Barbara Barrow

I'm a Registered Nurse, Not a Whore

tina — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0000

My grandmother was a nurse. She's retired now, but I remember how she used to chastise her grandchildren, scolding us about washing our hands, eating certain foods, and getting exercise. Above all, she was straightforward about our bodies. When we were too shy to put on our swimsuits in the changing room at the pool, she used to say, "We all got the same thing you got.” Another time she scolded me for cringing at a violent scene in a crime show, "Well, we all have to go sometime, sweetheart."

Because of her, I have always associated nurses with a sort of grandmotherly sass and frankness about the human body. This immediately came to mind when I picked up Anne Perdue's I'm a Registered Nurse, Not a Whore and I can honestly say I was not disappointed by the book. With episodes ranging from dental self-surgery to an accident involving a vat of wax, Perdue's plots often revolve around physical crisis. Her stories are not for the squeamish. Perdue uses unhesitating honesty for her descriptions of people and their bodies, offering up characters that are flawed and deeply compelling. The result is a collection that shows us the painful—and often darkly funny—conflicts of friendship, marriage, and parenthood.

Perdue's stories typically begin by introducing us to a common scenario: a couple on vacation or a family at dinner, but then she shows us how the character’s smoldering inner desires and regrets build up into a violent climax. In "Inheritance," a Botox-injected car salesman fantasizes about his youthful dreams of becoming a musician while building a deck for his house. As he’s working his children torment and disobey him, but we are privy to his inner thoughts. The story culminates in a relative's fall, a lost tooth, and a backyard grill tragedy. "Inheritance" introduces two of Purdue's common themes; one is regret. Characters in I'm a Registered Nurse, Not a Whore lament a youth subculture ("Theories of Relativity"), bad marriages ("CA-NA-DA," "Inheritance"), and failed careers in musical theater ("The Dry Well"). The other common theme is parenthood. There are some sympathetic parent-child relationships in these stories, but parenthood in I'm a Registered Nurse is often more painful than it is fulfilling: Children are distant and unappreciative, defying their parents' efforts at reconciliation.

Perdue's prose is crisp and direct, presenting fresh ways to describe our physical selves ("Bodies aren't a whole lot different from houses. They're made of matter and they crack and tear and sometimes things grow in them that shouldn't") and reinventing old clichés ("If we are what we eat, Leona was oxidized, fused to the vegetable crisper, ripe for fruit flies"). She writes engaging dialogue, transferring from one character's head to another with a sometimes absorbing and sometimes vertigo-inducing speed. Perdue is at her best when she stays with one or two characters throughout a story, as in my favorite piece from this collection, "Pooey." "Pooey" follows the relationship between Jackie, a single woman pursuing artificial insemination, and her sick and aging mother, Leona. "Pooey" masterfully blends pathos and dark humor—you cringe as Leona takes a drunken fall on her seventieth birthday, as Jackie falls over the punch bowl at a bridal shower—but you root for these women all the way. In "The Dry Well," the marriage between new homeowners Heather and Keith slowly unravels as the house around them floods and falls apart. The story transitions between Heather’s and Keith's thoughts, using crawling mice, leaking roofs, and sinister repairmen as the backdrop for the story.

At times I wanted to know more about the victims of the violent outbursts in these stories, about the world after the catastrophe. Perdue's structure can feel a bit redundant—near the end of I'm a Registered Nurse, Not a Whore I found myself patiently waiting for the fire, the fistfight, or the flood that would come and sweep the story away. But these stories also give us splendid moments of release, moments where the passion of inner life mirrors the explosive and painful physical action of the stories. Perdue's stories are edgy and fresh, providing just the right dose of sympathy and satire.

Written by: Barbara Barrow, January 30th 2011

Impatient with Desire

admin — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Gabrielle Burton

Voice

Impatient with Desire is the story of Tamsen Donner, now-legendary westward pioneer. Tamsen was forty-five when she set out on the California-Oregon Trail with her husband and five children in the spring of 1846. Stranded by early snows, Tamsen and the other Donner Party pioneers spent a harrowing four months in the Sierra Nevadas without supplies. Tamsen sent her daughters out with relief parties and stayed behind with her wounded husband; she died sometime in April 1847, leaving only her letters and a journal that was never recovered. Impatient with Desire is a recreation of that lost journal.

