Womanhood, in an earlier age

The Summer Before the Dark - Doris Lessing (Knopf, 1973)

Huh. As a non-yet-married third wave feminist without children, I found this book totally foreign. Maybe forty years is a surprisingly long time, or maybe I just haven't made it to the place where I can fully understand how a middle aged woman can have such trouble figuring out her "self" as an identity separate from how she is seen by others.

Kate's husband and children all go off for a long summer. She gets a job as a translator for some NGO that throws conferences and channels all the energies she spent running a household into that. And then with her free months she falls into an affair with a younger man and travels. Except one after another they are afflicted with some sort of illness that is explicitly considered existential as well as physical.

Throughout the course of the novel, Kate has a recurring dream, in which she is trying to rescue a seal. It's crucial that she let the dream run its course, and it has that metaphorical quality dreams do. But whole swaths of the novel felt the same way to me -- I'd be reaching out, trying to grasp the meaning behind what was going on in the moment, but it kept slipping through my fingers. And I was hugely annoyed to not be able to tell whether or not this was Lessing's intention, or if I was just too far away from Kate's existence to be able to understand it.

It was the best of times...

Golden Days - Carolyn See (University of California Press, 1996, c1987)


The 80s were different. In a bunch of ways. Feminism and New Age mysticism and not-helicopter-parenting were all less under attack than they are now. On the other hand, the threat of nuclear annihilation was a real thing. And so, this twice-divorced mother seeking financial security - oh, and happiness! - recounts the days and years leading up to the other Big One that loomed over California during that wild and decadent decade.

The last pages, about what happens after the bomb falls.... they take up a lot of mental space, blocking my view back of the first 150 pages of this slim novel. And those pages are a wonder in themselves, of the remarkable and unremarkable, and of the meaning of women's friendships, and the omnipresence of men as a force to be defined in relation (often in opposition) to, and of moments that seemed so terribly dated ("That was what it was like back then?") and ones that seemed so current that I couldn't believe the book was 25 years old.

I don't know that I would recommend this book per se. I feel like it spoke to its time more effectively than it speaks to us. And I'm not sure of its potential audience today. But that doesn't mean it deserves anything less than my respect. And a significant measure of awe.