, this is a book that demands your attention--full attention--and I loved this sense of the book making sure I was involved, that I was really listening to it and its characters.

I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for an intelligent, interesting read, especially if you are interested in women's lives through the twentieth century.

Okay. I'll be straight with you. I'm a guy. But I'm a feminist father of a lesbian activist daughter, my personal motto was written by Virginia Woolf, and I'm an ardent believer that the sooner women achieve full equality in this world, the better off we'll all be. But this book was truly a struggle to get through.

I'm perfectly capable of working through, and thoroughly enjoying, a complex book that details the experience of women in the world. Be it The Hours (Michael Cunningham) or Virginia Woolf's own works, I love the challenge, and I love the reward. This book failed on two major counts, and annoyed me on a third.

First failure: the novel that spans generations has been done a hundred times, and done well. It is not a new plot device, and if it is to be done yet again, I'd like to see a hint of originality in the approach. Instead, I found wearying murkiness to the forward and backward literary catapulting, having to make frequent references to the chart in front of the book to relocate the plot line. Tiresome.

Second failure: The book starts off with the death by hunger strike of a woman who explains "There was nothing else I could do". Truly? Nothing else one could do, when so many amazing women of that era DID find something else they could do, and did win incremental battles in a war that is not yet over. I read Gloria Steinem, and I think "Damn! What a mind! What a human!" I attend The Vagina Monologues, and I'm thrilled by the gutsiness and brilliance of the characters. I read about the five woman in this book and I'm left with a sense of "Oh, give it a rest". Somehow women shrink in this book, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. The tragedy of misogyny and gender prejudice is at its starkest when external limits shackle women of strength and ability. In this book, the women seemed uncomfortably close to shackling themselves.

My third point of contention is that the book reflects a frequently noted phenomenon that has blossomed with text messaging, Facebook, Twitter: a type of narcissism that assumes that we really want to know about it when someone does a load of laundry, has a pimple, or had a bad day with the kids/spouse/car/hair. Though Walbert throws us an occasional tasty nugget (e.g. a supposed women's advocate giving a lecture about how women evolved to make men more comfortable), way too often it's kibble. Women seem trivialized and powerless in this novel, more by their own personalities than by the world of men that they live in.

Choose this one for your book club or your personal pleasure at your own risk: this chunk of carbon is no diamond in the rough, it's a lump of coal that fails to ignite.

A Short History of Women is Kate Walbert's third novel. Her previous novel, Our Kind was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2004.

This outing opens with the death of dedicated suffragist Dorothy Townsend in 1914 from self-imposed starvation for the cause. The rest of the book deals with the consequences of her action on her progeny - from her daughter Evelyn to her great-granddaughter Liz.

I so much wanted to like this book because of Dorothy Townsend and her decisions, because of the historical eras in which the book is set, and because of the reviews being published. Unfortunately, I found this book hard to like. I was never drawn into the characters enough to actually like or dislike them. It's almost as if Walbert was more interested in, for instance, ensuring that Townsend's thoughts and speech patterns were authentic rather than creating characters her readers could relate to. Walbert's goal may have been to write a "literary" novel, but in doing so, she may have lost the main-stream reader. And more's the pity because many if most people are unaware of the sacrifices the early suffragettes made.

Many reviews of "A Short History of Women" on this site express dissatisfaction with the novel. Some readers are impatient with the way the book, which follows five generations of women (a British suffragette who starves herself to death and her descendents), moves back and forth in time; each chapter is the voice of a different woman, although not in linear progression. Other reviews mention that the characters are not really developed enough to be compelling or that it's difficult to keep the characters straight without constantly referring to the family tree at the beginning of the book (there are three Dorothys). And still others mention wanting to like the novel but putting it down in a kind of disappointment.

So there's a problem, but what is it? I don't think it's the structure. Many novelists use the technique of alternating voices---Faulkner, Morrison, to name just two. And I don't think it's the complicated family tree; the novel, at 200+ pages,is not exactly "War and Peace." I think the family tree may, in fact, give a misleading impression, since the only thing that, sadly, ties these women together is their DNA. The life of each woman is a story unto itself (parts of the novel WERE published as short stories), sharply observed and even funny when it's not heartbreaking. But the communication among them consists mainly of silences or broken connections, as when Caroline, a divorced businesswoman, discovers her mother's unhappiness when she comes across the older woman's blog or when Evie, at the end of her life, receives a letter from her niece.

