Book Preview: Other People Manage

Right...Esperanza Rising was meant to have been last week's book review. I was just opening Petfinder when a friend rolled up to McDonald's and offered me a lift home, for which I was grateful, since it was raining. Today's book is one of those previews of books publishers send out to generate Advance Publicity before books actually arrive in stores. It's been scheduled for April. I read it last winter, checked this morning, and learned that now you can pre-order at least the Kindle edition here.

Title: Other People Manage

Author: Ellen Hawley

Date: 2022 (Yes. This is a preview-review of the final draft of a book that’s still “in press.”)

Publisher: Swift

ISBN: 978-1-80075-098-2

Length: 208 e-pages

Quote: “When I try to remember the stages now, I come up with denial, bargaining, something else, another something else and acceptance. No matter how often I come back to fill in the blanks, I can’t name the missing stages.”

Bereavement, “Minnesota Nice” style. When you’re in Nice Mode you don’t let yourself think about anger and despair. There are anger and despair in the story, of course, because people die, but they’re like the mythical fnord: If you don’t see it, the fnord cannot eat you.

This is a story about bereavement. Any widow can relate, even enjoy it, see the little flashes of life and hope in the cloud of grief. Those who are not widows might learn something from it.

This story starts out with three young lesbians. (As regular readers know, I don't usually like romances; I’d rather read the future book of what Ellen Hawley’s learned about England by living there, but her fiction’s not disappointing either.) The characters are not Catholic and don’t mention the fact, but they have a patron saint in common: Marge, Peg, and Megan. Marge, the narrator, is the big strong one who accepts her orphanhood years before it becomes an irreversible physical fact. Peg is the sweet domestic one who draws Marge into the life of an ordinary, semi-functional family. Megan is just bad news. The story ends with Marge reminiscing about the other two, surviving bereavement with the help of family love.

After Megan’s melodrama reaches its end, Marge and Peg fret a bit about whether they’ve lost that loving feeling, then settle down and provide the stability for Peg’s teenaged sisters. Marge seems to be a classic LBS introvert. Peg seems to be another. They don’t feel a need to live at the pitch that is near madness. Marge narrates their mellow, if too short, story in a classic LBS wry tone: what’s happening in the present tense in her life is not hilariously funny, but you might as well laugh as cry. (Hawley’s Jewish, I’m Irish; that feeling that you might as well laugh as cry is something the cultures have in common.) In the depths of that stage of grief she can’t name, Marge says things like, “If half the country was sinking into the sea, I might care, but only enough to make sure I was on the part that sinks.” She’s not playing for laughs; this is the way her long brain stem manages despair.

Topophilia is another of this novel’s delights. Marge, Peg, and their family enjoy being Minnesotans. If you never thought you wanted to be a Minnesotan you can enjoy the place vicariously through the book.

Which brings me to the question some readers will ask. Should Christians read about lesbians? Well, should Virginians read about Minnesotans? People different from us exist, they’re not going to become us, we’re not going to become them, so we might as well acknowledge what we have in common with them. One of the purposes of reading is to help us learn to feel and practice good will toward people different from us. Bedroom scenes are mostly conversation, without the gross detail with which Marge Piercy and Lisa Alther got away in the days when publishers demanded explicit sex.

The use of another kind of intimate detail in Other People Manage is justifiable as part of the development of Marge’s character, and probably helps all the other characters seem as real as they do, though some of Hawley’s readers may not like it. I do think too many women writers forget that physical details in scenes of motherly love can be as tasteless as physical details in scenes of sex or violence. In real life people need to overcome the aversion some of us feel to nursing and mothering. Marge is such a person so it’s important for her personal growth that we see her maturing from noticing only young, perfect bodies as sources of erotic or aesthetic pleasure, to noticing Peg’s symptoms and the children’s maturation as indicators of what they require from her. 

Well, this is a novel about family ties so it’s more tactile, let’s say, than Hawley’s history and coronavirus posts are. Marge is a tactile person; what she likes about her job is not the sights along her route but the feeling of the bus’s power. If you’re one of the hand thinkers who like to “feel” rather than “see” a story as you read it, who probably find slim pickings here but may receive a link to this review from a friend, you will like Marge.