An elegant, candid meditation on the fraught journey to self-knowledge.
After divorce and her mother’s death, a writer struggles to redefine herself.
In a memoir notable for its graceful prose, two-time Booker Prize finalist, playwright, and poet Levy (Hot Milk, 2016, etc.) reflects on the new reality of her life after two nearly simultaneous events: the end of her marriage and the loss of her mother. Moving with her daughters into a “large shabby apartment,” she was determined to create “an entirely new composition” for all of their lives. “There are only loving and unloving homes,” she writes. “It is the patriarchal story that has been broken.” The author has much to say about ways that the patriarchal story erases women’s identity. For example, she met several men who refer to women only as men’s girlfriends or wives. At a party, one man never asked her one question about herself, all the while talking about his own books and his ailing wife. “It seemed,” Levy writes, “that what he needed was a devoted, enchanting woman at his side…who understood that he was entirely the subject.” That experience was hardly unusual: “It is so mysterious to want to suppress women,” she muses. “It is so hard to claim our desires and so much more relaxing to mock them,” she adds. Levy wonders about how desire shaped her mother’s life and how much her own desires shaped her perception of her mother: “If our mother does the things she needs to do in the world, we feel she has abandoned us.” Mothers receive “mixed messages, written in society’s most poisoned ink.” That poisoned ink infects any woman who dares to break from societal prescriptions. Rebellious women are expected “to be viciously self-hating, crazed with suffering, tearful with remorse.” But the author’s unexpected freedom from her role as wife liberated something “that had been trapped and stifled,” generating renewed energy. Still, she admits, “freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs.”
An elegant, candid meditation on the fraught journey to self-knowledge.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63557-191-2
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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