A Kind of Intimacy

admin — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 08:00:00 +0000

In Jenn Ashworth’s debut novel, A Kind of Intimacy, the reader follows a few weeks of Annie's life. Annie is not exactly a well person. She doesn’t have much going for her either. Her father was abusive and she married early partly to leave home and partly because she doesn’t have anything better to do. She was lucky, more or less, to have met someone who could support her, who wanted to do so, who was kind, and whose worst faults were tending toward the cheap side of thrifty and wanting to have children.

Eventually the demands of family life get to Annie. She kills her husband and their baby and moves into a new house across town with little more than her cat (to whom she is attached), a trove of self-help books, and a "File" into which she organizes the wisdom from the books into an elaborate system of cross-references she can apply to daily situations. For example, how to get her neighbor’s live-in girlfriend, Lucy, out of the way so that they can realize their destined Great Love. Obviously, this doesn’t go over very well.

The fact that Annie’s perspective on, well, everything is terribly and tragically wrong slips by most of the characters until it is nearly too late. The reader, however, is permitted access to Annie’s mind. At her housewarming party, Lucy, who is young and occasionally manifests the snobbery of youth, opens a bottle of wine, pours it into a glass, swirls it around, sniffs it and then drinks. Annie sees this and wonders, scornfully, “Did she think I was going to poison her or something?” I think, for me, that was when it clicked, when I got my first jolting sense of what it was like to be Annie. The world, for her, is a somewhat bewildering place where everyone but her seems to have attended some secret meeting where they learned all the rituals and understandings that would mark them off as normal, lovable, sane and special. Annie has missed this meeting but believes she knows enough about it to resent it. Annie also doesn’t doubt her grasp on reality and trusts herself to assess the world accurately.

This is an impressive first novel. There are a few editorial errors: a dress (one important to the plot) turns into a pair of jeans and a minor character’s name changes over the course of a few pages. These are insignificant oversights. Ashworth successfully puts her reader in Annie’s place and, amazingly, the reader is able to see the plausibility—from Annie’s perspective—of Annie’s thoughts and judgments. The reader also sees just how wrong Annie gets it, cringes at and for her. I admit, I found the novel a bit stressful sometimes. There was no flaw or shortcoming in the story or its presentation; noting the chasm between Annie’s perspective and my own induced an intense sense of vertigo.

Written by: kristina grob, August 7th 2010

The Hanging of Susanna Cox: The True Story of Pennsylvania’s Most Notorious Infanticide and the Legend That’s Kept It Alive

admin — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Corinne Earnest, Patricia Earnest Suter, Russell Earnest

Stackpole Books

The story of Susanna Cox, as detailed in Patricia Earnest Suter, Russell Earnest, and Corinne Earnest’s The Hanging of Susanna Cox, nearly perfectly follows the trajectory of the seduction of the mid-to-late eighteenth century: a naive girl is lured from her family, “seduced” (often, in actuality, raped), left by her lover (or rapist), and left to die alone. Seduction novels were simultaneously didactic, propagandistic, prurient, and hugely popular. What differentiates the story of Susanna Cox from the seduction novel is that Cox was a real woman, indentured at the age of fourteen and hung in Pennsylvania for infanticide in 1809 when she was in her early twenties.

The authors tease out the details of Cox’s short life, trial, and execution against the backdrop of the changes to the United States, forensics, the justice system, and the public’s perception of crime. This is all intriguing, albeit concerning, information. The evidence of Cox’s guilt was sparse, her trial exceptionally brief, and the details provided by the authors about her public execution horrific. At Cox’s brief trial, women connected to the case do not testify, nor does the father of Cox’s son, who is not so much as named in public records. Regardless of her guilt or innocence, in many ways Cox’s life was tragic, and the book is particularly sad to read in that her case was likely in no way unique, particularly amongst “invisible” indentured women.

What I found most interesting about the book was the emergence of Cox’s “notorious” status and the visibility that came to her after her death. The authors note, “At the very time Susanna’s life came to an end, her story came alive through the words of printers.” Perhaps because her story was so similar to the type of seduction tale told in countless novels and stories at the time, broadsides and poems about the case were printed simultaneous to her trial and execution, and were widely sold. The story endured. The book opens with the authors’ visit to the Kutztown Folk Festival in 2008—199 years after Cox’s execution—at which one exhibit is the repeated hanging of an effigy of Cox. Although this hanging of Cox’s effigy culminates with a quote from one of the poems about Cox (“Her exit–infamy!”), what is intriguing is that the poems about her are factual, didactic, and moralistic, but also somewhat sympathetic.

Although there are many unanswered questions about the life of Susanna Cox, the authors have assembled an impressive array of facts. As someone who had never heard of Susanna Cox or her execution before reading the book and who has never visited the area in which the story is famous, the book occasionally delved into too much local and geographical detail for me; however, The Hanging of Susanna Cox was still a book that I read with interest and speed, eager to learn more about the story. Beyond just the case of Susanna Cox, which is engaging but frustrating for the impossibility of decisive answers, the book is also a portrayal of a justice system and population in a state of significant change.

Written by: Erin Schowalter, June 16th 2010