Amy Wilentz (© Sigrid Estrada)

Pity and terror
Martyrs' Crossing by Amy Wilentz. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001, 311 pp., $24.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Lesley Hazleton

WHEN AN AWARD-WINNING journalist turns novelist, expectations run high. We're looking for the truth behind the headlines. And if the journalist in question has done her job well--and Amy Wilentz does it superbly in Martyrs' Crossing--what we discover is not one truth, but the deeper and more nightmarish world of many conflicting truths tumbling against each other, fighting for dominance, trying to prove the others all lies.

Wilentz covered Jerusalem for The New Yorker in the late nineties, after winning the PEN/Martha Albrand Prize and the Whiting Writers Award for her earlier nonfiction book, The Rainy Season: Haiti since Duvalier. Clearly, she could have played safe and written another book of reportage on the Israel/Palestine conflict, which would undoubtedly have earned her more awards. Instead, she opted for the deeper but riskier possibilities of fiction. And the first two chapters alone of Martyrs' Crossing amply justify that decision.

The setting is an Israeli army checkpoint--one of those well-guarded roadblocks that have become emblematic of the current de facto siege of Palestinians in the West Bank. Where Israelis see these checkpoints as essential security measures, Palestinians experience them as means of harassment and humiliation, subjecting their freedom to commute to work, go to school, visit friends, go shopping, even get medical help to the whims of the Israeli military. People wait for hours at a time to pass through--and then usually only on foot. The air is thick with dust and resentment.

In thirty pages, Wilentz quickly and surely sets up an explosive situation at one of the largest such checkpoints--a situation so humanly plausible that it becomes almost inevitable. She shows us a Palestinian-American woman, Marina, desperately trying to get from her West Bank home in Ramallah to Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. Her asthmatic two-year-old is having a severe attack. He needs to get to his doctors in Hadassah quickly. And normally, perhaps, she'd have no problem getting through.

But this is no normal day. Or rather, it's still more abnormal than every other day in this part of the world.

Two bus bombs have gone off inside Israel. All checkpoints have been ordered hermetically sealed. Nobody is to come across. Violent street demonstrations develop at the Jerusalem-Ramallah crossing, and the well-meaning but indecisive young Israeli lieutenant in charge does all he can to avoid fatalities. This means using lots of tear gas. With darkness, the demonstrators eventually disperse. But not Marina and her child. By the time they enter the checkpoint office, after all that tear gas, the boy can hardly breathe.

The young officer can see the child needs urgent medical attention, and starts calling his superiors for clearance. But at every call, he's told no. Because as if there weren't enough happening, there's an extra little problem: Marina's husband is a jailed Hamas leader. This is not just any Palestinian mother in Israeli eyes; this is the wife of a terrorist. And the son of one.

The lieutenant is still getting stonewalled when an ambulance arrives for one of his men, lightly injured earlier in the day. He decides to ignore orders and gestures mother and child to the ambulance. Too late, of course. The child dies right there at the crossing. A martyr is born.

THIS IS A DYNAMITE SET-UP, and one eerily echoed in a classic case of fact following fiction. Ha'aretz--the Israeli equivalent of The New York Times--recently reported on a toddler who had fallen into a water barrel in the village of Al-Taram near Jenin in the West Bank. His family tried to rush him to the nearest medical clinic in a neighboring village five minutes' drive away, but they were stopped by soldiers at an Israeli roadblock, even though the child was barely breathing and turning blue. By the time they finally got through, the child was dead.

As Tom Wolfe did in The Bonfire of the Vanities, taking a bad situation--a wrong turn, a moment of panic--and following it through, so Wilentz in Martyrs' Crossing leads us into the ramifications of Marina's individual tragedy. And through it, into the Byzantine philosophical maze of Israeli and Palestinian politics: the endless conflict between humanity and pragmatism, ends and means, integrity and corruption, greater goods and personal evils.

At first it seems as though the central figure will be Marina. Or perhaps the young lieutenant. But the best-drawn and most interesting character in this novel is a far more original choice: Marina's father, George, who returns to Ramallah from his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for his grandson's funeral. A renowned cardiologist, he is recently widowed, and his own heart is shaky. He is also a well-known Palestinian intellectual deeply critical of Arafat and of the corruption seemingly endemic to the Palestinian Authority: "how the Chairman--and his sycophants and flunkies--scraped away all the profits and made deals with the Israelis to enjoy the eventual spoils." Such opinions have earned him several death threats.

