Sara Paretsky’s Writing in an Age of Silence

This nonfiction collection of essays, each related to the theme of freedom, fascinates and challenges thought.

Freedom as a theme seems to have dominated Sara Paretsky’s life, judging from her Introduction, a memoir of childhood and education, which impressed me with admiration, perhaps awe, of her courage and intelligence. As a child within her family she fought for herself with rare determination and skill.

And she won through to a (state) college education, though not attendance at the first rate eastern university she wished for. She didn’t win her father’s respect or approval and she may not have won his affection; he seems not to have won hers. The consequences of this channeled her into the woman’s movement, with which the second chapter deals. She’s still angry, and she still blames men for holding women in exploitation, sexually and economically, and politically.

I don’t. I blame our genes—the kind of animal we humans evolved to be. And I feel that human males are as much the victims—prisoners—of that evolution as we women. Ants and honey bees evolved a system of life organization in which females operate their society, males being used exclusively for breeding. Are female ants dominating male ants, or are they and male ants dominated by their evolution?

But surely in western civilization we are seeing women struggling, in part successfully, to override their evolutionary impulses by taking control of their lives. The struggle costs the freedom fighters in exhaustion, punishment from the group—often from their own families—that sometimes includes assault, rape, and poverty. Paretsky’s first chapter, “Wild Women Out of Control or How I became a Writer,” movingly deals with that struggle and its consequences.

In her second chapter (or essay), “The King and I,” she moves on to social freedom: the civil rights movement as she encountered it in Chicago. She was young, young and inexperienced enough to be surprised as well as shocked by the racial hatred and rage she saw. This was the Chicago of the civil rights explosion, the king of the chapter’s title referring to Martin Lewis King, Jr. Paretsky poured her personal rage and her youthful strength into the battle, and learned from her efforts:

The children from our day camp were often anxious; outings to the beach started with black children throwing stones as we waited at Ashland Avenue for the bus, and often ended with an emergency dash home before the next round of riots began. The first time we took the children to Wrigley Field to see a baseball game, they wouldn’t sit next to a black person on the train, standing for the hour-long ride while half the seats on the car were empty. We told the kids they would forfeit the right to go on outings if they did it again, and, eyes wide with fear, they would perch on the edge of a seat, terrified of being assaulted by the tired middle-aged women next to them….That summer changed my life forever.

Paretsky’s women’s rights issues, beginning with the near-death of her roommate from a “coat hanger” abortion layers with the memoir of her mystery reading that helped push her into writing in chapter three, “Not Angel, not Monster, Just Human.” She writes of her series’ protagonist:

V I’s emotional involvements do sometimes cloud her judgments. That is a fact of life for men and women both. V I has lovers, but her sexuality does not prohibit her from making clear moral decisions and acting on them. V I isn’t flawless. Merely she is an adult, with the same freedoms that men have to act, to move, to make decisions, to fall in love, experience sex, even to be wrong, without any of those things making her a monster.

Religion in American public life and our mythic love of independent self-sufficiency occupy her fourth chapter, “The iPod and Sam Spade.” Her view of the perennial, perhaps unresolvable conflict between the human impulse to attend to personal needs against the impulse to care others is worth reading.

All contemporary American writers owe it to themselves to read “Truth, Lies, and Duct Tape, the book’s fifth and final chapter dealing with free speech and the state of oppression produced by current publishing practices. Hey, gang, this is you she’s writing about.

Her chapter end notes cite specific cases, and are a delight.

I particularly recommend reading this book in tandem with the recently republished first novel in her series (originally published in 1982), titled Indemnity Only. Its introduction is valuable reading and the novel itself great fun and a provocative glimpse of how she practices her theories and ideals.

Ellen Litman’s The Last Chicken in America

Read an excerpt.

