Vinegar Hill, AKA A Life of Quiet Desperation

Conservatives love to harken back to the good ol' days, when men and women knew their roles and the family was strong and sacred.  In fact, the main argument that conservatives have against gay marriage is that we were all so much better off when the nuclear family was defined as a husband and his obedient wife and children.

Here's the thing-that ideal was never the norm.  Sure, there were families that resembled the 1950's stereotype a la Leave It to Beaver, but look at the statistic about how many poor mothers had to work, and how many middle-class mothers had substance abuse problems, and they tell a different story.  This state of affairs is beautifully illustrated in A. Manette Ansay in her novel Vinegar Hill.  Vinegar Hill tells the story of Ellen Grier and her family in 1960s Wisconsin.  When her husband loses his job in Illinois, he moves the wife and kids back to their hometown to stay with his parents.  Ellen, a school-teacher from a devout Catholic family, chafes under her mother-in-law's disapproval and her father-in-laws cruelty.  Her husband find living with the father who abused him as a child drains all energy and ambition from him.  He turns away from his wife and their children, paralyzed by his memories and his crushing fear that he will not be able to keep his family safe.  Underlying all of this misery is a family secret that has warped the minds and hearts of everyone involved, creating antipathy and unhappiness.

Much of the novel focuses on the strict gender roles that each member of the family was expected to play.  Ellen's mother-in-law and her own mother are disapproving of her career, believing that she should be at home taking care of the children.  Her father-in-law believes himself to be the head of his wife, and expects her-and everyone else-to submit to his every command.   The crushing disappointment that Ellen feels in her marriage and the feeling of being trapped in an unhappy life lead her to take long walks alone at night, and eventually leads to substance abuse.  Her mother-in-law is just as unhappy, having lived her adult life under the thumb of an abusive husband.  And her husband's unmarried aunt is perhaps the most miserable, feeling as she does that she was never able to measure up to her more attractive sister, and bearing most of the guilt for the family secret that eventually comes to light.

An action-packed novel this is not.  What action there is takes place almost exclusively within the narrow confines of the family home.  But despite that, the novel feels full.  Full of repressed emotions, quiet sadness, mini-explosions of anger.  Ansay has captured the slow, inexorable march of the unfulfilled life.  Even when Ellen makes a decision that will better the lives of her and her children it doesn't feel joyous. It's just another sad event in the sad life of a sad woman.  But Ansay leaves us with hope that things can and will get better for Ellen, even if she and her children are the only ones who pull themselves out of the emotional morass that is their family.

The Leftovers, Tom Perrotta

Have you ever been driving down the road and come upon a car with the bumper sticker that reads, "In case of rapture this car will be unmanned"?  For a while they were real popular here in southern Chicagoland, and every time I saw one I thought the same thing, How arrogant! Granted, as an atheist I don't really believe in the Rapture or heaven, but from what I know about the teachings of Jesus somehow I find it hard to believe that he would be in favor of his followers assuming that just by believing in him they get a free pass to heaven when the Apocalypse happens.  Wasn't he all about good works and loving your neighbor and turning the other cheek and all that?  What would happen if suddenly millions of people worldwide disappeared in a Rapture-like event but the supposedly devout faithful weren't necessarily among them?

This event and its aftermath are the backdrop for Tom Perrotta's latest book, The Leftovers.  One October morning millions of people all over the world, of all races, cultures, and religions, simply disappeared.  Vanished without a trace.  One minute you are sitting next to your best friend on the couch, the next instant-gone.  Some people lost their whole family in the blink of an eye, other families stayed intact but lost friends and colleagues.  There appeared to be no rhyme or reason to the disappearances, which led those trying to recover from the loss to find different ways to cope.  The novel follows one family and their attempts to make sense of what seems like a senseless event.  Kevin and Laurie and their children Jill and Tom  were living the American dream.  Kevin was a successful businessman, Laurie a busy stay-at-home mom.  Jill and Tom were both honors students, and Tom has just left for Syracuse University when the Sudden Departure, as the world soon called it, occurred.  Three years later, Laurie is a member of a cult called the Guilty Remnant, Jill has shaved her head and nearly failed out of school, and Tom has disappeared into the organization of a faith "healer" who gained fame by hugging away the pain of those left behind.  Kevin tries desperately to keep some semblance of normalcy going while trying to give everyone he loves time to recover from what happened to them all.

The narrative structure of this novel is of the every-chapter-from-a-different-POV variety, which I know bothers some people, but it works in this book because it allows Perotta to examine the various personal emotional reactions of the people affected by the Sudden Departure of their friends and family.  Aside from the family listed above, we also see the point of view of a woman named Nora, who lost her entire family-husband and two kids-in the time it took for her to go to the kitchen for a rag to wipe up a spill.  The depth of her grief feels boundless-to her and to the reader.  Her unsuccessful attempts to move on from the event illustrate just how difficult it can be to move forward when everything you thought you knew is taken away.

