Shelf Love

This 1936 novel by Rosamond Lehmann is a follow-up to Invitation to the Waltz. I remembered very little about the earlier novel, but I had no real trouble following this story—it works well as a standalone piece. It’s also extremely timely for us today.

The book begins with a young woman named Olivia Curtis running into an acquaintance named Rollo Spencer as they’re both traveling by train to their hometown. Rollo invites Olivia, who was once friends with his sister, to come to his family’s home for dinner while they’re there. The two soon begin an affair, despite Rollo being married.

For most of the relationship, Olivia doesn’t seem particularly troubled by the fact that they cannot meet that often or that their meetings are furtive. She is herself separated from her husband, and she shows no desire to end that marriage for good and marry Rollo. Her only resentments are in the fact that she doesn’t want to be seen as waiting around for him all the time and in the worry that he may still love his wife. Most of the novel is written in the third person, but a section of first-person narration gives a strong sense of Olivia’s mix of romanticism and sensibleness when it comes to her relationship. She knows what she can’t have, but she sometimes can’t help but want it.

Eventually, however, just as the relationship seems to be cooling, Olivia becomes pregnant. As much as she might want to raise a child with Rollo, that is one thing that has been deemed entirely impossible. The child cannot exist. So she seeks an illegal abortion. Olivia has just enough money, just enough connection to be able to find a medical professional who helps women in secret. It’s not a horror-story back-alley abortion. Yet Olivia is entirely on her own to handle both the emotional and physical consequences. It’s just by coincidence and luck that she’s able to get help at all when the after-effects are more difficult than she expected.

I don’t think this book is likely to change anyone’s mind about abortion. But I do think it presents a clear picture of what even relatively privileged people might have to deal with if they decide to end an unwanted pregnancy in a place where abortion is illegal. Abortion being illegal didn’t change Olivia’s decision, but it did change how she went about it. Not being able to be open about what she’s doing makes things much more difficult than they had to be and ends up putting her health at risk in ways it wouldn’t have been if she’d been able to speak freely about her circumstances. In this case, having to go underground makes things far worse than they needed to be.

The fictional rock duo Opal and Nev became notorious in the 1970s after a riot broke out at one of their concerts and Opal was photographed in a posture of defiance while Nev carried her on his back away from the scene. Their partnership had always been sort of odd. Nev was a white guy from England who wrote quirky semi-folky rock. And Opal was a skinny Black woman from Detroit whose musical stylings were closer to performance art than any kind of traditional Motown sound. But something about them struck a chord with a lot of people, especially after the photograph.

This book by Dawnie Walton is written as an oral history of the fictional duo, assembled by the rock journalist Sunny Curtis in 2017, when rumors are swirling about a possible reunion of the duo. Sunny has a personal connection to the story, as her late father was their drummer in the early part of their career and had an affair with Opal. Although this connection might make her exactly the wrong person to tell Opal and Nev’s story, it gives her the personal passion to get it off the ground, when the pair are little more than a musical footnote.

I like the oral history format, and I liked this. It’s fun to see how the different participants build on and complement each other, and Sunny’s own personal stake in the drama and her reactions to the revelations along the way add pleasing layers to the narrative. There’s plenty of complexity here, as the story addresses race, politics, family, sex, addiction, art … all the things you’d expect to find in a story with this premise. I especially liked the tension between Sunny’s expectations of who these people are and who they turned out to be.

That tension was especially evident in Sunny’s perception of Opal, who had become a sort of pop-culture revolutionary icon in the years since her career slowed down. And she is a revolutionary, no doubt about it. But she’s also not exactly who Sunny expects her to be. At the same time, Opal herself is continuing to grow, perhaps in response to other people’s reaction to her. I think that angle of the book — how people respond to people’s perceptions of them — is the most interesting part of the book. It takes in people’s personal lives, their artistic lives, and their political lives.

A few years ago, I read Kelly Link’s short story collection Get in Trouble. Despite generally liking short stories best when they’re kind of weird, I thought that collection was a little too weird. I can’t remember the details of those stories well enough now to compare them to the stories in her first collection, Stranger Things Happen. But I can say that I enjoyed this collection more. Maybe the stories are just a little less strange (and they’re very strange), or maybe I’ve changed enough as a reader or was just in the right mood to be able to just sit in the weirdness of these stories.

Some of the stories involve hauntings. The first story, “Carnation Lily, Lily, Rose,” is a series of a man just past death, trying to hold on to the memory of the woman he loved. “The Specialist’s Hat” involves twin girls living in a historic home and telling creepy stories and playing games about death. And “Louise’s Ghost” has a woman trying to use music to get a ghost out of her house only to wish to be haunted after the fact.

Fairy tales and myth feature heavily in the stories. Some stories feel like fairy tales, as was the case with “Water Off a Black Dog’s Back,” in which a man falls in love with a woman whose father has no nose and whose mother is missing a leg — and both seem to have an odd connection with the family dogs. And “Flying to Hell” is the story of a woman who seems to have become embroiled with a family from Greek myth, living in the contemporary world. “Travels with the Snow Queen” is about exactly that, a journey on torn-up feet involving not just the Snow Queen but also Briar Rose, all to find a man who may not be worth the trip. And “Shoe and Marriage” offers and different, and darker ending to the Cinderella story.

I don’t necessarily know what these stories mean, but I liked immersing myself in the images and general mood of them. In some of them, I didn’t know what was real in the story world and what wasn’t, and I liked being kept just a little off-kilter. It’s a feeling that can sometimes wear thin for me in a novel, but it’s great in a story.

In the early 17th century, Katharina Kepler, mother of astronomer Johannes Kepler, was accused of witchcraft. Rivka Galchen draws on that incident for a novel about how one little rumor in the wrong hands can spread and cause tragedy.

Galchen’s version of the story comes largely from Katharina herself, who tells her story with the help of Simon, a neighbor who interjects occasionally with his own reflections on the situation. The novel also includes testimony from witnesses of Katharina’s supposed crime and a handful of letters and other documents. But most of the narrative comes from Katharina herself.

Katharina is just the sort of woman you’d expect to get accused of witchcraft. She’s an herbalist who makes medicinal concoctions. She’s a widow who prefers the company of her cow to any of her neighbors. And she’s a woman who lives her own life in her own way. When Ursula Reinhold gets sick after drinking something from Katharina, she decides that witchcraft must be the cause. This starts a whole chain of events, with dueling charges and additional accusations. Any ailment or accident or bad feeling anyone has had for decades comes to be attributed to Katharina, and any unconventional behavior on her part comes to be understood as a sign that she’s in league with the devil. This progression is most evident in the testimonies, where one witness after another reaches to connect themselves and their suffering to Katharina. Some don’t even seem that bothered by what happened to them, and never previously attributed it to witchcraft, but they decided they want to testify in order to do the “right” thing.

These documents, showing the community’s reaction to Katharina and the accusations against her were the most interesting part of the book. I think I would have liked the book better if there’d been more voices incorporated. I’m all for feisty old women in fiction, and  Katharina was, for me, likable enough, but her voice felt kind of one-note after a while. Her narrative wanders a bit, too, and I sometimes wanted a clearer connection between her storytelling and the incidents recounted in the documents. Simon’s voice brings some variety, but he’s also sort of bland. It’s not a bad book, but I think it could have been so much more engaging.