A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert

The Moment: You catch your daughter burning her bra

by Katherine Hill

	print	email	reply

Published: Jun 10, 2009

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

A Short History of Women
by Kate Walbert

Quietly, steadily, Kate Walbert has over the years built an impressive literary reputation as a modern-day Virginia Woolf, with Woolf's interest in time passing and women's deceptively uneventful lives. Her last book, Our Kind (2004), a slim novel-in-stories short-listed for the National Book Award, skillfully defied stereotypes in its depiction of aging 1950s housewives who speak in a collective voice that is at once intimate and wryly detached.

Knowing a good formula when she's found it, Walbert is back this summer with another slim novel-in-stories, A Short History of Women, focusing this time on a family rather than a group of friends. The women of the title are Dorothy Trevor Townsend, a British suffragette who, in 1914, literally starves herself for the cause, and a handful of her American descendents, each of whom is in some way haunted by their ancestor's final act.

Walbert writes with a taut lyricism rarely found in contemporary fiction, her elegant, looping sentences shifting from past to present, and sometimes future tense, as if to suggest that the history of women is at once inherited and determinative. She draws from a variety of 20th- and 21st-century literary styles to tell the stories of the Townsend women, among them a middle-aged Barnard scientist on V-J Day in New York, a 1970s suburban housewife attending a "rap session" at a neighbor's home, and a Manhattan sculptor getting drunk and confessional at her daughter's afternoon playdate.

While some of these stories will feel familiar to fans of feminist legend and myth, Walbert's style is wholly original. Peppered with fine observations, it is, for all its influences and elasticity, still very much her own. The only thing to lament in this history is that it had to be so short.

Scribner, 256 pp., $24, June 16

There's a Book for That
My Goat Ate Its Own Legs by Alex Burrett
And Then There's This by Bill Wasik
Rave Culture by Tammy L. Anderson
The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson
The Big Rewind by Nathan Rabin
How The Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll by Elijah Wald
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe
I'm Down by Mishna Wolff
This Is Your Country on Drugs by Ryan Grim
The Strain by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan
How to Sell by Clancy Martin
Life Inc. by Douglas Rushkoff
Commencement by J. Courtney Sullivan
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton
The Blindfold Test by Barry Schechter