Burton’s meticulously researched account mingles her own prose with phrases from Tamsen’s extant letters, with engaging results. From her shelter in the Sierra Nevadas, Tamsen remembers her girlhood in Newburyport, her courtship and marriage with her second husband, the bustle of their preparations to move west, and the hardships of trail life. Burton captures the voice of this remarkable woman, a schoolteacher and botanist who traveled alone from Massachusetts to Illinois and left behind a spirited collection of letters to her sister Betsey. “In my lifetime people have sometimes wondered at my conduct, but they have never despised me,” Tamsen writes, thinking back over her travels. “And I shall never be despised.”

Tamsen’s independence does not go too far, however, in securing her voice on the trail. One of the most harrowing moments in Impatient with Desire is a campfire scene where the party’s men debate over whether or not to take the Hastings Cutoff, the ill-advised shortcut that ultimately left them stranded. Sitting beyond the circle of men with her journal on her lap, Tamsen records the fateful vote, convinced that no woman in the party would have agreed to the decision. Months later, searching for empty spaces in her filled journal, Tamsen muses, “You can write a whole book in the margins.” Tamsen’s marginalized pages remind us of marginalized voices: a “schoolteacher doing life and death sums,” Tamsen is at once a mother, wife, traveler, scribe, voteless companion.

Despite her exclusion from trail politics, Tamsen still maintains an equal companionship with her second husband George. The story of their marriage blends the objects and scenes of memory with the bleak mountain campsite. These vivid recollections—holidays and children’s birthdays, the decision to move West, the frenzy of preparations, and the excitement as the party sets out from Independence—bring Tamsen alive as a historical figure. Reminiscence finally yields to grim inventory as, in spare, elegant language, Tamsen records taking apart her family’s shelter, her botany collection, even her journal cover, for sustenance.

Burton’s Impatient with Desire is more evenly composed than her memoir about her cross-country journey in Tamsen’s tracks, Searching for Tamsen Donner. I began the book a bit skeptical about its valorization of the American frontier, and I kept reading because I wanted more Tamsen. Donner Party lore has often focused on the cannibalism of the pioneers (confirmed facts about the Donner Party’s struggles are notoriously scanty). Burton deftly negotiates this tale of outward struggle to bring us a story of inner survival as well. I read Impatient with Desire with a kind of grim fascination; Tamsen’s endurance and the powerful elegance of her narration stayed with me long after I finished the book.

Finely crafted and spellbinding in the calm pain of its heroine, Impatient with Desire is historical fiction at its best. Readers interested in women’s history, westward expansion, wilderness tales, and historical fiction will find much to ponder.

Written by: Barbara Barrow, April 12th 2010

No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admissions and Campus Life

admin — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 09:00:00 +0000

By Thomas J. Espenshade, Alexandria Walton Radford

Princeton University Press

No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal is a thorough and accessible study of race- and class-based dynamics at elite American colleges and universities. Sociologists Thomas J. Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford report on the racial and class makeup of student populations at top U.S. schools at various stages of their college careers, and conclude with suggestions for closing the racial academic achievement divide in American society more broadly. The result is a lucid and informative analysis that will benefit students, parents, admissions officers, teachers, and anyone interested in how race and social class come to bear on prestigious campuses.

The first six chapters of No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal analyze patterns of application, admission, scholarly performance, financial aid, and other factors among Black, White, Hispanic, and Asian students at America's most selective undergraduate programs. However, non-specialists and readers most interested in the potential applications of Espenshade's and Radford's research may wish to concentrate on the final chapters, which consider both affirmative action and class-based admissions procedures. Because elite colleges have more financial wherewithal than public universities, the authors charge top schools with the responsibility of recruiting, admitting, and graduating more low-income students. Especially rousing is the authors' call for the establishment of an American Competitiveness and Leadership Project (ACLP), which would work both to identify causes of the racial academic achievement gap between Black-White and Hispanic-White students and work to combat this gap on a national level.

