New Century Reading

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

Louise Erdrich is a novelist revisiting her own familiar territory in The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. But this outing to the fictional North Dakota Ojibwe reservation is a more ambitious and ultimately more successful venture than Erdrich’s previous novels. A finalist for the 2001 National Book Award, it’s hard to say why this novel was not chosen over The Corrections, which was also an outstanding book. But who’s complaining when two such strong contenders face off in a single year?

 

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse is the story of, among others, Father Damien Modeste, who is valiantly struggling to get the Vatican’s attention regarding the possible sainthood of one Sister Leopolda, previously known as Pauline Puyat. Sister Leopolda is not what she appears to be, argues Damien; but then, neither is he: a woman with her chest bound in Ace bandages, Father Damien presents a male priest appearance to his flock, keeping his true gender to himself.

 

Father Damien’s journey from young noviate to elderly priest takes more than 80 entertaining years. Erdrich’s novel is a vast, messy exploration of the miraculous and not-so-miraculous events of everyday life. The wise and unwise residents of her North Dakota reservation observe Damien with distrust, then with growing respect. And Damien’s acknowledgement and acceptance of the value of the tenets of Ojibwe spirituality open his life in ways never dreamed of by most priests. When contemplating how to talk to a young woman who is scandalizing her community with flashy clothes and makeup, Damien calls on all manner of religious help:

 

"These last few pews, empty and quiet in the morning, were where Father Damien had many a long discussion with troubled members of the church. Saint Augustine, Nanabozho, whoever can hear me, give me a little help now, he prayed. The saint would have condemned the young girl’s self-display, and the notorious Nanabozho would have taken advantage of it. Such were Damien’s sources. His bedrock now was aggregate. The voices that spoke to him arose sometimes out of wind and at other times from the pages of religious books.”

 

Father Damien’s world is one of hardship and beauty, lives gone astray and the miracles of the everyday. Erdrich’s formidable writing draws the reader in, seduced by the loveliness of the writing and the terrible humanity of her characters. Her understanding of human nature is deep, her eyes open to the less appealing characteristics of most people while understanding the good that some can do. The book comes alive with humor (the death of Nanapush is priceless), with pain, and most of all, with love:

 

“’What is the whole of our existence,’ said Father Damien, practicing her sermon from the new pulpit, ‘but the sound of an appalling love?…

 

‘What is the question we spend our entire lives asking? Our question is this: Are we loved? I don’t mean by one another. Are we loved by the one who made us?…

 

‘Divine love may be so large it cannot see us.

 

‘Or it may be so infinitely tiny that it works on a level where it directs us like an unknown substance buried in our blood.

 

‘Or it may be transparent, an invisible screen, a filter through which we see and hear all that is created….

 

‘If I am loved,’ Father Damien went on, ‘it is a merciless and exacting love against which I have no defense. If I am not loved, then I am being pitilessly manipulated by a force I cannot withstand, either, and so it is all the same. I must do what I must do. Go in peace.’”

 

There is little peace for Erdrich’s characters, but the reader following those characters will wish them nothing more than a lifetime of Father Damiens to guide their way. 

Property

Manon Gaudet is an immature, bored antebellum bride in the pre-Civil War South whose marriage to a sugar plantation owner does not bring her the happiness and love she expected. Her husband is a bullying, debt-ridden tyrant who views his property—including his slaves and his wife—as his to do with as he wishes. Humiliatingly to Manon, his wishes include sleeping with and impregnating Manon’s slave, Sarah, a wedding gift from Manon’s aunt.

 

In Valerie Martin’s Property, the title refers not only to the black slaves, but the role of wives during this time period. While certainly more privileged than Sarah, Manon is no freer in many ways: she has little to occupy her time other than gnawing on her petty and not-so-petty concerns, while forced to be at her husband’s beck and call for both conversation and bed duties.

 

But through Manon’s haze of discontent and disillusion, rumors filter in regarding slave uprisings and rebellions, and one hellish night the rumors become reality. Her husband is killed, and Manon barely escapes with her life. But during the fray, Sarah escapes, and Manon becomes obsessed with tracking her down and reclaiming the runaway property, as she learned from her father:

 

“My father would never keep a runaway, but he never let one stay away either. If it took him six months and cost as much as the man was worth, he would gladly take the loss for the example it set the others to see a malcontent returned in shackles and straightway sold at market. He made sure all our Negroes were informed of the proviso to the warranty, that whoever bought the man must know he had run away and could not be trusted, and that his value had been accordingly diminished. This policy resulted in a very low rate of absentees from our farm.”

