SF Chronicle Review: ‘A Short History of Women’ by Kate Walbert

Heller McAlpin / SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

The common thread in Kate Walbert’s fiction is an exploration, at once intellectual and lyrical, of women throughout the 20th century (and into the 21st) coming up against society’s limiting expectations and constraints.

In her exceptionally promising first novel, “The Gardens of Kyoto” (2001), an unhappy mother tells her life story to an offstage daughter, conveying unshakable heartbreaks. “Our Kind” was a 2004 National Book Award finalist about former country-club housewives unbuckling their straitjackets.

Her new novel, “A Short History of Women,” is a complex, exquisitely rendered consideration of what used to be called “The Woman Question.” Told through the interwoven stories of five generations of highly intelligent but variously thwarted women, it considers women’s place in society over the course of more than a century, a time frame that spans both world wars and our current multi-fronted wars.

The novel opens during World War I. Teenager Evelyn Townsend narrates this initially disorienting chapter, which begins: “Mum starved herself for suffrage, Grandmother claiming it was just like Mum to take a cause too far. Mum said she had no choice.”

The death of Dorothy Trevor Townsend is the seminal event in Walbert’s novel, which traces its roots and then follows its reverberations in the lives of her daughter Evelyn Townsend and granddaughter Dorothy Townsend Barrett, down to two great-granddaughters and great-great-granddaughter Dorothy “Dora” Barrett-Deel, who writes in her Yale profile, “My great-great grandmother starved herself for suffrage. Color me Revolutionary.”

The danger of a multigenerational saga, and particularly one as compressed, elliptical and nonlinear as Walbert’s – in which so many characters share the same name! – is keeping the various generations straight. Walbert’s lineage chart is as essential as the patronymic-heavy dramatis personae in Russian novels. Also helpful are chapter headings carefully spelling out time and place. Even so, the novel’s early chapters demand a level of attention some readers may find off-putting.

There’s payoff aplenty, however, as Walbert’s intricately structured, vividly researched narrative unfolds. Alternating between Evelyn’s compelling first-person life story and the close third-person perspectives of her other heroines, Walbert transports us convincingly from Cambridge University in 1898 to V-J Day in New York City to a 1970s suburban American rap session to an anxiety-ridden post-9/11 playdate in New York City.

In 1898 Cambridge, smart women like Dorothy Trevor, “Girton (College) girls,” could attend lectures only with special permission, were not allowed to speak in class and were not granted degrees. A generation later, her orphaned daughter finds an intellectual home at Barnard College in New York, thanks to a scholarship and benefactor. But Evelyn, who absorbed the hard lessons of her mother’s shortened life, achieves professional success in part by eschewing not just her past, but marriage and children.

To continue Dorothy’s lineage, Walbert creates Evelyn’s clubfooted younger brother, Thomas, a piano prodigy sent to be raised by friends in San Francisco after his mother dies when he is 10. Even when Thomas’ daughter eventually tries to find her long-lost aunt, Evelyn heartbreakingly sticks to her resolution to be “done with family.”

Thomas’ daughter, Dorothy Townsend Barrett, born in 1930, follows the projected path for women of her day, “a calculated abandonment to marriage – clubfooted father to emotionally crippled husband.” Walbert paints a nuanced portrait of Dorothy’s decades-long marriage to a man who, as a POW in Japan, was kept contorted in a bamboo cage.

We meet Dorothy in her 70s, fed up with marriage and society, angered by the death of her son, the eldest of three children, of cancer in middle age. Interestingly, Walbert treats her rage with gently mocking levity: “She wore boots. She wore a beehive. She wore babydolls. Maybe she just wore out.” After repeated arrests for attempting to photograph soldiers’ coffins on government property, “just trying to DO something,” she channels her fury into a deeply personal blog, which leads to an unexpected connection with her financially successful but lonely, divorced elder daughter.

And so it goes, from generation to generation, in this resonant portrait of a legacy of struggle for self-fulfillment.

“And what do we women do?” the original Dorothy asked disgustedly from her deathbed in 1914. “We play our roles; we speak our lines. Christ. We go along.” Until, at some point – the point that most interests Walbert – they refuse to do so anymore.

Heller McAlpin reviews books for The Chronicle, Newsday and other publications. E-mail her at books@sfchronicle.com.