The Brave Escape of Edith Wharton – Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge
Wooldridge avoids a pitfall many biographers succumb to when writing about famous authors. It has to do with length. Do we need multiple volumes (three for Graham Greene, five for Henry James)? Do the single volume works need to be so lengthy (Updike 576 pages, Capote 632)? This is research gone wild; the biographers feel compelled to use every last thing they find, and as a result the subject gets buried under a deluge of facts. Wooldridge’s account of Wharton’s life is a mere 152 pages (and at least half of those pages have photographs, an invaluable asset in telling a story). Possibly the book has been relegated to the Young Adult category because it’s not a weighty tome and its approach is straightforward. But I didn’t at any time feel I was reading a book meant for a teenager. (Anyway, what fifteen-year-old would be interested in an author of the early 1900s who wrote novels for adults?) In the confines of this review I won’t go into the life of Edith Wharton. Suffice to say it was a remarkably active one; she had a unquenchable thirst for experience – for new sights and for the company of stimulating people – and she used her considerable wealth to satisfy her needs (her “brave escape” from convention was contingent on her inherited fortune). But she could also sacrifice comfort – in WWI she worked tirelessly to aid the suffering in France. Lastly, she was a writer, and in that profession she found immediate success (with the help of family connections). There was a marriage to the wrong man and a dearth of physical love. But all in all she led a good life, one which she appreciated. In her last year Wharton addressed a packet of papers “For my biographer.” Her request of the person who told her story was that they “find the gist of me.” I believe that Wooldridge has fulfilled that wish.

Plains Song – Wright Morris
Wright Morris and I have had a long relationship. This is the fourth of his novels I’ve reviewed in this blog, and previously I had read three or four others, two of which I liked very much – The Deep Sleep and Love Among the Cannibals. At least I liked them when I was in my twenties; since then I’ve been consistently disappointed in his work. I keep returning to Morris because I believe he possessed the ability to produce something wonderful, and in reading the opening chapters of Plains Song I thought he might fulfill that potential. The two characters (Cora and Harrison) and their situation are presented without adornment. A woman marries a man she hardly knows; she goes to live on his farm on the Great Plains. She finds their first (and possibly last) sexual act to be a horrific experience; they live together without emotional intimacy but also without strife. Her life consists of the many chores of a farmer’s wife, which she does diligently and which give her a sense of purpose. From that first sexual act she bears their only child, a daughter. Though these seem to be sparse ingredients for a novel, I found them fully sufficient to hold my interest. But Morris wasn’t content with a limited scope, and he abruptly shifts gears. As the decades start to speed by a host of new people crowd into the confines of this short novel; more daughters get born; daughters marry husbands and bear more daughters. A dispersal of focus sets in, and I reached the point where I felt no contact with anyone (including Cora and Harrison, who recede quietly into the background). In the last third of the book one of the random daughters named Sharon is given the most space, but she’s undeveloped as a person (what’s her job, what’s her sexual persuasion?). She’s merely a vehicle the author uses to go into an overtly profound mode – it was a Morris tendency to muse about Life, always a mistake. He started out with a grounded simplicity, which I found satisfying and meaningful, but by the end things had become ill-defined and inconsequential. So there it is: once again Wright Morris disappoints me. Maybe I’ll read his autobiography next.

Nine Women – Shirley Ann Grau
This collection came out when Grau was in her late fifties. Because of the extreme range of quality, it occurred to me that the four outright failures may have been discards found in a drawer. If this was the case, she surely worked on them, but they’re based on an idea that doesn’t hold water (a woman wants to rejoin her husband and daughter by dying in a plane crash) or they lack substance (post-wedding bickering among relatives and friends who drink too much). Their conceptual flaws make them unsalvageable. That said, four stories – most of which deal with old age – are good and may be of recent origin. In all the writing flows nicely, with pleasing clarity. But let’s cut to the one outstanding piece, which is the first and the shortest. In “The Beginning” a girl tells about her resourceful mother, who knew not only how to survive in a hostile world but how to flourish as a businesswoman. She always referred to her daughter in the highest terms: as a hidden princess, a lotus flower, a pearl without price. Their bond is made palpable. The closing lines in the story: “When the kingdom at last fell and the castle was conquered, and I lost my crown and my birthright, when I stood naked and revealed as a young black female of illegitimate birth, it hardly mattered. By then the castle and the kingdom were within me and I carried them away.”