Perrotta does an admirable job imagining how different types of people would react to such an impossible-seeming occurrence.  The loss, and ultimately the not knowing, drive people to extremes.  Some turn to religious cults who claim to understand "god's" plan and to provide answers that people seek.  Some frenetically try to return to normal, diving into the same mindless consumerism that existed prior to the Departure.  Some turn to drugs or alcohol or sex as a way to dull their pain.  But the book does not dwell only on the sadness and loss-to me the book's message speaks to the human ability to survive, to the unique capacity of human beings to adapt to new circumstances, to the idea that even in a world where the old rules have been turned on their head, people can and will begin to create order from the chaos.

The 19th Wife, or Why Conjugal Subjugation is Bad

OK, I'll admit it-I have a morbid fascination with the idea of Mormon polygamy.  It's not quite risen to the point that I am watching Sister Wives on TLC, but it's close.  I've decided it's similar to the reason rubberneckers slow down at an accident scene, or people rush out to see the results of some natural disaster.  Somehow you just get sucked into the horror and drama of it all.  I also have a strange fascination with Mormonism in general.  As an atheist most religious belief stretches the bounds of my reason, but Mormonism in particular (along with Scientology) surprise me.  Most faith traditions at least have thousands of years of cultural weight behind them.  I have a hard time seeing how Mormonism started, however, given that it was only founded in the mid-1800s.  I mean, if Joseph Smith were a "prophet" today, and claimed that he spoke with the angel Moroni and that he found golden plates with the words of God on them, but then lost them again, the psychiatric community would call him schizophrenic.  I don't mean to sound disrespectful-I feel strongly that everyone has the right to their own religious beliefs.  I'm just making an observation. 

At any rate, after reading a book about the founding of Mormonism, I've wanted to read more about the early history of the church.  In his novel, The 19th Wife, David Ebershoff uses the real-life story of Ann Eliza Young, one of Brigham Young's many wives, as the frame for his modern day tale of polygamous cults and murder.  The books goes back and forth between "historical" documents written by Ann Eliza and her father, and the story of Jordan Scott, a young man excommunicated from a Mormon offshoot, the Firsts.  The Firsts are a polygamous cult, headed by a man called the Prophet.  The Firsts believe that the Mormon church was wrong to abolish the practice of "celestial marraige", as polygamy was called.  They have dedicated themselves to continuing what they see as God's true wish in their desert town of Mesadale.  Jordan's mother, the 19th wife of one of the elders, is accused of killing him in a fit of jealousy.  After swearing he would never return to Mesadale, he agrees to visit his mother in jail, and becomes convinced she did not commit the crime.  Working with his mother's lawyer and some other ex-Firsts, he investigates what really happened.

Ebershoff obviously did a lot of research in preparation of writing The 19th Wife.  Ann Eliza Young was a real person, and she did write a memoir of her time as a Mormon.  While Ebershoff is clear that the book is a fictional account, there is a lot of factual information.  I read several parts of the books with my laptop close by, so that I could check the factual nature of the story.  The Firsts are surely modeled after the Fundamentalist Church of Later-Day Saints, the polygamist cult headed by the notorious Warren Jeffs. Jordan's character and the other former Firsters in the book describe many of the conditions that The FLDS has been accused of.  Aside from the many wives of the men, there were accusations of welfare fraud, child abuse, child sexual abuse, rape, and the forcible marriage of underage girls to much older men.  While there are those that argue that plural marriage is a religious practice that should be respected when entered into by consenting adults, I think that we've seen enough evidence in a variety of cultures that in reality plural marriage mostly serves to concentrate power in the males of the group, and leave the women very little control over their lives.

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress

Imagine the most embarrassing thing your parents ever made you wear or do.  Now multiply that by 10 and you may have some idea of Rhoda Janzen's childhood.  In her memoir, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, Janzen tells the story of growing up in the Mennonite community in California, and going back to that community at 40 in the wake of a divorce and major health crisis.

Janzen's father was a leader in the Mennonite community, traveling the world and converting non-believers.  Her mother was the backbone of their family.  She was the one that made their lard sandwiches for their school lunches (yes, I said lard), and sewed mismatched strips of fabric at the bottom of their pants when they got too short (you begin to see where the embarrassment comes in).  Rhoda and her sister are very close, and both of them left the community for college.  Their three brothers married nice Mennonite girls and settled down to raise nice Mennonite children. 

Janzen describes her family and her life as an adult with humor, which is good, considering how challenging some of it was.  She was married for 16 years to a man with bi-polar disorder, and like many people in her situation she rationalized away much of his behavior, telling herself that he really loved her underneath all of the cruelty and obsessive behavior.  What she couldn't rationalize away was Bob, the man that her husband met on Gay.com.  Despite having become a non-believer herself, when she goes home to heal after her divorce and a major car accident, she finds herself comforted by how little has changed.

Janzen is an English professor, and you can tell.  Her vocabulary is impressive, though it can be disconcerting to read a story about some rather mundane aspect of life and have to look up a word to understand her point.  Despite my rather frequent trips to websters.com, it was an easy, enjoyable read.