Both a collection of short stories and a novel, its covers hold stories of individuals, each different from the other, particular, strongly flavored. And yet the stories add up to a novel about one culture crash landing into another, the recipient culture unaware and indifferent to the accident. But the expectations, hopes, and illusions of the entrants crack at contact, some bursting into flames; many of the immigrants quickly and desperately wishing to go back “home.”

The travelers were Russian Jews, successful professionals in the country of their birth who took their leap for reasons that aren’t ever clear. Is it to escape a restrictive government, chronic anti-Semitism, an anticipation of worse in Russia to come, or belief that the U.S. has a superabundance of dollars ripe for the plucking?

Pittsburgh, the site of their crash landing, or spot they soon crawled to, had no professional jobs for them, only few, sporadic jobs of a poorly paid, low status, service sort—care taking, janitorial, and other such.

Language loomed a barrier to efforts to improve their situation, for some an almost insurmountable barrier. In America, though they are trying to learn English, they are most comfortable and most often speaking Russian.

Most of the immigrants arrived as families—parents and children, siblings, cousins, huddling in Squirrel Hill, creating something very like a ghetto blocked by invisible but almost impenetrable walls.

Failure, rage, depression eats at family affection and bonds. Everyone seems to demand too much; no one is capable or willing to give enough.

The novel deals with this culture unraveling under stress and these people’s attempts to build a hybrid, functioning culture in this strange land, America. Litman shows glimpses of individual endeavors without abstracting the process, which can only be obtained by the readers’ epiphanies and slowly accumulating understanding.

The stories are of individuals, their each one’s unique response to the common dilemma.

My favorite character is the teenager Masta, who is as close to protagonist as the novel owns. Torn, unconsenting from her home in Russia, where she had a promising future, she struggles to make a place for herself, despite her failures in Pittsburgh’s schools, her growing antagonism to her parents, her fumbling attempts to manage newly sprung sexual needs, and muddling work performance. Masta combats her difficulties without the shield of delusion. She is clear-eyes about those she loves and her own, often flinching and desperate attempts to make a life for herself. But flinch though she does, she’s no quitter. Again and again she throws herself into new opportunities. And when moments of comfort an joy come she has the ability to throw aside resentment and embrace them.

Litman’s older and old people demonstrate time’s stiffening of flexibility. Their successes are slow-coming and few; their failures many; some are wonderfully cranky, some pulled under by depression.

One critic called Litman’s prose luminous. I call it sturdy and serviceable. Here’s a taste for you to judge:

This is our everyday route. Me at the wheel, my dad in the passenger seat. We start at Wendover Street—it’s where we live. I adjust the mirrors the way he tells me to. To my left, the road. To my right, the curb, littered with tilted garbage cans. The sidewalk and five almost identical apartment buildings, brick with tarnished trimming. There’s one with all the crazies: at night they come out, sleepwalking and howling. Joe Berman, who lives across the street, says they give him nightmares. Joe studies for his Ph.D in Russian. Some nights, I see him sitting outside in his Tercel, listening to the songs by Vertibnsky: I am madly afraid of your shimmery shackles. Sometimes I sit with him and translate.

AND

Sweryoza and Olya miss the bus. First they miss the one that stops at the corner of Phillips and Murray, in front of the hardware store. It shows up early and passes without pausing—no potential passengers in sight. Seryozha and Olya see it as they round the corner.

“See? Unreliable,” says Seryozha. “Cabs and buses, all unreliable, but buses especially so.”

Adept at both first person and third person, she conveys the impression of broken English without making an obstacle of it.

It’s her characterization that is luminous. She’s clear-eyed, unsentimental, and very affectionate in capturing her characters on paper. What impressed me most was how much of her characters’ behavior I had seen among my own non-immigrant, typically American friends.

The Last Chicken in America provokes thought, refusing to be dislodged from memory, despite my dyslexic breakdowns with the Russian names. My largest and rather surprising inference is how humanness withstands cultural washing. Reading this collection is often like looking in a mirror.