Entries in the Category "divining women"
Divining Women, Kaye Gibbons
(I read this a month or so ago, and just got around to posting this review.)
Kaye Gibbons is one of the most well-known (non-Grisham) Southern writers out there right now. She’s written a number of novels and can boast a fair amount of critical success. I liked the description of the novel itself—the historical plot seemed right up my alley. On the negative side, I’d read one Gibbons novel before this one (Sights Unseen) and found it sorely lacking.
Unfortunately, Divining Women (I keep typing Diving Women) did not work for me. My immediate reaction was to say that it didn’t work for me for a number of reasons, but actually, that may be untrue. It may just be that one element of the book was so overwhelmingly poor that it overshadowed everything else the book had going for it. The period detail was, as far as I know, accurate. The lifestyle of the main character’s family was vividly rendered. In fact, I liked the idea of the plot all around, and it could have been done very well. The concept was solid, but the execution was flawed.
To say that the male character who is the villain of this work was set up as a straw man is a staggering piece of understatement. This man’s capacity for inflicting humiliation and abuse, his intense narcissism—it was all so heavy-handed as to draw me out of the book entirely. When Maureen, the wife, began to stand up to him, it became even worse. She would give him these retorts, which for some reason always left him speechless; yet, they were not strong. They were not eloquent. They sounded like the feminist fan-fiction rantings of a fourteen-year-old, who creates a male character who spouts offensive things so that she can deliver these self-righteous diatribes in the voice of her lady protagonist. Look, I was fourteen, and I wrote them. It’s all very fun when your judgments are unsubtle, 99% theoretical and no one has to read the thing except your Facebook friends. But this is a published novel by a grown woman.
I’m all for tearing down patriarchal idols, rewriting history to foreground the woman’s story, and so on. When women have been oppressed and beaten down (figuratively and literally, politically, socially, bodily) for centuries and continue to be so to this day, yes, I want to continue to hear their stories. In fact, I want to witness their redemptive, “screw you” moment when they tell their oppressor that he just won’t get to be one any more. But it has to feel like reality; it has to not strategically disarm the oppressor at that moment so that her victory feels unearned.
It’s interesting that my dislike of Sights Unseen also stemmed from one major problem in the construction of the novel, though not the same problem; not even a related problem. Sights Unseen violated the basic tenet of creative expression which instructs, “Show, don’t tell.” The entire story lacked what I would call (vocabulary stolen from film) “set pieces” in which characters exchange dialogue and events unfold in a specific location in a specific narrative time. It’s not strange to begin a novel with, for example, a retelling of an event from childhood, narrated retrospectively by the main character. But for it to take place, unrelentingly, throughout the entire novel? It made the events of the story seem so remote; I felt no connection to the characters. I’m sure it was an artistic choice to narrate the novel this way, but for me, the result was to take what should be a piece of art and give it the aesthetic value of a talk therapy transcript.