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

Women and Children First : Page 1, 2

The book's next story, "Other Lives," reminded me a little of where I live, as well. Dottie attends the New Consciousness Academy in Bennington and looks like a sunflower, and while I live near enough to Bennington that I think I'd know if such an academy existed, it's a slim enough stretch that I'm willing to suspend my disbelief.

We also meet Claire, Dottie's best friend; their daughters, Poppy and Miranda; and their husbands, Raymond and Joey. Again, the insights of the characters prove as interesting as the story of which they are a part:

Claire looks at the children and the two sets of parents and thinks a stranger walking in would have trouble telling: Which one paints dancing vegetables? Which one's lived before as a Napoleonic soldier? Which ones have mated for life? She thinks they are like constellations, or like that engraving on Evelyn's father's desk, or like sunflowers seen from below. Depending on how you look, they could be anything.

People could be anything and aren't always what they seem — this theme extends into "Everyone Had a Lobster," which introduces us to Valerie, freeloading at an expensive summer home where the residents carry a video camera with them each day and watch their day's events on the television after dinner. We watch Valerie's fascination with the mysterious Nasir and the way their relationship sours. "It amazed her that what you'd hoped was the start of your life could turn out to be a scene in someone else's porno movie," Prose writes.

Some of the stories are evocative of other stories I have read and loved. "Everything is About Animals" reminds me of the assortment of animal (especially ape) stories in T.C. Boyle's Collected Stories; "Electricity" — with its tale of a middle-aged man turned Hasid — points me to "The Gilgul of Park Avenue," from Nathan Englander's For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. But Prose's volume predates both of these. In any case, they're flattering comparisons; Boyle and Englander's collections are among my favorites in recent months. Prose's collection has now joined them.

There are certain images that recur, threads tying the stories loosely together. Setting oneself on fire, for instance (although I won't spoil anything by listing places where that one pops up). The twined trio of wanting a child, having a child, not having a child. Letting go. Storytelling, and the reliability (or unreliability) of narration.

But mostly, the mixture of wit and compassion with which Prose brings her characters to life ties these stories together. By the collection's end, I was both near laughter and near tears because we are all tender and ordinary and screwed-up, and Prose sees that. She leaves ambiguous the possibility of a kind of redemption, but I see the world more clearly now that I have taken her words inside.

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Rachel Barenblat is co-founder of Inkberry, a literary organization in the Berkshires. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. A chapbook of her poems, the skies here, was published by Pecan Grove Press (San Antonio) in 1995. Learn more at www.rachelbarenblat.com