 

 Martin’s remarkable and disturbing story is told first person by Manon, a highly unsympathetic narrator who, in spite of enjoying the return of her own freedom after her husband’s death, cannot see clear to let Sarah enjoy hers. There is no understanding on Manon’s part of the similarity in the two women’s status as property of others, and Manon will not offer redemption of any kind to Sarah.

 

The trick in creating a potentially unlikable narrator is for the writer to understand how Manon came to be this way, and to help the reader understand as well. Martin’s highly skilled narrative does just that. Manon is still not likable; her behavior toward Sarah is still unconscionable by today’s standards. But it becomes clearer to the reader that reducing people of any class to the status of simply being property will create its own hierarchy, even if all members of the property class are regarded as virtual slaves by those at the top. Rather than just telling the surface story of a cold, spoiled woman, Martin illuminates the lifestyle that created that woman, and in the process allows the reader to feel a nudge of compassion for her, even though her actions wouldn’t encourage it. In less skilled hands, Manon would simply be whiny and boorish, but in Property, a far more complex picture is drawn, leaving readers unsettled – no doubt exactly what Martin intended.

         

Mr. Pip

Somewhere in the South Pacific is an island called Bougainville, peopled with residents who have lived comfortably and happily for many years, until the island’s copper deposits and potential riches lead to a bitter and violent civil war. As the foreigners leave, as well as many of the island’s long-time residents, a core group stays behind, along with one of the more peculiar immigrants: the white and eccentric (thus frequently mocked) Mr. Watts, also known as Pop Eye for his enormous, bulging eyes. Mr. Watts is also known for his odd ritual involving dressing himself up with a clown’s nose while pulling a trolley through the town which carries his wife, Grace, an islander.

So begins the story of Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones, a deceptively simple, ultimately devastating, tale of the power of literature. When all the island’s teachers have abandoned their posts, Mr. Watts begins to show up at the school, reading to the children from Dickens’ Great Expectations. It’s a choice that enraptures the kids, especially the narrator, 13-year-old Matilda. Matilda’s mother is less enchanted, viewing such literature as the devil’s work. Matilda is gradually torn between her harsh but loving mother and the eccentric Mr. Watts, who provides his students with an imaginative escape.

But when the rebels invade the lonely village and demand to know who Mr. Pip is, based on having seen that name drawn in the sand, the book takes on an ominous importance. No one can prove that Mr. Pip is only a character, because the book is nowhere to be found. Matilda’s mother has stealthily stolen and hidden the book, an act that she feels is righteous, but an act that leads to horrifying consequences—and ultimately, much later, a kind of redemption for Matilda.

Jones’ novel  walks a fine line between fairy tale and all-too-realistic war story. The almost surreal correspondence of life on this war-torn tropical island and the world of Dickens shouldn’t work, but it does; Matilda is able to find connections that make sense, both to her and to the reader:

“Now that I had met Miss Havisham, and knew more about her unhappy past, I had changed my mind about my mum being like Pip’s sister. She had more in common with Miss Havisham, who cannot move on from the day of her greatest disappointment…

 “Miss Havisham remains in her wedding gown for an event that has been and gone. I had an idea my mum was stuck in a similar moment. Only it had to do with an argument with my dad. Her frown gave her away. A frown that could be traced back to the original moment. I had an idea that whatever my dad had said still rang in her ears.”

The book is not devoid of tragedy, but just as Dickens’ great book survives through generations to reach new and far-flung readers, Mister Pip reaches out from its small corner of the world to create a story that is almost universal in its pain, even though it’s specific to its island. This is a short, profound, unsettling—and most worthwhile—read.

Black Swan Green

 

It was hard for me to imagine reading a finer book than my favorite from 2005, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. So it was with some trepidation that I opened the cover of Mitchell’s latest novel, Black Swan Green.

 

Silly me.

 

As outstanding an achievement as Cloud Atlas is, Mitchell has apparently not reached the apex of his abilities as a writer. As a reader, I’m grateful for that. And the true blessing of his latest book is that it is so different from his previous work. Rather than rehashing old stories and propping himself up on his known strengths, Mitchell is a writer who can stretch himself, investigate new territory, and succeed brilliantly.

