novels

30 Women Novelists You Should Know – #1 Carol Anshaw

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As I count down the days before Her Own Vietnam is published, I wanted to share some thoughts about my favorite novelists. If you’re not already familiar with these wonderful writers, I hope you’ll give their books a try.

Over the next few weeks I’ll post (in alphabetical order) about Thirty Novelists You Should Know. And guess what – they’re all women.

#1 Carol Anshaw

I discovered Carol Anshaw in 1992 with her first book, Aquamarine. In that novel she creates three alternate and equally plausible lives for Jessie, an Olympic swimmer who almost wins a gold medal but loses it to the Australian swimmer she has fallen in love with. Or was it love? Did the Australian woman woo her only to break her concentration? And which of the three possible futures does Jessie experience?

My admiration for Anshaw’s writing has grown through all four of her novels including her most recent book, Carry the One, in which young people on the way home from a wedding get into a car accident that will affect the rest of their lives.

What I admire

Here’s what I love about her work. Anshaw creates warm, lively, complicated characters who live in the real world, not in a fictional bubble. They recognize the impact of public events on their personal lives, as well as their capacity to help shape those events.

Her books are witty, with the smart, sharp-edged humor I most enjoy. Many of Anshaw’s characters are lesbians, but the books are never about the fact that they’re lesbians. She is a master at writing dialogue that’s realistic and revealing. Throw in some great Chicago locations (my home town) and you have the perfect mix.

 Where’s the love?

I know she’s a New York Times best-selling author, but it has always seemed to me that Carol Anshaw is underappreciated as a writer. I wonder if it’s because of the naturalistic way she writes.

Her plots unfold in ways that seem inevitable, as if anyone could see that the characters had no choice but to make those particular decisions. Her characters speak like your smartest, funniest friends, and they strive and stumble just as we all do.

Anshaw makes it look easy to write that way. It isn’t.

Carol Anshaw (thefeministwire.com)

Carol Anshaw
(thefeministwire.com)

Women and War

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Fatigue shirt

My father served on Okinawa in World War II. That 21-year-old Army lieutenant from Chicago probably could not have imagined that 70 years later the U.S. military would still be a dominant force on Okinawa, setting the rules and occupying twenty percent of the land on that tiny, crowded island.

Above the East China Sea

Of course, you don’t need to wear a uniform to be transformed by war. Just ask the two teenaged girls at the heart of Sarah Bird’s luminous and compelling novel, Above the East China Sea.

Okinawan daughter Tamiko Kokuba has eagerly embraced the Japanese propaganda about the crudeness of her own culture and the superiority of the “true Japanese spirit.” She only learns the truth in 1945, when she and hundreds of other Okinawan girls are pressed into service in the nightmarish cave hospitals of the Japanese army.

In 2014, Luz James has just moved to Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, yet another leap in the endless hopscotch of her life as the daughter of a single mom who’s a gung-ho U.S. Air Force sergeant. But this new assignment is different, because Luz’s beloved older sister has just been killed in Afghanistan, and Luz isn’t sure she wants to keep on living.

The two girls, separated by generations and cultures, are connected in ways Luz only begins to discover as she learns how to reckon with her family’s history and the long shadow of empire.

As a reader and a writer

As a reader, I was enthralled by Above the East China Sea, and felt bereft when I finished the book and was forced to leave its fictional world. As a writer, I was deeply impressed.

An immense amount of research must have gone into the writing, yet it never seems didactic. I learned a good deal about the history and culture of Okinawa, and fascinating details about the lives of today’s “base kids,” bouncing around the world from one U.S. military post to another, perpetually unable to claim a hometown. Sarah Bird also does something interesting and unexpected with the narrative point of view toward the end of the novel.

Beyond women and war

It’s no mystery that the concept of women and war intrigues me, since I wrote a novel about a woman who served in Vietnam and the impact that experience had on her and her family. So I was surprised to discover that I had only read 10 of the 50 novels described in this excellent article by Soniah Kamal.

Kamal defines her list, quite rightly, not as women writing about war, but as women writing about “conflict, displacement and resilience.” Her list includes some books I’ve loved: The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver; American Woman by Susan Choi; Small Island by Andrea Levy; The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat; The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing; Bel Canto by Ann Patchett.

Given the spaciousness of Kamal’s definition, we can all probably think of other novels that might have been included. For me the best – or, depending on your point of view, worst – thing about Kamal’s article is that I now have 40 more novels to add to my to-be-read list.

Book fever

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My current to-be-read pile

My current to-be-read pile

I don’t’ know about you, but I have so many books I’m longing to read that it’s a wonder I can make time for frivolous things like work or sleep.

What I’m reading now

I tend to have a few books going at once, in different genres and different formats. Here’s what I’m currently reading.

  • We Are Called to Rise by Laura McBride (novel)
  • The Visionist by Rachel Urquhart (novel – audiobook)
  • The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison (essays – ebook)
  • Rare and Commonplace Flowers: The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares by Carmen Oliveira (biography – ebook). This one’s for my book group.

