Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

The earlier posted reviews from readers and media sources do a good job of summarizing most of the strengths and weaknesses of this book. I want to add another perspective. As a sexual assault victim advocate, prevention educator and survivor, I have been recommending this book widely. Working With Available Light, and Telling by Particia Weaver Franciso, help all of us understand more clearly the years and years long impact of any crime, and particularly of sexual assault. The criminal in this book did commit sexual assault under the laws that apply in most states (despite some confusion on the part of some reviewers.). Sexual assault affects almost every aspect of one's life for many years to come, and yet the sexual assault and reactions to it happen in a larger context of relationships, interests and activities. The impact ebbs and flows and evolves with time. Sexual assault also affects every member of the survivor's family and community. This book provides a new view of that context and the long term effect. Survivors, family and friends, counselors, victim advocates, law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, medical workers should all find this book both affirming and enlightening. Kalven does write from a position of great social privilege. Other feminists may wince, as I did, at some of his comments. This book speaks of stranger rape of a woman over the age of 25. The vast majority of sexual assault happens to people under 25 and the perpetrators are known to the victim. The amount of community support for victims of stranger rape is generally greater than for those who survive acquaintance rape -- and this book illustrates the kind of support I wish every rape victim could receive but rarely does. Working With Available Light is not the "one and only best book anyone should read on rape" but I am very glad this book is available. It now holds a key place on my own suggested reading list for those who work against sexual assault.

Many people may avoid this book because the subject is rape; if they do, they will be missing the love story of the decade. The author of Working With Available Light has written a ground-breaking and heart-breaking book. It is a man's story of trying to understand, help, and remain connected to his wife's terrible experience of sexual violence, and it is the first book of its kind. The lovely depictions of family and community life are in sharp contrast to the searing descriptions of terror and isolation. Anyone in a relationship should read this book, whether or not one partner has been victimized, because it stretches the definition of what it means to listen and to love.

Mr. Kalven writes with extraordinary power and tenderness as he questions the nature of violence; his prose startles a reader on every page. The book is consoling only in that it helps readers realize that the human condition includes the capacity for great joy and care, great pain and violence. But there are no easy formulations; indeed, the author himself is still struggling with the large and terrible knowledge imposed by a single, hateful act.

Clearly, it is a book that should be read, pondered, and discussed.

A truly graceful and powerfully written book. The author obviously wrote this book with great feeling and it shows in the flowing expression of his words. This is one of the most powerful and moving, yet tender books I have ever read. Absolutely fantastic.

One of the most thought-provoking books I have read. For those who have been survivors of violence, this book helps to sift through the layers of fear, guilt, darkness, anger, disconnection. For those who have not experienced violence, it reveals the complex and murky depths of this horror. The writer is astonishingly eloquent and perceptive. A MUST read.

Jamie Kalven has delivered a haunting and devastatingly beautiful story of terrible violence and unconditional love. A dark peek into a world that "happens to other people", and takes the reader to a place at once horrifiying and illuminating. Candor, love and visceral prose make "Working With Available Light" one of the most important books of our violent times. A remarkable piece of writing with a powerful lesson - darkness and light share the same address. This book holds the key that may save the lives of anyone reeling in the aftermath of violence. Jamie Kalven proves life does go on, you just have to decide on how.

There are many parts of Working with Available Light, by Jamie Kalven, that I found difficult to handle. The central subject matter of rape was not the most disturbing. The issue that I found most troubling was the use of first and last names with academic vitae included for most of the characters. A kind of name-dropping that I found both pompous and invasive. This kind of invasive pomp is especially questionable as it regards his telling of his wife's story.

Kalven makes various nods though out the book to the fact that he is a man and thus somehow implicated in heterosexual power structures, that maybe his telling of this story is invasive rather than healing, that he doesn't know from any personal experience what it is like to be oppressed by his gender, class or racial status. He quite blithely tells his tale from a position of extreme privilege and names his privileged relationships throughout the book to somehow legitimize his speaking for the voiceless/speechless ones.

For me, this book would have benefited greatly from a changing of names and details so that the admittedly well-written narrative would have had to stand on its own rather than being propped on the prestige of its characters. It truly is too much like day-time talk shows, something else to which Kalven nods his head.

The ending is also extremely questionable.