As a first-generation college graduate from a poor family, I found this book both tremendously interesting and, sometimes, a bit at odds with my own college experience. While the authors rightly make the point that on-campus jobs identify less affluent students to their wealthier peers, it seems to me that class divisions among college students can be apparent in much more entrenched and longstanding ways—from clothes to vocabulary, from parental involvement to extracurricular activities—for work-study to be of so much significance as a class identifier. The authors' suggested substitution for work-study, however, is exciting. Noting that students who have on-campus jobs tend to interact more often with people from different backgrounds, Espenshade and Radford propose mandatory campus-wide "community service activity" initiatives that would replace work-study programs and bring together students of diverse backgrounds. Such a program would benefit both campus life and community outreach.

Another drawback is the book’s reliance on four broad racial categories, White, Black, Hispanic, or Asian. The authors are quick to acknowledge the different multiracial, immigrant, and descendant identities that comprise these categories, but at times the groupings still feel a bit reductive. This is especially evident in the book’s treatment of Native American and Pacific Islander students. While “American Indian/Native American/Alaska Native” and “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander” were options along the other categories on the student survey the authors used, these results are not discussed at length. The authors explain that “There was an insufficient number of individuals responding to the NSCE survey who listed Native American/Alaska Native to constitute a meaningful analysis category.” It didn’t seem to me that the authors spent any sustained part of their study focusing on Native American or Pacific Islander students, and some further elaboration of why not would have been helpful.

I have no background in sociology, so I was pleased with the readability of_No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal_. Espenshade and Radford demystify elite university admissions procedures and analyze the current state of racial and socioeconomic diversity at selective institutions, all in clear prose and with abundant statistical detail. Should universities implement class-based admissions? What roles should top schools play in eliminating racial inequality across generations of students? Not only does this book offer some answers to these questions, even more importantly, it will give you the tools you need to decide for yourself.

Written by: Barbara Barrow, January 27th 2010

The Southern Woman

admin — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 17:02:00 +0000

By Elizabeth Spencer

Modern Library

I grew up in the so-called New South, where there are sweet tea and skyscrapers, Gone with the Wind screenings in posh movie theaters, and Faulkner reading groups, but no stereotypical southern drawl and no cornbread. In an age where regional identity yields to interstates and chain hotels, can I still call myself a southern woman? After reading Elizabeth Spencer’s collection of short stories, I think I can.

Spencer’s South is not just a location; it is a kind of voice, a way of thinking and of speaking. “She was one of the old school of Southern lady talkers,” Spencer writes of one of her characters. “She tried to protect you from even a moment of silence.” So goes the conversation of Mrs. Harvey in “First Dark,” a story about a well-to-do Mississippi socialite struggling to come to terms with her daughter’s undistinguished suitor. In a volume that shifts from the bayous of Biloxi to the piazzas of Florence, voice, as much as setting, becomes the guiding force of Spencer’s fiction. Nearly all of her protagonists are women, and their voices—funny, shocking, anguished, and strange—propel the reader through story after story.

The Southern Woman is split into four sections: “The South”; “Italy”; “Up North”; and “New Stories.” Many of the stories in “The South” deal with rural landscapes, religious orthodoxy, and the legacy of slavery. In “Sharon,” a young girl first learns of the relationship between her White uncle and his Black housekeeper. Sexual awakening is the theme of the sultry “Ship Island,” about a girl from a poor family coming of age among Marine Club boys, eccentric millionaires, and a raucous adult Bible class. Spencer’s heroines are never dull; they break horses and chase ghosts through small towns and back roads.

The narrators in The Southern Woman often wrestle with family conflicts, and stories across all of Spencer’s geographies feature runaway relatives, errant husbands, and anxious parents. One of the most touching pieces in the collection, the novella “The Light in the Piazza,” tells the story of an American woman, Margaret Johnson, who brings her daughter Clara to Florence. Clara is permanently brain damaged from a childhood accident, and when she falls in love with a young Italian man, her mother learns to see her daughter as an adult for the first time: “a warm, classical dignity had come to this girl,” her mother realizes, “and no matter whether she could do long division or not, she was a woman.”