Exiled as a child from Jerusalem in 1948, George still carries the key to the front door of his childhood home, which has stayed the same except that the street is now called Hovevei Zion--Lovers of Zion Street. "Funny name for his old street," he thinks, taking the exile's refuge in irony. Sophisticated and cosmopolitan, possessed of deep humanity and scathing intellect, George is a man of paradox and ambiguity thrown back by his grandson's death into a world of absolutes.

Wilentz clearly adores him, and so does the reader. She gives him wonderful scenes. He has what he thinks of as a "terror episode" when he's suddenly paralyzed by fear of opening his own car door lest it be wired to a bomb. A Jewish patient berates him for not condemning terrorist attacks, as if he is individually responsible for everything that every Palestinian does. His daughter persuades him to visit his childhood home, where he finds the Jewish girl whose family once rented a small apartment out back, now a grandmother living with the furniture his family left behind. "You make Palestine romantic," he remembers his wife telling him. "It's not romantic." Ah, but George is.

A clue to the real-life model for George surfaces when he picks up a book of old photographs of Palestinian life called All That Remains. In fact, All That Remains is not a photography book; it's a stunning encyclopedic tome edited by Harvard professor Walid Khalidi, cofounder of the Institute for Palestine Studies in Washington, DC. Subtitled "The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948," it's an immense, sober, and sobering documentary record, an essential reference work for anyone seriously interested in the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Another of Khalidi's books is Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of the Palestinians, 1876-1948, and this is presumably the book George thumbs through. Wilentz acknowledges both works at the end of her novel. I don't know why she switched the titles, but I assume there is a lot of Khalidi in George, just as there is a goodly dose of Columbia professor Edward Said and of the many other Palestinian intellectuals in the States whose lives and minds wrestle with questions of identity and exile, principle and politics.

BACK IN RAMALLAH, George witnesses the instant transformation of his dead grandson into a symbol, part of what he thinks of, ironically capitalized, as The Cause. The new slogan on the streets of the West Bank becomes "Find the Soldier"--the young officer at the checkpoint. Orchestrating the whole campaign is George's boyhood friend Ahmed Amr, now no longer quite so friendly. A charming and wily politician, Ahmed has become a senior advisor to Yassir Arafat, "part of the whole corrupt contraption" in George's mind.

The two square off: George the idealist versus Ahmed the pragmatist, who is determined to use the boy's death to force the Israelis back to the negotiating table. "You have enough weapons at your disposal. You have enough bargaining chips. You don't need to use my grandson to spur the masses. He's not a blunt instrument," George objects. "We use the tools that are given to us," Ahmed bluntly replies.

I wish Wilentz had stayed focused on George and Marina and Ahmed, following the three to the inevitable point at which George literally breaks his heart. But she gives equal time--the journalistic habit of fairness, perhaps--to two other main characters: the hapless Israeli lieutenant and the Israeli intelligence colonel whose job it is to spin the situation, using it, as Ahmed uses it, to advance stalled negotiations. The details are spot on. The colonel has "the stance of an old boxer, barrel-chested and muscular, and eyes that were hooded now, but looked as if they once might have been bright." Wilentz gives him green eyes, though I remember men like this with eyes such a pale blue they're a washed-out gray. His memories of Prime Minister Gertler having an alcoholic breakdown as chief of staff during the 1973 war are unmistakably those of Yitzhak Rabin's breakdown, attributed at the time to nicotine poisoning. And his comments on "fabled Israeli intelligence: full of double agents, incompetents, frauds, and blabbermouths"are a realistic antidote to the spy-novel image of Israeli infallibility. But with both the Israelis, the psychology fails; they're reduced to acting as characters instead of as people. The colonel becomes too convenient a villain, while the guilt-ridden young lieutenant seeks absolution in ways not even the most sympathetic Israeli officer would ever do. His actions--going to a demonstration in Palestinian East Jerusalem, or to Marina's house in Ramallah--create a Hollywood-type plot, true, but in this context that seems entirely unnecessary. Wilentz may have taken too literally Tom Wolfe's famed admonition in Harper's to write wide-scope novels of social realism. The wider focus isn't necessarily the best; sometimes, like a steel nail, narrower goes truer and deeper. Yet the strengths of Martyrs' Crossing far outweigh its shortcomings. Amy Wilentz leads us into territory that Americans are blissfully unaware of: the wrenching lives of those for whom the political and the personal are inextricably, even fatally, intertwined. She does this with a clarity of vision that perhaps only an outsider can have, one who is both an acute observer and a gifted and empathetic analyst. In a novel whose only lapses are due to overextension--a far better and braver fault than under-extension--she makes real the pity and the terror of the Middle East today, with all its moral complexities and human tragedies, frustrations and paradoxes, absurdities and ironies.

