Category: Reviews by Sue Martin

Diane Oliver died in a motorcycle accident at age 22 in 1966. At the time she was a graduate student at the Iowa Writers’ workshop at the University of Iowa. Today reviewers laud this phenomenal black author, a master of the short story, with their highest praise for the economy of her prose, the empathy and insight she demonstrates in her character development and the intimate glimpses of life in the Jim Crow south. The stories are gems of compelling insight far beyond the tumultuous media coverage of the civil rights era. Critics’ reviews are in response to the 2024 collection and publication of fourteen of her stories in a volume titled Neighbors. Only four of her stories were published in her lifetime, none in main stream media.

A particularly remarkable feature of Oliver’s brilliance as a writer is her ability to show rather than tell – to reveal the story line with phrases and details that communicate much more effectively than direct narrative in informing the reader. In the title-based story “Neighbors” for example, Oliver begins revealing the core of the narrative in the third paragraph when Ellie stands up to look over the shoulder of a man reading the newspaper to see if she can read the headline. Immediately the reader suspects the story is about something momentous, but what? “Traffic Jam” finds maid Libby icing Christmas cookies, putting a ham in the oven and soup on the stove for her wealthy white employer’s lunch while she worries about her children scavenging for apples for lunch or alternatively eating cold boiled potatoes, because they have no other food – a powerful, heart breaking contrast.        

Throughout the collection a number of common themes are woven into the fabric of the narratives. Her main characters – mainly strong black women – are all aspirational – some, striving for a better world to raise their families as in “Neighbors” where parents are agonizing over whether to send their young son the next morning to integrate a neighborhood grade school. In “Health Services” the mother is focused on a better day-to-day existence for her children by trying desperately to access health care in the face of bureaucratic inhumanity and dire poverty. In “Key to the City” the mother insists on moving her children to Chicago, keeping up the charade that their father will meet them at the depot. She’s confident there’s got to be a better life in the big city even without his support.

In a twist on the theme of aspiration, the main character in the “Closet at the Top of the Stairs” is a young woman who has been sent by her father to integrate a southern women’s college. She is exhausted and on the verge of a mental breakdown due to the unchecked civil rights activism of her father, who has turned her into what feels like an “Experiment.”

Aspiration does indeed have a downside too as in “The Visitor” where socialite and doctor’s wife Alice faces the lies and games of the artificial life she aspired to and now inhabits. Also achieving marriage to a doctor, Meg in “Spiders Cry Without Tears” realizes she is simply an interchangeable object to her husband rather than a unique human being when he gifts her with his former wife’s fur stole, just back from the furriers, as if it were a special present from him.

Oliver’s use of bright colors often serves to emphasize the bleakness of a situation. In “The Closet at the Top of the Stairs,” mentally unstable Winifred has a pink plaid hatbox, and, in a seeming effort to cling to her childhood and her family, a menagerie of stuffed animals including a yellow bunny, a green duck and a pink dog with orange eyes which she carefully wraps in plastic every night. Emphasizing her efforts to fit in even as she spirals mentally, Winifred has her parents send her a white rain coat – what everyone is wearing – to replace the blue one she brought to college. The yellow ribbon the mother in “Key to the City” is carefully ironing for her daughter who cherishes it and wants to wear it to church, vividly contrasts the dire situation of a family stranded in Chicago with a paucity of festive normality.  In “Traffic Jam” the fact that the car the father has bought instead of food for his family is blue, his wife’s favorite color when they were courting, provides the reader with a very clear understanding that this man is not focused on the reality of his starving children.

Adding to the compelling nature of these spare and exceptional stories, is the irony of many of the titles.  “Mint Julips Not Served Here” focuses on a family who has fled to the woods to live a primitive life, where visitors are met with firearms, in order to protect their young son who no longer speaks after having been brutally bullied. As the reader soon learns, there is no “Key to the City” in that story, rather desperation and fear when the reality of the abandonment by the father sinks in. There is also no health service in “Health Service,” only denial of service and disregard for health.  “Traffic Jam” has two disrupting “jams  – Libby’s employer is constantly in her way and irritatingly nosy as Libby works in the kitchen, and her clueless husband “jams” up her life by buying an obviously unneeded car.