Spencer is not afraid to take risks in her writing, with mostly superb results. In some of the stories, particularly “The Business Venture” and “The Cousins,” the narrator’s voice is so intimate it becomes almost cloying. Spencer’s quirky characters are fascinating when they waver between the real and the fantastic. “The Finder” tells the tale of a man with a supernatural ability to find all lost things everywhere, and “I, Maureen” tells the story of a woman whose life changes after she experiences a vision in a flying piece of glass. Both of these stories exemplify Spencer’s dreamlike sense of comedy—a humor that both laughs and thinks.

Whether strolling through Southern farmlands or European squares, Spencer’s characters are fresh, funny, thoughtful, and, above all, honest. You’ll find someone to like in The Southern Woman, no matter how regional—or region-less—you are.

Written by: Barbara Barrow, December 4th 2009

Searching for Tamsen Donner

admin — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 23:10:00 +0000

By Gabrielle Burton

University of Nebraska Press

Westward expansion meets the women’s movement in Gabrielle Burton’s Searching for Tamsen Donner, a memoir about a mother’s journey West in the path of the doomed Donner Party pioneers of 1846-7. Most people associate the Donner Party legacy with cannibalism. The pioneers spent a horrific winter stranded in the Sierra Nevadas with no supplies; forty-two died and many of the remaining members survived on the remains of their friends and family.

Tamsen Donner, wife of the party’s captain, stayed behind with her dying husband as the last relief party left with her children. Her name has gone down in history as a paragon of traditional womanly virtue, a loyal wife who sacrificed her own life to be with her husband in his last moments. In Searching for Tamsen Donner, Burton seeks to show a different side of Tamsen, one that showcases her many roles as wife, mother, schoolteacher, botanist, letter writer, and traveler against the background of the Donner Party legend. As William Lederer tells Burton at a Bread Loaf writer’s conference in 1972, “Most people survive by eating each other. You’re going to write a book that shows a better way.”

Five years later, Burton sets off en route to California from New York with her family, weaving together the history of Tamsen Donner through pioneer gravesites and memorials, museums, maps, scholarly research, and surviving letters and diaries from the Donner party. Burton’s memoir charts her own participation in the feminist movements of the sixties and seventies, and her decision to become a writer while caring for a husband and five daughters. Burton’s struggle to balance career with family is a central tension of her journey. “I was afraid the summer would go and we’d find we had piddled the trip away in side trips to snake farms and Stucky shops,” she writes, these family diversions suggesting that, “I was not a writer at all but always and exclusively a mother.”

Burton’s family is supportive, however, and their cooperation and support efface the home/career divide that underscores popular images of successful women. With Tamsen in the foreground, Burton reminds us that history is filled with strong women—women who juggled domestic duties and personal aspirations long before movements for political equality had met with any success. Searching for Tamsen Donner is also a road story, and much of the pleasure of reading Burton’s memoir lies in the plucky characters she meets throughout her journey. These characters straddle history and modernity, blending tales of local life with their own struggles as farmers, small business owners, and casino employees. They also tell the story of the careless destruction of American landscapes—of highways built over historical markers, vandalized memorials, and toxic government testing sites. These acts of destruction present a very different picture from the serene visual landscapes described by Tamsen in her extant letters, all of which appear in Burton’s memoir.

Burton’s emphasis on pioneer history occasionally seems to leave unquestioned the frontier mythology of discovery, the manifest destiny that masks nineteenth-century imperialist narratives of westward expansion. Burton’s self-identified focus on Tamsen shows that a more complete depiction of pioneer history and its displacements and dispossessions are beyond the scope of her memoir, but sometimes one wishes for a less peripheral depiction of Native and Mexicans populations in her retelling of Tamsen’s journey West. Burton’s quibbles with the Mormon Church and culture, too, may seem a bit strident to third wavers. But Burton’s account of her journey and Tamsen’s are (second wave) at its best, and her story is an inspiration to all women seeking to balance personal ambitions, adventure, and family.

Arriving just in time for summer road trip planning, Searching for Tamsen Donner is a moving exploration of a legendary American woman through the eyes of a modern heroine.

Written by: Barbara Barrow, April 23rd 2009