Every year I read the National Book Award finalists and winner, and just about every year I wonder how the winner is chosen. Not that 2004’s winner, The News From Paraguay by Lily Tuck, isn’t a good book, well-written, interesting characters, all of the good qualities an award finalist should have. But compared to Kate Walbert’s Our Kind, Tuck’s book should have been a runner-up.
Our Kind is the story of a group of women, all part of the 1950’s country club set, who have aged past their supposed glory years. Their husbands have died or left them for younger trophy wives; their children have grown, moved away, forgotten them or come to view them as irrelevant. But these women—Judy, Barbara, Canoe, Esther, Louise and Suzie—are finding ways to reinvent themselves and their lives to make them meaningful to themselves and each other, if not to the family members who have abandoned them. Among their sometimes aimless activities: an intervention for a handsome local realtor who has come to represent the men in (or out of) their lives; rescuing geese; conducting a book club at a local hospice, while reflecting on activities they once thought were important: baby photos, hat parties, education.
If it doesn’t sound like much happens, well, that may be true. But Walbert conquers two difficult writing hurdles with her novel. The first is the “novel in stories” structure. More often than not this type of structure becomes a series of stories in which a few are good while the rest are merely filler; rarely can an author pull this off in a worthwhile manner (the last one I can remember succeeding is Jean Harfenist’s A Brief History of the Flood). But Walbert succeeds with this form, with each story a gem, highly successful on its own merits, yet together the novel is more than a sum of its parts.
The second hurdle Walbert manages to overcome is the point of view: first person plural. The book is narrated by the women as a whole, a “we” narration that at first is jarring and leads the reader to suspect a tricky, self-conscious writing. But soon the narration begins to make perfect sense. This book is about a group of women who together represent a generation, a time and place, and their story is a group story. Even as individual pieces are being told, they’re all reflective of the group and the generation, such as this description of their devotion to Dr. Spock:
“They’re in their birthday suits, the babies, and having none of it, their tiny tomato faces flush with rage. It is all we can do to sit on our hands; if we were breast-feeding, our breasts would leak, but we’ve dried them out on the advice of Dr. Spock; a little crying, he tells us, builds character.
“We want character: character and brains and looks and lives led a la Amelia Earhart…In other countries, Dr. Spock writes, mothers leave babies out in the snow and those girls grow to be warriors.
“We want warriors, we’d tell them. Warriors with character. Brilliant, gorgeous warriors with character. And pilot licenses.”
By the end of this unusual but compelling novel in stories, Walbert has shed light on a nearly forgotten and often-denigrated generation of women. For that, and for her courage in tackling difficult writing and succeeding, she should have won.
Comments