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Book Review: Mothers, Daughters, Sisters, Wives, by Karen Rosenbaum
January 30, 2017
Mothers, Daughters, Sisters, Wives: Ceaselessly into the Past
Karen Rosenbaum. Mothers, Daughters, Sisters, Wives. Provo: Zarahemla Books, 2015. 204 pp.
Reviewed by Josh Allen
When reading Karen Rosenbaum’s short story collection Mothers, Daughters, Sisters, Wives, I kept thinking about the end of The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald’s haunting conclusion: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” So it is with the women who populate Rosenbaum’s fourteen stories in this collection. The past defines them, breathes always within them. They live preoccupied with family legacies and personal histories, often ruminating, always remembering. Consider, for example, the structure of Rosenbaum’s story “Requiem in L Minor.” Charlotte, the main character, is recopying an old address book that’s grown faded and illegible. She’s reached the Ls—Angela and Mark Laird. Their names are offered to readers as a subheading, and under that heading, Charlotte dredges up memories of her time with the Lairds, reflecting on the past. The story continues in this way, on through the address book, with Nathan Loewe, Carole and Ken Lidwell, Jill Leonard, Morty Lawler, and Ginny Lin. In each of these sections, Charlotte moves through her past, reaffirming it. This single story’s structure seems a fitting microcosm for the larger collection. The fourteen stories in this book are divided into four sections, each section focusing on the women within a single family and exploring their histories and the accumulated baggage of their lives. But it’s not just their own lives’ weight these women bear. They also bear the weight of family legacy—inherited faith, family responsibilities, or even stories themselves. And yet, for Rosenbaum’s female protagonists, the past is never an oppressive force. Rosenbaum’s women bear their pasts without complaint, accepting them as instrumental and often welcome parts of who they are. This emphasis on /preoccupation with the past does much for Rosenbaum’s writing. It fuels her prose, lends her stories a gratifying subtlety, allows her to develop finely wrought characters, and ultimately imbues her work with the artistic weight that makes this collection such a pleasure.
Related to this quiet prose are the quiet and subtle transformations of Rosenbaum’s characters. Impatient readers might crave more volatility—more dynamic characters and grander character arcs. But given Rosenbaum’s emphasis on memory, her characters’ subtle transformations feel authentic. Consider the end of “Requiem in L Minor.” “Returning again to her address book, Charlotte thinks: ‘I should write to Ramona. No confession, no conversion. A letter of love. Love, no matter what. Mostly'” (152). Any changes that emerge here, from a character willing to dwell so worshipfully over her address book, feel more like affirmations than transformations. And yet, this story, like so many in the collection, ends with both an affirmation and a transformation. Charlotte makes the kind of change that can be triggered by revisiting long-carried memories—a subtle change—so subtle that it’s captured in a single word (i.e.,“Mostly”). Other stories in this collection follow suit. In fact, a few of the character arcs in these stories are so understated that I had to re-read them to see them at work. But the story arcs are there. By moving through their pasts, these characters not only reaffirm their identities; they also slowly and methodically develop them.
One of the most common burdens of the past that Rosenbaum revisits is that of faith. Some of her characters take up their inherited Mormon faith gladly; others shed it. But to Rosenbaum’s credit, her characters are not hobby horses for some agenda. This book is not activism masquerading as fiction. Her characters are too carefully developed for that. For example, in “The Price of Ties,” one character says, “Believing isn’t the easiest thing in the world” (31), and we believe her. These characters’ faith or lack thereof comes across as simply one of their human qualities, one piece of their pasts they’re destined to wrestle with, never a statement by their author.