This brokenness between generations is only exacerbated by the way the novel moves back and forth in time, and the effect, at the end, is not of a "History" (the title of the novel is surely ironic) but of fragments, shards of the lives of twentieth century women. In one century, the novel moves from the high drama of the martyrdom of the suffragette, Dorothy Trevor Townsend (b.1880), to the banal Facebook entries of the Dorothy "Dora" Louise Barrett-Deel (b. 1989), who professes admiration for Virginia Woolf, appends a couple of "quotes" about women, and notes that "My great-grandmother starved herself for suffrage. Color me Revolutionary." " A Short History of Women" has much to recommend it--spare prose, acute observations, tragedy, satire, even humor--if you approach it not as a family saga, which it is not, but as linked stories. And by the way, I think this novel is far truer to its subject (and thus probably less filmworthy) than Michael Cunningham's "The Hours," to which it will surely be compared.

I usually don't write up reviews for Amazon: I'm often just ready to get on to my next read. But when I was deciding whether or not to buy this book yesterday -- remembering that I'd stuck a sample on my Kindle months ago while reading the Times review -- I was nearly put off by so many reviewers who found this book a hard read -- and therefore a bad book. I asked myself whether or not I was in the mood, but then, taken in by chapter 1, the subject, and the literate 5 star reviewers here who said to ignore the negative -- I decided to give it a go. I am so so glad I did -- and feel compelled, like a few other people, to offer a counterbalanced point of view.

What Kate Walbert has accomplished is amazing -- producing a novel that helps explore not just the history of women, the way women's lives have changed in the last century, but the way we humans EXIST in this world -- lost, seeking, changing, feeling, hoping, defending, and dying -- all against the back drop of history, all while our language, our clothes, our dreams, our consciousnesses, and our ways of communicating, interacting, and BEING change. Hope & loss, hope & loss. Don't we all live in time feeling emotions, experiencing the events of our lives, even as we reach for ideas we can barely hold on to and grasp? Even as we make mistakes from which we can never recover? And just as some of the minor characters in the novel write insensitive, clueless blog comments about a major character's late in life epiphanies, isn't it true that we don't all feel our lives -- or history -- in the same way? This book is not just historically profound; it's psychologically true.

This is not a hard book to read if you like novelists who love literature, who play with time and character, British and American sensibility, who explore history, gender, and shifting social mores -- topics that happen, as a student and teacher of literature, to interest me. I guess if you hate Virginia Woolf you WILL hate this book, but I just feel like going back and reading Woolf all over again.

If you tune in to the various moments, to the way it captures human flux, hence human existence, you'll love it. If you love the way poetry can touch you and tell the truth -- you'll love it. If you try to read it relatively quickly, -- so you can hold on to the big picture -- you'll love it.

Still, if this isn't your kind of thing -- if you just prefer a straightforward conventional time-compressed plot(I'm not averse to those novels, btw), maybe you should read something else.

As for me, however, I plan to recommend this to all the smart women I know (and a few of the men. The ones who think like this. The poets.)

Finally, my thanks to the reviewers here who got me to read the book that they read. Wow!

Before I sat down to write this Vine selection, I went to the other reviews to get an idea about how other readers liked the book. Actually, I only read the one-star reviews, though the ratings seemed to be pretty evenly spread out between one star and five.

And what the one-star raters DIDN'T like about Walber's novel about five generations of women, living both in the UK and the US, is what I DID like about it - the bouncing of voices between time and place. Walber included a family tree of the characters and I did consult it a few times, but was not bothered by the jumping.

The novel begins with the suicide in 1914 of the "first" Dorothy, a British suffragette who starves herself to death for "The Cause", leaving behind a young son and daughter, whose lives are cast adrift. The repercussions of this act echo down through the generations to current day great-granddaughters. None of the women depicted in the novel seem to live full lives. All seem to detect a missing "something", usually in their abilities to relate to other family members. Walbert's writing is nuanced in trying to tie the losses of the past to the emptiness of the present.

I enjoyed the book - maybe I'm a restless reader - and am ordering some of her backlist.

"I write to find out what I'm thinking," Kate Walbert quoted Joan Didion in a round table discussion with Charlie Rose. By the time I viewed that program with the other four(women) authors nominated in 2004 for the National Book Award, I had already read and been mesmerized by this book.