 

Black Swan Green is the story of Jason Taylor, 13 years old, stuck in a small British village in the early 1980’s. Yes, it’s a coming-of-age story, a growing-up-and-realizing-the-world-isn’t-all-sunshine-and-roses story, but it’s also a testament to Mitchell’s ability to rise above such tired conventions and create a riveting, moving novel, one which reads as if no one has ever done a coming-of-age story before.

 

Jason is a complex young man, a lover of words and literature (secretly, though—such interests would be considered “gay” by his peers) even though words often betray him, as his alter ego, the Hangman, causes him to stutter. Not exactly popular, not as outcast as others, capable of seeing the pitfalls of being popular while still wanting to be part of that charmed group, Jason trudges on in spite of the obstacles all around him. Life at home revolves around his parents’ slowly disintegrating marriage and the ongoing news of wartime with Mrs. Thatcher. Jason notices everything, even when he doesn’t understand it fully, and his boyish view of life is reflected in Mitchell’s apt descriptions. While Jason’s parents have one of their frequent fights, Jason notices cows outside the window: “The cows swished their tails at the fat flies around their dungy arses.”

 

As this pivotal year in Jason’s life unfolds, he engages in rites of passage such as “nightcreeping” through neighbor’s gardens, an event which leads to making a mortifying choice; meeting a deranged neighbor who lectures him on the value of poetry; meeting and learning the other side of the Gypsies’ story, the Gypsies who inspire terror in the townsfolk.

 

Mitchell never demeans Jason, nor does he set him up to be a shining example of youth. Jason makes good choices and bad; he wants things he knows he shouldn’t, he falls in love with the wrong girls, he isn’t brave enough to let his “true” self show because he’s wise enough to know that would be his undoing. Youth isn’t glorious, it’s about brutal survival, and Mitchell knows that and doesn’t attempt to glorify this painful period of life. Consequently, Jason, for all his flaws, makes for an achingly sympathetic character.

 

And with the world of Black Swan Green a considerably smaller world than that of Cloud Atlas, Mitchell succeeds in making this smaller world as compelling as any larger world could be.

 

Is it possible that Mitchell can continue with this level of writing? I, for one, can hardly wait to find out.

 

 

The Mammoth Cheese

One can hardly do justice to the rich, sprawling story that makes up Sheri Holman’s latest novel, The Mammoth Cheese, in a short review. Just look: in this book we have Manda Frank, a white-trash girl grown up to marry her high school boyfriend and raise hunting dogs who finds herself caught in a nightmarish public life when fertility drugs cause her to become pregnant with eleven babies; we have Polly, a teenage girl who is just beginning to learn about the vagaries and miseries of adult life; we have Polly’s mother, Margaret, divorced and desperately struggling to maintain a purer way of life as well as the last vestiges of a family dairy farm. Then there is August Vaughn, Margaret’s right-hand man, a middle-aged local who still lives with his parents and carries a secret torch for Margaret as well as a fascination with Thomas Jefferson that causes him to dress up as the latter and give public speeches. August’s father, Leland, is the local pastor who interceded with Manda Frank when Manda’s doctor recommended selective abortion. And we have Mr. March, Polly’s history teacher who opens her eyes to the true nature of rebellion and the frailty of adulthood.

Oh, and we haven’t gotten to the cheese yet.

It would be an understatement to say that in lesser hands, this book would be a mess. But Holman is more than capable in exploring the varying story lines while finding ways to tie them together that are believable and logical rather than contrived. Her characters are fully developed, even painfully so; we recognize Polly for the petulant teenager she is, yet we remember almost too vividly how painful those years can be, while Manda’s postpartum depression, even though extreme, will certainly ring true to any woman having gone through something similar. Perhaps most importantly, while all these characters are as flawed and sometimes irritating as any human being, they are all treated sympathetically. Holman has found a kernel of understanding within herself for each of them, and while she doesn’t overlook their faults or treacheries, neither does she totally condemn them. Consequently, the portraits drawn here are absorbing and multidimensional.  

