~ Mrs. Everything, by Jennifer Weiner ~
This novel has an ambitious goal: to tell the story of a woman from her birth in the 1940s to her death around 2016, and to reflect the events and changing mores of American society during this period as well.
This ambition has been realized in quantity, in that the lengthy novel does indeed follow the lives of Jo and her sister Bethie over 70 years, but not in quality, so that their personalities are never fully explored or understandable. And while various events of the 1900s in America are name-checked — civil rights protests, Dylan at Newport, hippies and drugs, Kennedy’s assassination, communes, Wall Street millionaires — there are no particularly interesting insights into the events or their cultural ramifications.
Jo and Bethie grow up in Detroit, and their names appear to have some symbolic connection to Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, in that Jo is a tomboy, hates wearing dresses, and wants to be a writer. Bethie is the ‘perfect’ little girl (really more Amy than Beth) — pretty and talented. Early on Jo discovers that she is attracted to women, which colours her life choices thenceforth. She has clandestine relationships in high school and in college. The fear of societal disapproval keeps all the women quiet about their lesbian lives.
Bethie is the more perplexing character, whose personality changes dramatically from period to period. Talented and popular in school, she goes to college and abruptly changes into a drug-addict with a dealer boyfriend. Much of her life is defined by sexual violence: molestation by an uncle, gang-raped at a concert. Her other main characteristic is a fixation on weight and body image.
One thread running throughout the book is female choice: Should they marry? Should they have children? Should they work? Every female character makes some choices, but all the options seem unsatisfactory. The lesbians who get married to men are unhappy. The stay-at-home women who have children love them, but are miserable about not working. The ones who do work long to spend more time with their children. And so on, with little change over the decades except that the women have more work opportunities.
The two women feel guilt or blame each other for the oddest things throughout their lives. At one point, Bethie feels responsible for Jo’s troubled youngest daughter because Jo had become pregnant soon after the two sisters had a fight — What?!
I’m no expert on changes in America in the last 70 years, but some of the cultural aspects seemed historically inaccurate to me. The 60s in this novel are a blur, with Afros and acid in 1962 in Ann Arbor (a bit early, surely?) and Black Panthers on campus by 1965. In the novel, Hillary Clinton runs for the Presidency right along with the #metoo movement that actually happened a year or so later.
The writing is functional but unexceptional. The changes relating to LGBT life in America are perhaps the best developed part of the book. This would be a tolerable read except that the sheer length of the book drags it down — long after the major events in their lives have taken place, we’re still plodding along with Jo and Bethie to the bitter end.
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