Love and politics in challenging times
A Dangerous Age
By Ellen Gilchrist
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 245 pp., $23.95
Ellen Gilchrist's "A Dangerous Age" is a political novel, always a difficult and uncertain form. But Gilchrist understands the problems with political fiction. She delivers a troubled examination of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars through the safest literary vehicle, a love story. The Hand cousins, Winifred, Louise, and Olivia, three modern women raised in the easy affluence of the American South, are each in love with men deeply affected by modern political events.
Gilchrist marches straight into her story. Page one opens with the announcement of Winifred's upcoming marriage to Charles. A page later, Charles has died in the 9/11 attacks. Louise says, "All of us were flying in and getting giddy at the thought of red velvet bridesmaids dresses . . . and the world before us like a land of dreams." But how do we - how does a bride left waiting with her wedding dress half-buttoned - respond? Why is Charles dead? Who is to blame? How do we exact revenge? Should we? Louise tells her grieving cousin, "It's a tragedy but you'll live through it. Our ancestors lost their loved ones all the time and they pulled through. We just have to relearn how to do it." As the war in Iraq escalates, these three women will have plenty of opportunity to practice those ancestral skills of stoicism and courage.
The day after Charles is killed, his twin cousins, Brian and Carl, enlist to requite his death. When Brian is flown to Bethesda, Md., seriously wounded, the family gathers at the hospital. In a rushed narrative, Gilchrist draws wounded Brian into grieving and nurturing Winifred's arms, and Louise into Carl's. (Oh, yes: there is a lot of tender, celebratory love-making for all three woman, an antidote to war and fear.)
Unlike Louise, Carl is clear about his obligations. When Louise says that she doesn't even know him, Carl responds sharply, "Yes, you do. Brian . . . is me, and now I am going back up there and spending the night beside his bed. And then I am going over there where they did this to him and count coup. Can you deal with that?" He is the avenger, the warrior brother with absolute clarity about good and evil, Gilchrist's voice for the American soldier's commitment to this war.
"A Dangerous Age" is described as a tale about three cousins. But Gilchrist never quite captures Louise or Winifred's voices and characters, and she pretty much surrenders them in the first chapter to their sudden and unlikely loves. That's OK, because the third cousin, Olivia, is ready to take over this story. Olivia is the love child of a Hand man and a Cherokee girl who died in childbirth. Raised by her Cherokee grandparents, Olivia fell in love with, married, and divorced Bobby Tree. Now, as the editor of the Tulsa, Okla., newspaper, she moves between her two worlds - a spiritually guided life at home and her newspaper job where everything is a potential story. She is smart, complex, unpredictable, and provocative.
The reader listens attentively because she has a lot to say. Or ask, because most of her work is to challenge us to question - war, patriotism, relativism, duty, imperialism and profiteering, idealism and altruism - with few easy answers arising. This war confuses her.
Gilchrist rides the tension - between seeing events and motivations clearly and becoming clouded by personal and material concerns - on a perfect edge. When Bobby Tree and Olivia reconcile and are expecting a baby, this war is still an idea she debates in her edgy editorials. But when he is called back to the Reserves, the war is no longer an abstraction.
Gilchrist raises a multitude of issues in her novel - the burden on poor boys to fight our wars, the lack of arts in our schools, global warming, torture, the failure of young people to serve the greater good, the ethical bankruptcy of political parties. But the overriding questions here are about this war in this electoral year, about our motivations, our best interests, our moral and spiritual obligations. After Olivia's baby is born, she closes her editorial with this: "A bumper sticker reads, 'We are making enemies faster than we can kill them.' What in hell are we supposed to do next?" The political is personal, and the personal is political. War comes home to men and women, everywhere.
Meredith Hall is author of the memoir "Without a Map."