The writing itself is a pleasure. Holman never takes the easy route or the quick cliché, but neither does she waste the reader’s time. She, along with her characters, face some harsh realities, as when Manda visits the home she lived in before the arrival of the babies and the construction of the new home donated by neighbors:

“There was a time when six children, two parents, and a grandmother lived in this shack. As the youngest, Manda slept wherever there was space—sometimes just on sofa cushions on the living room floor, if her sisters had friends over. Now her two oldest brothers were in the jail and the youngest in the military. One sister lived nearby and the other had moved to Raleigh when her husband repeatedly violated his restraining order. Both had growing families of their own. That’s what struck Manda as so odd about this whole thing. If she’d spaced her children out and had eleven babies in eleven years, she would have been no better than her own mother and sisters: irresponsible, a welfare cheat, another bit of Sawdust Lane white trash. But as luck would have it, she’d had them all at once, and now she was, overnight, middle-class. And respectable. She lived in a house built by a man from one of the town’s oldest families. She was cared for by a respectable minister of a respectable church. The whole town, who before would reflexively lock their car doors at the sight of a member of her family, was treating her like a favorite niece. She didn’t know whether to be grateful or to spit on them all.”

It’s hard to think of a book I’ve found more satisfying this year than this one. Read it. Oh, the cheese? Just go read the book.

        

Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles

In these days of memoir-as-suspect-literary-form, it’s interesting and downright exciting to read Kate Braverman’s memoir, Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles. Braverman is not a writer who tiptoes around her topics; her novels Lithium for Medea and The Incantation of Frida K are revelations for readers, works by an author who experiments not at all self-consciously, but wildly successfully, with the written form.

The same is true of her memoir. Rather than a chronological “so this is my life” approach, Braverman’s book is a series of essays, told mostly—but not always—from her point of view. In her swirling, hypnotic language, she reviews her years of life in Los Angeles, growing up in less-than-desirable neighborhoods, a youth that could have driven many others into lives of failure and despair. And yet, in spite of the hardships, Braverman survives, thrives, and eventually moves to the east coast with her family. Her essay about moving east, to a home that provides privacy and history and reestablishes the nature of family, seems like the ideal escape—yet a few years later, disillusioned by the collapse of the mythic view of her new life, Braverman and her husband return to the west coast.

But Braverman doesn’t tell her story just from her viewpoint. Two essays are told by other family members, and one is told via an interview with Marilyn Monroe. The family voices are brassy, aggressive, and bitterly funny, as shown by the excerpt from “Uncle Irving’s Advice:”

“They couldn’t invent a past with a single exception to impoverishment. I used to ask, ‘Do we have anyone of distinction in our family? A rabbi? A doctor? A learned man or woman anywhere in our family tree?’ No. ‘How about a guy who owned a store with leather goods? He sold shoes and boots, maybe?’ No. Just centuries of people with genetic trauma, curled up in rocky crevices of the Carpathian Mountains, waiting to get raped, looted, hung, drawn and quartered, imprisoned, conscripted, and tortured. I’ll tell you how poor these people were. They thought a candle and a potato was a good time.”

The in-your-face voice and narrative construction leads to the conclusion that memoir at its best is less concerned with literal facts—no matter what current controversies might say—and more concerned with emotional facts. Braverman’s interpretation of her family background, of her life in LA, of who Marilyn Monroe really was, says as much, if not more, about her as a person and a writer than a straightforward retelling of facts could ever do. And it makes for much more enjoyable reading.

The Pearl Diver

Jeff Talarigo’s debut novel, The Pearl Diver, is a slender gem of a book that tells the story of Miss Fuji, a 19-year-old Japanese woman who in 1948 has the perfect life: she is one of many generations of pearl divers, a demanding but fulfilling role in her society. She is content with her life until she is diagnosed with leprosy, and then everything changes.

 

Leprosy, as the cliché goes, turns her into a leper; her name is removed from the family register, and they consider her dead. New drugs are being developed, but the medical committees want nothing to do with them, fearful that even if the lepers are cured, they will terrify the townspeople; better to leave them in exile. So Miss Fuji is sent to the island of Nagashima, a permanent resident of a leprosarium where she eventually develops a new life helping the other patients. They are a group considered to be abnormal freaks by anyone outside. Inside, they band together to accept and live with their fate. Once they die, they are cremated, with only nameless artifacts—urns, old coins—to commemorate their lives.