What I plan to read

In the photo above, you can see my stack of books to be read. I also have a TBR stack you can’t see, because it contains ebooks and audio books. These include:

  • Abroad by Katie Crouch (novel)
  • The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud (novel)
  • Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks (novel)
  • Destiny Disrupted by Tamim Ansary (nonfiction)
  • Above the East China Sea by Sara Bird (novel)
  • Some Sing, Some Cry by Ntozake Shange and Ifa Bayeza (novel)

Bookstores: part of the problem

Part of my problem is that I live in Washington, DC, a city with a rich culture of independent bookstores.

Busboys and Poets, for instance, is a small local chain of restaurants. Each restaurant holds a tiny jewel of a bookstore, and each conducts regular readings and programs – all designed for politically progressive people. If ever a commercial venture was built to siphon away my paycheck, it’s Busboys and Poets.

But they’ll have to stand in line behind Politics and Prose, one of the nation’s pre-eminent independent bookstores. Politics and Prose has a fantastic – and relentless – program of readings by wonderful authors of all kinds. On Saturday I heard Adele Levine talk about Run, Don’t Walk, her moving and witty chronicle of working with amputees at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. On Thursday I’m going to hear Amy Bloom discuss her new novel, Lucky Us. 

Libraries: also part of the problem

Of course, all of these books, including audiobooks and ebooks – even Kindle books – are available from the public library. That helps my budget. It doesn’t help me fight the fever.

Book fever

I’ve got it bad. Am I suffering alone? Let me know what’s on your to-be-read list.

The first line – Revealed!

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Three sharp red pencils.

Let’s begin.
(Photo by Horia Varlan.)

Last week I invited folks to identify ten novels written by women, based only on the first line of the novel. Many people identified several of the novels, but no one knew them all. (Neither would I.)

Here are the answers

1. “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish onboard.”

Their Eyes were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

2. “They shoot the white girl first.”

Paradise by Toni Morrison

3. “It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel.”

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

4. “That night when he came to claim her, he stood on the short lawn before her house, his knees bent, his fists driven into his thighs, and bellowed her name with such passion that even the friends who surrounded him, who had come to support him, to drag her from the house, to murder her family if they had to, let the chains the carried go limp in their hands.”

That Night by Alice McDermott

5. “Dear God, I am fourteen years old.”

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

6. “Princeton, in the summer, smelled of nothing, and although Ifemelu liked the tranquil greenness of the many trees, the clean streets and stately homes, the delicately overpriced shops, and the quiet, abiding air of earned grace, it was this, the lack of a smell, that most appealed to her, perhaps because the other American cities she knew well had all smelled distinctly.”

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

7. “’Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,’ said Mrs. Ramsay.”

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

8. “I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old.”

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

9. “We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.”

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

10. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

And the winner is…

Jan Elman Stout identified the most books: six of the ten titles (numbers 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, and 8). She will be the proud owner of Egg Heaven, a collection of powerful and haunting short stories by the award-winning writer Robin Parks.

The book will be published October 1. You can preview it here. Congratulations, Jan!

 

The first line

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Photo: jason-denys

Photo: jason-denys

They say the first line of a novel is supposed to tell you all you need to know about the book and the reading experience ahead of you. (Is that true? Beats me. You know how they are always going around saying things.)

But it did make me think. And what I thought was: Let’s have a contest!

 A contest!

I’ll list the first line of ten novels I loved. Let’s see how many of the novels you can identify based only on the first line. Of course, you could simply google the lines and figure out all ten, but where’s the fun in that?

There’s a prize

The first person who correctly identifies the most titles will win a copy of Egg Heaven, a collection of gorgeous short stories by the award-winning writer Robin Parks. It’s the first book that will be published by Shade Mountain Press, which a month later will publish my novel. Egg Heaven will be available in October; you can preview it here.

The first lines

1. “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish onboard.”

2. “They shoot the white girl first.”

3. “It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel.”

4. “That night when he came to claim her, he stood on the short lawn before her house, his knees bent, his fists driven into his thighs, and bellowed her name with such passion that even the friends who surrounded him, who had come to support him, to drag her from the house, to murder her family if they had to, let the chains the carried go limp in their hands.”

5. “Dear God, I am fourteen years old.”

6. “Princeton, in the summer, smelled of nothing, and although Ifemelu liked the tranquil greenness of the many trees, the clean streets and stately homes, the delicately overpriced shops, and the quiet, abiding air of earned grace, it was this, the lack of a smell, that most appealed to her, perhaps because the other American cities she knew well had all smelled distinctly.”

7. “’Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,’ said Mrs. Ramsay.”

8. “I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old.”

9. “We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.”

10. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

Here’s a hint

These are all women writers.

The deadline is Sunday, June 8. Ready? Guess.