As a former teacher and founder/participant in many women's book groups, I can't recommend this book enough. I long to talk about it with friends, so we can appreciate Walbert's "wickedly smart" writing ... so we can look at the sweep of history from before the Great War to post Nine-eleven, to see what's changed and what's endured ... so we can place Walbert appropriately in a hierarchy of favorite authors (including Virginia Woolf, Ian McEwan, Richard Russo???).

But what women readers will especially enjoy is asking (privately or publicly) the question that each of Walbert's generations wrestles with: Did I find something worthwhile to do in life? Did I accomplish anything?

Because of the book's structure, this question is posed against the backdrop of our own family trees, giving each of us an opportunity to play with our own histories and voice.

One final observation: Though Walbert doesn't cornily quote "Dover Beach"(as the novel "Saturday" does), still Matthew Arnold's final stanza summarizes the themes Walbert has woven throughout her novel: "Ah, love, let us be true/ To one another! for the world, which seems/ To lie before us like a land of dreams,/ So various, so beautiful, so new,/ Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,/ Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;/ And we are here as on a darkling plain/ Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/ Where ignorant armies clash by night."

Walbert's last line shows a glimmer of hope and love. Perhaps her next novel will have a bit of joy.

A SHORT HISTORY OF WOMEN is a work of amazing imagination, detail and structure.

Author Kate Walbert devised a brilliant concept and executed it beautifully.

The title refers to the name of a lecture given by a man to a group of "bluestocking" -- intellectual -- women in World War I London. Women then did not have the vote; women then rarely were allowed higher educations. How easily most of us have forgotten the tremendous struggle it was for our entire gender to become enfranchised, a point that Walbert makes brilliantly.

Yet this novel, too, is A SHORT HISTORY OF WOMEN; specifically, the women of one single family, followed through five generations bookending the 20th Century, from the late Victorian era to the present. Each generation, in turn, epitomizes the issues facing the women of her own time.

The first heroine of the novel is a suffragette with a moving and shocking story. The book then moves to her daughter, but the story is not linear, jumping around among the decades. Often, the resolution of a subplot begun in one section only is referred to years later, long after the fictional fact, in another part of the book. As jacket blurbs used to say, years ago, A SHORT HISTORY OF WOMEN spans the centuries and the continents.

It takes an person of great imagination to conceive such a notion, a true scholar for accuracy and an author of great skill to make it work. Kate Walbert is all of these things.

Walbert is most authoratative in writing about present-day New York. Presumably, this is the world in which she actually lives, though her prose is lovely in every section. She is a master of her craft.

A SHORT HISTORY OF WOMEN falls just shy of perfection by virtue of being so joyless. It seems almost impossible that generation after generation of one family could have been that unhappy. Yet the entire book still makes for worthwhile and thought-provoking reading.

Kate Walbert's the sort of writer's writer who produces exquisitely crafted novels that get great reviews, win awards, and somehow simply don't strike it big with the general public. Here's hoping her latest, A SHORT HISTORY OF WOMEN, changes that; it deserves a wide readership, male and female. The narrative follows five generations of a family through most of the Big Events of the twentieth century; women's sufferage, the World Wars, AIDS, terrorism, contemporary urban angst, and on through the familiar litany of woes. Her marvelous accomplishment is that, although the book is rigidly structured, it never feels schematic or cliched; the fresh, detailed observation, scrupulous, inventive use of language, and intriguing characterizations make this a richly rewarding experience that will linger in the reader's mind for a long while after putting down the book. The best sort of popular fiction, and highly, highly recommended.

I began reading eagerly, because this novel was described as a riveting intergenerational story of women in one family spanning 100 years, across wars and lifetimes and continents. But I found this novel impossible to follow. It's not in chronological order. It skips around from one era to another, and then backwards again, then forward, etc. And you are never quite sure where you are. It didn't help that there are three Dorothies and two Jameses.

Reading this felt like listening to five or six elderly people free-associate about their feelings at important times in their lives--but they pay no attention to each other, and they can't quite explain what happened, and the recounting meanders across sanity and generations and eras, and then back again.

Despite constantly turning back to the "lineage," a page I actually dogeared so I could find it easily because I couldn't read more than two paragraphs without checking it, I was lost and completely unengaged in this novel. I gave up after about 50 pages.