Talarigo’s story is quiet and gentle, yet heartbreaking. His prose is spare but beautiful, never precious but always moving. In this passage, Miss Fuji visits a cliff on the island which is the site of many leper suicides:

 

“From the rocks at the bottom of the cliff, she stares at the bleeding wound of the morning horizon. The tide backtracks, leaving only small puddles in the crevices of the rocks she sits on.

“She knows of twenty-three patients who struck these rocks, their final breaths taken on them. What was the last thing that they saw? Was it something of beauty? Like the white heron she sees pinkened by sunrise, perched one-legged, checking from the corner of its eye a fish leaping a foot out of the water. Or did they close their eyes, nothing left for them to see? Was it on a moonless night, sneaking away from their room, feeling their way up the dirt path, past the bamboo, and finally that thin, crooked cedar that stands atop the cliff, on a moonless night when nothing could be seen, eyes open or not?”

Talarigo wastes no words, and he sets each scene carefully. He exhibits remarkable skill and precision, so much so that the care goes virtually unnoticed while reading this absorbing book. It’s only afterward that the reader realizes what an accomplishment this book is, how heartbreaking and lovely at the same time.

The Solitude of Thomas Cave

In the autumn of 1617, a group of whalers who have pushed the boundaries of Arctic exploration are preparing to return to Europe with the season’s catch. The captain of the ship has taken his crew further than most ships go, and the remote Arctic island is profitable, but frighteningly remote. Before leaving for the winter, a wager is made: the silent crewman Thomas Cave will stay on the island over the winter, alone, in order to win 100 pounds. No one believes he will survive, except Cave himself. In that day and age, the idea appears to be sheer insanity.

Does he survive? That is the story in Georgina Harding’s debut novel, The Solitude of Thomas Cave. Cave is not a crazy man, nor is he mentally or physically incapable of meeting the challenge. He takes the dangers of solitude and the unknown climate seriously, preparing his small shed (normally used only in summer for whale dismemberment) to help him withstand the elements. In all the practical matters, Cave has the ability to survive.

But it is the emotional side of solitude, even to a man who’s known to be reclusive, that becomes the challenge. As the long winter nights build, Cave is faced with his own past, the torment of longing, the ghosts of memory. And it is these elements that prove to be his most difficult challenge.

Harding is an accomplished writer and, one realizes, an accomplished researcher. Most importantly, she’s also capable of understanding how to use research. She doesn’t inundate the reader with useless details to show off her knowledge, but carefully creates a vivid physical world for her characters to reside in. Early in the winter, Cave struggles with frozen food supplies:

“He melts the vinegar as he melts his water, by taking a hot iron from the fire and placing it into the cask. It cracks and steams like a sorcerer’s cauldron and the acidic smell rises into the room. His beer is frozen though the barrel is only a few feet from the stove. He is disappointed that when it has been thawed what pours off it is no more than sour and yeasty-tasting water, as if it has lost its essence in the cold. But that is so with everything here, every real thing seems numb and without essence. Survival itself is a numb activity.”

Harding’s precision with language is critical to the story. She takes her time, makes the reader understand the slowness of the world Cave inhabits for the duration of the wager. This is not a book for those who like a fast-paced read; the story is languorous and slow, but ultimately moving for readers who stay with it. As Cave tells himself later in the winter, “Survival does not lie in the heavens but in a man’s patience, above all.” The reader’s patience will reward them in the end.

Her Husband

In what must be one of the best-written literary biographies of this year, if not of many years, Diane Wood  Middlebrook manages to uncover new perceptions of an oft-told tale: the nearly mythical marriage of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. In her wonderfully written book, Her Husband (the title refers not only to Hughes’ status the husband of one of the twentieth century’s most iconized female writers, but to his own references to himself in the third person when annotating Plath’s work), Middlebrook presents a clearer picture of how the work of the two poets influenced each other. Middlebrook had access to many papers in the Emory University Hughes archive that no other biographer had seen, lending new details as well as a clearer picture of how the poems from the early days of their marriage were written in an almost back-and-forth literary conversational style.

 

The two poets often used each other’s discarded draft papers to create new works, and Middlebrook shows how they were not unaware of the words on the other side of the page. This was a technique very apparent to readers of Hughes’ late work, Birthday Letters, which had a kind of “asked and answered” relationship to many poems of Plath’s. But Middlebrook’s work demonstrates how that back-and-forth routine was already in play, if much more subtly, in the earlier years.