Book club members were moved by the exceptional skill of Diane Oliver as a short story writer and by  the intimacy of these insightful stories of an era they all lived through. They wished she had lived to develop her talent even beyond the high standard of Neighbors. The only adverse comments were about “Frozen Voices,” the experimental story which most found difficult to follow, although some made some sense of by reading it as poetry. Without question, everyone did agree “Neighbors” needs no editing.   

— Sue Martin

Readers in search of good historical fiction may question whether they really want to learn about the everyday life and challenges of Jewish immigrants in London in the 17^th century, but The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish quickly draws the reader into a compelling, atmospheric and skillfully written account of the period surrounding the Great Plague of 1665 alongside its impact and meaning to the professional and personal lives of two historical researchers in the 21^st century.

In The Weight of Ink, the story moves back and forth, chapter by chapter, between the late 1660s and modern day London – between the household of Rabbi HaCoen Mendes who has followed his flock from Amsterdam, now, after Cromwell’s abdication, a somewhat more accepting place for Jews to practice their religion, and Helen Watt, professor and historical researcher who, at the end of her university career, is battling Parkinson’s disease and her brash, American assistant Aaron Levy.

Rabbi HaCoen Mendes is a survivor of the Inquisition, who was blinded as a concession for renouncing his faith, otherwise to die in agony on the rack. Also in the HaCoen Mendes household is Ester Valazquez, an Amsterdam orphan. She has a brilliant, open and inquisitive mind along with a strong aversion to the arid state of marriage.  Ester becomes the rabbi’s scribe by default, since she had been educated alongside her brothers, despite cultural norms against it. This work frees her from household drudgery, the only culturally acceptable alternative to marriage for a young woman.

Helen is a brilliant researcher and seemingly revered teacher, but she is lonely and emotionally repressed, having retreated from her first and only love and “…wasted her life fleeing from it ” (p. 452).  Aaron is obnoxious, arrogant and immature, but a highly intelligent graduate student whose dissertation on some minutia of Shakespeare’s Influence has stalled, likely irretrievably.  The personalities of these two accomplished researchers clash again and again until a seemingly terminal confrontation initiated by Aaron clears the air and marks the beginning of an unconventional friendship.   

But the main character of the narrative is a trove of old documents discovered during the 21^st century renovation of the former Mendes, now historic HaLevy house. The narrative thereafter shuttles back and forth, chapter by chapter from one century to the other as Helen and Aaron decipher, analyze and puzzle over the documents. In alternate chapters the story of Ester, the originator of many of the documents as the rabbi’s scribe, is gradually revealed in fascinating detail, including vivid descriptions of life in London in the late 17^th century.

Description is indeed the author’s strong point. Just one example – not long after Ester’s arrival in London, the rabbi sends her out into the city alone on an errand.  At first terrified by the jostling crowd,–“She was in a crush of English strangers and her breath came quick with fear – but their unfamiliar smells and rough fabrics and stout limbs carried her and the heat of their bodies warmed her” (p. 132) –and she soon comes to recognize a strong desire for life drives existence in London and in her – desire, strong enough to override the cultural conventions constricting her.  Ester’s craving for a life centered on books and ideas and how she addresses this life force through her work as a scribe is a major theme of the narrative and one shrouded in mystery.

Although The Weight of Ink would not be classified as a mystery, it reveals the secrets of the documents in a gradual way that nourishes suspense and propels the reader through the narrative. Two revelations near the end are especially surprising – one involving what momentarily seems like a contradiction of Ester’s desire for a life of the mind and the other that raises, but does not resolve, a mystery about her origins. This final jaw-dropping revelation also offers a profound gift to Aaron.

The book club enjoyed The Weight of Ink, and deemed it well written, especially the vivid descriptions, but the consensus was it would benefit from a thorough editing of its 559 pages.