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Sarah Flannery with her father, David Flannery (© Eddie O’Hare)

The Mathematical model
In Code: A Mathematical Journey by Sarah Flannery with David Flannery. New York: Workman Publishing, 2001, 341 pp., $24.95 hardcover.

Reviewed by Ann K. Stehney

"TEENAGER CRACKS E-MAIL CODE." This astonishing story appeared on the front page of The Times in London: Ireland's 1999 Young Scientist of the Year, aged sixteen, had devised a scheme that would challenge the world's leading commercial encryption system. The news quickly reverberated through the media and cyberspace itself: "Irish Teen's E-Mail Code Could Transform Internet Commerce" (CNN); "Speedy Secrets, Thanks To Teen Genius" (The Age, Australia); "Teen Devises New Crypto Cipher" (Wired News). Thus began a wave of international attention for Sarah Flannery, an unflappable schoolgirl whose youth was as central to the story as the commercial prospects for her technical breakthrough. In the days that followed, reporters and photographers descended on Sarah's village; strangers advised her to patent her discovery; venture capitalists called to propose deals.

Sarah Flannery and her father at Blarney Castle (© Eddie O’Hare)

In Code: A Mathematical Journey is Sarah's account of how she became a mathematician and of the public attention surrounding her discovery. Co-written with her father David, a mathematics lecturer at the Cork Institute of Technology, the book is an odd mix of engaging memoir and serious mathematics. When telling her own story, Sarah speaks with humor and passion about herself and her beloved mathematics. Of grappling with the algorithm that brought her fame, she writes, "I worked constantly for whole days on end, and it was exhilarating. There were times when I never wanted to stop. Most of the time nothing was coming together and I was running into dead end after dead end. I kept different parts of the developing ideas on the blackboard in the kitchen, in particular those parts where I was stuck, so that they were there in front of me all the time, waiting to be sorted out."

In the book's first chapters, she introduces her family members and describes the excitement of entering the national Young Scientist competition. Then her flowing chronological narrative is interrupted by five chapters of technical material on mathematics and cryptography. Sarah's story resumes with her first project for the science competition, taking us through the following year in which she became a celebrity and world traveler.

Sarah Flannery (© Eddie O’Hare)

In her 1998 project, Sarah explained and demonstrated several methods for encrypting messages, from the classical Caesar cipher, used by the armies of Julius Caesar, to today's RSA, the leading commercial system for protecting and authenticating e-mail and e-commerce transactions. (The RSA algorithm and the company that markets it were named for Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adelman, who published it in 1977.) This project, suggested by her father, required Sarah to learn a computer programming language and to study mathematics as well as cryptography. The effort paid off: she won several prizes, including an Intel Award for Excellence in Science.

More significantly, her success emboldened Sarah to seek an internship with Baltimore Technologies, a data security firm in Dublin, where she began to explore a new approach to encryption inspired by Baltimore founder Michael Purser. Purser's work, as well as suggestions from her father, formed the basis of Sarah's project for the 1999 Young Scientist Exhibition. Over several months, she implemented, improved and tested the new algorithm, undertaking computer experiments to compare its speed with that of RSA. She arrived at a clear conclusion: with the same level of security, the new method took but a fraction of the computer time required by RSA to process a message.