 

While not glossing over any of Ted Hughes’ womanizing or contributions to the failure of the marriage, Middlebrook does not condemn him, either, which creates a more balanced and complex view of the man. Her insistence that Plath died, not out of despair rooted in Hughes’ departure from the marriage, but from clinical depression that had trailed her most of her adult life, is a new view and a welcome one. What we know about depression now is significantly different than how it was addressed in 1963, or even 1973 and 1983. Middlebrook isn’t saying that the condition wasn’t exacerbated by Hughes’ behavior, but that she believes Plath’s death cannot be fully blamed on him, either.

 

The only disappointment regarding this excellent biography is that Middlebrook did not have access to all of Hughes’ papers; there are archives sealed until 2023, 25 years after the poet’s death. There are tantalizing speculations, included in Middlebrook’s text, of what those archives might hold: possibly the “lost” Plath journals or final novel, letters, maybe even poems Hughes did not publish. Twenty years will be a long time to wait, but at least in the meantime, we can uncover deeper insights with repeated readings of Her Husband.

Arlington Park

It’s a rainy morning in Arlington Park, an affluent British suburb filled with up-and-coming landowners, of both the “couldn’t wait to get there” and the “wish they weren’t there” types. And in their little corner of the world, at once very British and yet highly universal, the women in particular are at loose ends with their lives and what they’ve become, as well as what they might yet become.

Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Arlington Park, is a masterful examination of primarily one day in the lives of several female residents of this suburb. It’s a tricky approach; the “bored women who think there should be more to life” theme has been done to death, but Cusk makes it new again. It’s impossible while reading the different threads not to think back to the women of the 1950’s, who faced the same household drudgery and unsatisfactory marriages, but for different reasons; back then there were few options and expectations for women. Today, women appear to have more choice, and many women choose to become homemakers and stay-at-home moms, yet, according to Cusk, they are not gaining more satisfaction from their lives simply because it was a choice rather than a requirement.

The book opens with Juliet, who’s frustrated at the route her life has taken, and particularly with what she considers to be her lower household status. Her husband is a highly regarded teacher in an at-risk school, while she teaches privileged, bored girls. Waking with a hangover after a contentious dinner party with a condescending couple, Juliet sets the tone for the book:

“It almost made her laugh now, to think of it…For a while she prized the idea of a house and a husband and children, as though these things were uncommon, as though they represented some new refinement of human experience. Then she got them…The time she realized that if she didn’t go and buy food herself there would be none in the house; the time Benedict returned to work a week after Barnaby’s birth and she realised she would be looking after him alone; the countless times a domestic task had fallen to her, so that she became experienced and preferred to do it because it was easier than asking Benedict—it was all surprising to her, outrageous almost…She made the mistake of complaining to her mother. Oh, the joy, the harsh, vitriolic joy in her mother’s face! She could almost hear her mother thinking, That’s showed you. That’s told you what’s what.”

From Juliet, Cusk moves through the lives of housework-obsessed Amanda, pregnant Solly, and Christine, who is something of a leader of this group of women while hiding her own sense of incompletion and value. From a coffee party where the women try to develop meaningful discussions about local and world crises and end up disagreeing over which topic is most valuable, to a dinner party in which the hostess becomes severely drunk, yet perseveres to provide an entertaining evening, Cusk demonstrates a sharp eye and ear for the nuances of early 21^st-century suburban life and angst. She takes a situation and characters that could easily turn into a cliché and raises them into something more real, with more at stake for the characters and thus for the readers.

Towards the end, Cusk makes the point—and makes it credibly—that women through the centuries have struggled with their roles and purpose in life. When Juliet tries to engage a group of high school girls in an advanced literary club into understanding and appreciating Wuthering Heights, her own reveries bring her to a new realization:

 

“She’d always, somehow, identified herself with one or another of the sisters, with Emily or Charlotte. Now, though, she found that it was with the mother that her sympathies lay. Their mother, whose dress was ripped to shreds, who did not write one of the finest novels in the English language. Instead, she had died, murdered—there was no harm in calling a spade a spade—by her husband. It was left to the daughters to make their mark on the indifferent world…

“’Wuthering Heights is not a book about love,’ she said to them. ‘It’s a book about revenge.’”

 

The revenge, in Cusk’s world, is not necessarily women against men or women against society, but women against each other and what they expect of each other and of themselves. The problems are the same—it’s the perception that is changing.