Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726

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Women and Children First
Novel by Francine Prose
Reviewed by Rachel Barenblat

Women and Children First Francine Prose Out of Print Published 1988 Pantheon Books

On a recent Sunday my husband and I sat on our deck with books. He was re-reading the Harry Potter series; I was reading Francine Prose's Women and Children First.

"That's a new one. Where'd you get that?" he asked.

"Just came in the mail from a used bookstore," I said. "I'm reviewing it for Pif's out of print issue."

"That's not very nice," he pointed out. "Telling people about all these great books they can't get anymore."

"Well, maybe it won't be very good," I hazarded. "Then I won't have that problem."

I have good news and bad news. The bad news: I have the problem he predicted. Not that this surprises me — I've read Prose's essays and novels, and the theory that she might not be as skilled at the short story as she is at everything else was a tenuous one at best.

The good news: this is a fantastic book of short stories, and your local library might even have a copy. If you're the kind of bibliophile who needs to own every book you've ever loved, you'd better start hitting used bookstores now.

The stories in Women and Children First are uniformly beautiful and surprising. Prose's stories reveal the kernel of the extraordinary hidden within ordinary people and ordinary situations. They left me feeling that, if I approached my own life with her scalpel-like intensity, I would find something extraordinary in me, too.

"Most of the Buddhists were therapists from the Upper West Side," begins the book's first story, "Tibetan Time." This is a tale about Ceci, a kindergarten teacher spending a day at a Buddhist retreat outside the city. Through Ceci's eyes, Prose shows us the complicated facets of the lives of these "Buddhists": the German woman who is homesick for temple bells, the man in the parka who flirts with her (to the frustration of his quiet wife), the pony-tailed kid who's obsessed with the Dalai Lama's eating habits.

The next story, the book's title story, throws the reader into a completely different world. Janet, who lives outside of D.C., buys antiques to sell at her friend Gordie's shop in the city. "They have just smoked a joint in Gordie's bedroom in the basement of his shop," Prose writes.

They are sitting cross-legged on his carved four-poster bed, amid the Chinese knickknacks, the Oscar Wilde bearskin rug, the moth-eaten taxidermy Gordie says is illegal even to own, and looking through a carton of antique nursery-rhyme illustrations, the remnants of some disintegrated kids' book that someone recognized as beautiful and worth saving.

Ostensibly, the story is about Janet taking her son to a doctor's office to explore mother-son ESP, and while I enjoyed this thread of the story, Janet's offhand musings about her life proved the aspect of the story that sticks with me most:

When she and Will split up and she found this way to live out here and make money, she'd thought that the rest of her life would be a treasure hunt. The auctions, the sales, checking the local obits — how quickly it all came to seem like a job. It's got so her heart sinks at the sight of another beautiful oak hutch.

It's possible that those lines resonate with me because I live in small-town New England; one of my favorite ways to spend a Sunday is to drive up and down country roads, looking for the kinds of treasures Janet has learned to loathe. I suspect, though, that these lines would ring true even for someone who's never visited an East Coast auction hall, never thumbed through used books or scanned shelves of chipped estate china.

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