Amazon.com Review
Even a fickle reader of Alice Walker will find something to admire in
The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart. This tender, elegiac collection of stories is based in part on her early marriage to a white man and her continuing puzzlement at how their connection--once so charmed and resilient--faded to nothing. Looking back at their happy years together in "the racially volatile and violent Deep South state of Mississippi," a place and time in which their union was not only unconventional but illegal, Walker is also led to imagine other, less metaphoric homecomings. After the initial autobiographical story, "To My Young Husband," she turns to a character named Rosa, a novelist like herself, who returns home to the South with her sister, Barbara, after their grandfather's death. Rosa had not made it to the funeral, since news of his death arrived just as she was leaving on a long-planned holiday abroad. Now, belatedly, she has come to gather family stories. But when she asks her Aunt Lily a question, this woman glares back at her with something close to hatred: "I don't want to find myself in anything you write. And you can just leave your daddy alone too." Reeling, Rosa turns to her sister for comfort, but Barbara, too, rejects her with "a look that said she'd got the reply she'd deserved."
For wasn't she always snooping about the family's business and turning things about in her writing in ways that made the family shudder? There was no talking to her as you talked to regular people. The minute you opened your mouth a meter went on. Rose could read all this on her sister's face. She didn't need to speak. And it was a lonely feeling that she had. For Barbara was right. Aunt Lily too. And she could no more stop the meter running than she could stop her breath.
With her characteristic insight and her slow, colloquial prose--seeded with anger but watered with hope--Walker explores the territory of her own broken heart and those of African Americans of her generation.
--Regina Marler
From Publishers Weekly
HIn 13 affectionate stories, Walker (The Color Purple; By the Light of My Father's Smile) reflects on the nature of passion and friendship, pondering the emotional trajectories of lives and loves. Some of the pieces are directly autobiographical, as Walker explains in her preface. "To My Young Husband" is about her marriage as a young woman to a Jewish civil rights lawyer and their difficult but mostly happy decade in Mississippi and Brooklyn. Many years later, telling her daughter the story of the marriage, Walker wonders how she and her ex-husband, once so close, could have become such strangers. Other stories are "mostly fiction, but with a definite thread of having come out of a singular life." Old hurts are soothed in "Olive Oil," in which Orelia learns to trust her husband, John, and not visit the sins of the past upon him. In "The Brotherhood of the Saved," Hannah, the lesbian narrator, confronts the bigotry of religion and attempts to save her relationship with her mother, whose fundamentalist church is urging her to ostracize her daughter. A trip to a screening of Deep Throat gets the older woman and two of her friends talking about sex, but true acceptance proves more elusive. Infusing her intimate tales with grace and humor, Walker probes hidden corners of the human experience, at once questioning and acknowledging sexual, racial and cultural rifts. Though a few stories tip into self-indulgence and read less like fiction than personal testimony, this is nonetheless a strong, moving collection. A common theme runs throughoutDwe are all obliged to love and be loved, no matter how blind, inexpert or troublesome we may be. 100,000 first printing; 8-city author tour. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
by Alice Walker
by Barbara Chase-Riboud
by Alice Walker
by Maryse Conde
by Alice Walker