— Sue Martin

Alice McDermott’s most recent novel Absolution is a masterpiece. The setting and plot are fresh while at the same time abundantly nostalgic for readers who came of age in the 60s and 70s. They focus attention and elicit involvement through excellent writing, intrigue and character development that focuses closely on the nuances of body language and facial expression. The structure reinforces the overall complexity of the plot by suddenly in Part II switching to a different narrator fifty years or more into the future, and then in Part III back again to 1963, the initial year of the narrative, which completes the story but leaves the reader with numerous questions to ponder and discuss.  

The setting is Saigon, Vietnam in a single year of America’s on-the-ground presence there. The war itself is mostly in the background, except for a couple of vivid scenes – one in the children’s ward of a hospital and the other a trip to and from a leprosarium by the principal characters, two young wives of American officers temporarily serving the military from the corporate world.  

In Part I and Part II the year is 1963 and Tricia is the narrator. In Part II the time frame is fifty to sixty years later, and Rainy the daughter of Charlene, the other main character, is the narrator. 

As the plot unfolds, we learn that Tricia is narrating the story as a letter in response to a request by Rainy to provide background on Dom her new neighbor in a rural location in Maryland who was a medic in Saigon and friends with both Tricia and Charlene when Rainy was a child there with her family.

The plot centers on the relationship between Tricia and Charlene and especially on Charlene’s overpowering and complex personality. She pushes and pulls at naïve, self-conscious newlywed Tricia, and much like the spider with the fly, enmeshes her in the web of her cabal – as Charlene’s husband describes his wife’s circle of fellow do-gooder friends. In fact, she designates Tricia as the originator of two major projects that occur to her seemingly off the top of her head but drive much of the narrative: One to produce Vietnamese outfits for Barbie dolls and sell them to make money for Charlene’s hospital charity baskets and the other, far more ambitious one, to make silk garments for patients in the leprosarium. Tricia realizes that Charlene needs a foil, what Tricia identifies as a “saint” to dilute her “smarter that everyone else” persona.

As the novel progresses, we learn that Charlene has another do-gooder project. She procures Vietnamese babies to sell to the highest bidder. Knowing how desperately Tricia yearns for a child, she gifts her a baby.

The simple urge to do good versus the lofty goal to “repair the world” runs throughout the novel.  The later seems largely the aim of men fighting a righteous war against communism while the former occupies women and is frequently dubbed inconsequential, even by the women themselves. Though Charlene and Tricia return to America, a place of safety to love and live with their families, more globally the war doesn’t bring about a better world for all. As we see in Part II, Rainey and her eventual husband both fall victim to the burgeoning demon of drug addiction in their youth. Dom and his family live in a nearly ramshackle house, and Dom dies after falling into a pit of human waste. The epigraph from Graham Green’s The Quiet American captures a common sentiment about the war’s aftermath – “…but how I wished there existed someone to whom I could say I was sorry.” – someone who could grant absolution.

Perhaps Charlene’s small acts of goodness – soothing wounded children in a hospital ward by providing treats and stuffed animals or delighting the lepers with the promise of fine silk clothing – accomplished more and required no absolution, though this avenue of activity was the only one open to women in Charlene and Tricia’s circumstances, at least the only legitimate one. Sexism was alive and well in the early 1960s. It’s evident in the everyday condescending interactions between husband and wife under which Charlene chaffs, but to which Tricia is largely oblivious, befogged by the joys of early married life.  

Demonstrating her Catholic faith in an act deserving absolution, Tricia returns Charlene’s gift child after initially being tempted to keep the baby. She says,”…I can think only of hot and cold – hot with anger, at Charlene, at Peter, at everyone in my life who had considered my opinions inconsequential, who had lied to me, or ignored me or manipulated me for what they considered my own benefit. Hot to think of those who’d set out to do good on my behalf.” And when her husband comes home, she stands up to him for the first time.

Let the women’s movement begin.

— Sue Martin