ABLE TO GIVE a professional account of her work during three days of intense questioning by judges, Sarah was named Ireland's Young Scientist of 1999. In the book, she recalls the media frenzy that engulfed her and the family, and the opportunities that came her way as a result. She turned down an offer to appear in Pepsi ads, for example, not comfortable with suggesting that Pepsi makes you clever enough to win science contests. But the promotion company for the Spice Girls, seeking permission to feature Sarah in their magazine, got a better reception: "Mom thought this was charming and a bit of fun, and said yes. Dad's students, who had been very politely deferential about my Young Scientist success, abandoned all reticence and were full of interest and questions when they read 'Smart Spice--Pop Babes Think Irish Whizzkid Has Girl Power'."

After speaking with her by phone, even Ron Rivest praised her grasp of modern cryptography and the mathematics required. He and other experts in the field, however, reserved judgment on the algorithm itself, which had not yet been published. There had been numerous challenges to RSA over the years, and none had withstood close scrutiny. Although Sarah's report claimed her method was secure, she warned in interviews that the strength of an encryption scheme could only be appraised by experts. Unfortunately, such caution was lost on the reporters and would-be sponsors who beat a path to her door.

Only in the last ten pages of the book do we learn that, within a week of the article in The Times, cryptographers at Baltimore Technologies suspected the method was less secure than RSA. Although "desperately disappointed," Sarah remained in the public eye and hoped that any error could be patched; she eventually joined the team at Baltimore to develop an "attack" on her own algorithm. But "because I had been made out to be such a hotshot," she candidly asks, "would the papers suddenly cry 'Fraud' if I were to reveal the attack? One newspaper had run an article with the headin NO MILLIONS FOR SARAH... I had no idea that the article was to appear, and it was chilling to realize that reporters could write almost anything they wanted without bothering to check with you on points of fact or how you might feel."

CONSIDERING THE LENGTHY technical sections, which breeze through topics that would occupy a college course for a month, I'm not sure who is the intended audience for In Code. Although clear and correct, these chapters will deter most readers. Written by David Flannery as though from Sarah's perspective, they speak with a different voice and are never integrated into her story. They were included to explain "terminology and notation that is used sparingly in later chapters...in hopes of keeping the book self-contained--you shouldn't have to open another book to understand this one." A worthy goal, but unrealistic. Do not pick up this book to learn mathematics. Do read it to meet Sarah, and skim any sections you find incomprehensible.

Other reviewers have noted David Flannery's influence on Sarah, remarking on his creative use of mathematical puzzles and skill as a teacher. I would not begrudge anyone a mentor in her family (many women mathematicians come from scientific families), but David's role was a mixed blessing. If something goes terribly wrong, you can break with an advisor, unless he or she is kin. And something did go wrong here.

Early on, the book reveals that Sarah had a casual attitude, even disdain, toward rigorous proofs. Yet proof has a distinctive role in mathematics. Mathematicians come of age not by accumulating facts and formulas but by assessing the validity of arguments; practice is an essential part of their education. The flaw in Sarah's 1999 Young Scientist report was the assertion that she showed "mathematically" that her algorithm was "as secure as the RSA algorithm." As unfortunate as this error was, she can be excused on the grounds of inexperience. Not so David, who made a similarly unequivocal statement to BBC News. In my view, David let Sarah down as her mentor in several ways: by teaching her mathematics without an appreciation of the rigorous standards in the field, by not alerting her that the claim of security made in her report had not actually been proven and then by making the same claim himself.

The fall of the new encryption scheme may have been as fortunate as it was predictable. After all, if things had gone smoothly, Sarah's integrity and moral courage would not have been tested. "I have no doubt that I am not a genius," she writes. "I am not being falsely modest. Through my father's classes, I have seen examples of true genius, and I know that I do not possess the 'insight' that distinguishes geniuses from those regarded as merely intelligent. I also know of their complete dedication to and obsession with their interests.... Although I was interested--very interested--and worked very hard, I would never say that I was obsessed to the point of losing sleep." By the end of In Code, we see a young woman who owned up to a mistake and had the courage to join in a painful search for the truth. Sarah is now at Cambridge University, studying math and computer science, armed with maturity and the conviction that her project, in the end, was "good science."

Workman, the book's US publisher, is said to have targeted aspiring mathematicians in their marketing campaign. Although their publicity incorrectly equates fame with stature, calling Sarah Flannery a "leading mathematician at age 16," I won't complain. This book may do more to attract students to mathematics than the many publications and web sites that showcase established mathematicians. It's a welcome contrast to recent portrayals of mathematicians, real or fictional, as eccentric, socially inept and emotionally unstable. In Code assures us that ordinary people may become mathematicians, and that mathematicians may lead balanced lives, even when discovered by the media. Readers who can't imagine themselves as mathematicians may still relate to Sarah Flannery's joy in learning.

