Working With Available Light: A Family's World After Violence [Hardcover]

Jamie Kalven (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc; First Edition edition (1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393046907
• ISBN-13: 978-0393046908
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,177,438 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Rape in the Neighborhood, May 29, 1999

By 

David Light ([e-mail]) (Hyde Park, Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Working With Available Light: A Family's World After Violence (Hardcover)

This is an important book as well as a good book. It is a part of the movement away from thinking of rape as a kind of dishonor and towards thinking of it as a kind of physical and social torture that one can speak of and fight against.

I should note that I am not an objective reviewer. I am a lifelong friend of the author, Jamie Kalven. I have known Patsy Evans, Jamie's wife and the book's hero, for about as long as he has. I am briefly mentioned by name in the narrative. I haven't even finished the whole book yet, because I find it too upsetting.

What Jamie and Patsy are trying to teach us, in part, in Working with Available Light, is something that the people running Serbia already know. Rape is a very effective way to pull people apart from their communities.

Patsy, Jamie and I live in Hyde Park, a neighborhood within Chicago and a sort of character in the book. Everyone here seems to connect with everyone else in at least three or four ways. Typically, I know X because I took her class and I garden near her, and I went to high school with her and she's related to Y and a friend of Z. When Patsy was raped, all those connections stretched and frayed, in addition to the ties with her husband and children. I wouldn't have understood this, but for the book.

Patsy had the courage to rewrite the story that our culture had prepared for her--the one in which she is a devalued victim who either never or only speaks of the rape. In that story, she is soiled goods. She drops out of relationships in her community, because she is not who she was when she formed them. So does Jamie, because the story makes him a shamed and injured party who has suffered a type of irreversible property damage.

We see ourselves as too sophisticated to think this way now. We remind ourselves that we don't live in Kosovo. Working with Available Light is a book about how hard it is to rewrite the old story of a rape, even in a sophisticated American community.

Truisms are true. We can't change how we think collectively unless people have the courage to speak out specifically. My friends Jamie and Patsy are intensely private people who have decided that sexual violence is not a private matter. They want to tell you their story. They want to make some room for others to speak.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars the line between light and dark, September 14, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Working With Available Light: A Family's World After Violence (Hardcover)

This book has much to recommend it. And much that leaves me, ultimately, wondering. At times I feel the image of being assaulted from behind is an apt metaphor for the book itself. I have this sense of the author running to catch up with his wife, overtaking her and finally discarding her -- as if her body were simply a vessel to provide him access to an experience otherwise unavailable to him. What I don't know is: Does this say something about him personally? About the ruthlessness of the writing process? About being human? I don't know. But something leaves me uneasy.

He takes liberties with her experience (not just the assault, but other aspects of her life and personhood) that take my breath away. It's as if he's unclear where she ends and he begins -- as if that line doesn't really matter, is subservient to this book, the act of writing, his own sense of the world.

But in spite of this limitation (and to me, it is a limitation), Kalven has much of insight to say. And maybe, ultimately, he and Patsy have carved out a marriage that works for them. After the assault, she turned to him to recount everything she was feeling, every change in her personal barometer, every shift in the weather. And he took it all in. Maybe the invasiveness of this book is the cost of that kind of attentiveness.

Life's a mystery. And Kalven, insufferable at times, mostly recounts it beautifully.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An interesting perspective on rape, June 30, 2006

By 

Chasmodai "Chasmodai" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Working With Available Light: A Family's World After Violence (Hardcover)

The author of this book writes about his wife - her experience of rape and survival, and his love for her. He admits that he can't know what she has gone through. He is a journalist, and he is striving to report with honesty and integrity.

I do disagree with the reader who implied that he exploited his wife. He speaks often of her integrity. He says that she holds strong to her separateness. She wouldn't allow the book to be written if she did not wish it. They were complicit in the telling of her story. I did find at times that I wanted her to be the author of the book, not him, because this is her story.

I also disagree with the reader who accused him of name dropping. Instead, I see it as a willingness to be open about who he is. He writes about people being defined by their relationships and connections with others. He writes, on page 256:

". . . tortureres routinely assault their victims by way of their relations.... Every human connection supporting civilized life is ravaged."

Elsewhere he writes: "My mind keeps circling back to Alan's words: 'Our identities are composed of our relations with others.' " He also writes: "I was aware of myself as being uninjured by violence and, at the same time, impaired, as if I lacked a sense they both possessed. There is a word for this mix of robustness and obliviousness: privilege. Not the privilege of gender, race, or class (though not altogether unrelated either.)...'the privilege of ordinary heartbreaks.' " His candid descriptions of his friendships help tell the story of who he is, and who his wife is. It shows how even a woman from a privileged family can suffer, and even a man with contacts and privilege cannot make it better.

There were times when I was unsure whether the book was about the author or his wife. I do not think this makes the book less valuable, when a woman is raped, her husband and male family members also suffer. Speaking of male family members, while the daughter in the family is mentioned often, the son is given less time in the story. That leaves me wondering. How did this influence the son, and the formation of his values? I missed that part.

As someone else said, this is a good book, but not the only one. Anyone interested in this subject matter would benefit from also reading other works.