Another aspect of her story gives me hope as well: From the start, the print and broadcast reports were uniformly gender-neutral. The same is true of the book, as well as its promotional material and reviews. If she was ever teased as a girl who was good in math, Sarah has effectively ignored it. As the Association for Women in Mathematics celebrates its thirtieth anniversary, here is an indication that its efforts to promote the visibility of women and their contributions to the profession have succeeded in taking us beyond statistics and political correctness. Is it possible that the gender of a mathematician is at last irrelevant to the perception of her result? I admit to being both astonished and pleased; this, to my mind, is what the Women's Movement promised.

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Leslie Van Houten in prison, 1982. From The Long Prison Journey of Leslie Van Houten.

Reviewed by Joycelyn Pollock

ON AUGUST 10, 1969, Leslie Van Houten participated in the murders of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. After three trials and countless parole board hearings, she is still in prison for that crime.

From Leslie Van Houten’s televised interview with Barbara Walters in 1977. From The Long Prison Journey of Leslie Van Houten.

Karlene Faith's book is about a "Manson girl" linked to one of the most notorious crimes of the twentieth century, replete with sex, drugs, rock and roll, and horrific slaughter. It is also about cults, the 1960s, hippies, politics, the justice system, the subjugation of women in a patriarchal society, prisons and the humanity of those who work in what is ultimately an inhumane system, retribution, and redemption.

Faith first met Van Houten in the California Institute for Women (CIW) in the early 1970s. An educator, she had been asked by the Warden to offer classes to the three "Manson girls" on CIW's death row. The women had escaped execution only by coincidence: shortly after they arrived on death row, California abolished the death penalty and commuted their sentences to life. (The state reestablished the death penalty several years later.) Van Houten and the other two women, Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel, served their time alone in the small death row block for about five years before they were transferred to the general population of CIW. Over the course of the next thirty years, Karlene Faith kept in touch with Van Houten through visits, letters and phone calls. The book is a loose chronology of what happened to Van Houten, from the time of her first meeting with Manson through the murders, trials and decades in prison.

Leslie in the prison yard in 1997, at age 48. From The Long Prison Journey of Leslie Van Houten.

Faith is no stranger to prison herself. She is a highly respected author and prison reformer. whose scholarship has consistently been spiced with passion and purpose. Her criticism of the "prison industrial complex" has resulted in acrimonious dealings with some prison systems. She is no one-note critic, however. A keen observer of the system's failings, she also acknowledges and appreciates the humane intentions of some who work within it. This book, like her other works, exposes the contradictions of a system that preaches rehabilitation and practices oppression; that demands individual responsibility but punishes individuality. Here she has freed herself to some extent from the academic mold retaining footnotes but forgoing voluminous citations, qualifiers and tired literature reviews. This is not an "academic book" and it should be well received by a general audience.

FAITH ANNOUNCES HER POSITION from the outset: Van Houten has served enough time in prison. Her support of Van Houten's bid for parole is evident from the first page to the last. Not surprisingly, it would be a rare reader indeed who would not agree with Faith after reading her story of the Van Houten that she knows.

Van Houten was in her early twenties when she fell under the spell of Charles Manson. In the tumultuous days of the 1960s, she, like many young middle-class kids, left home to "drop out," "turn on" and find the meaning of life. She thought she found it in Charles Manson's ramblings about peace, love and a race war. Now it seems outlandish and beyond belief that Manson's followers could be brainwashed so completely that they could commit murder at his command. Faith does a good job of reminding us what the 1960s were like: the yearning for meaning, the naive belief that everyone (at least under thirty) was cool, and the faith that there were answers to be found--in drugs, music, and/or leaders whose charisma eclipsed the emptiness of their message.

Manson's family mirrored the hippie movement itself. Starting as a haven of love and acceptance where the lost could find a home, it transformed itself into a coven of death worshippers with Manson as Satan. Just as the message of love that attracted the likes of Van Houten and the other young women and men ultimately turned sinister, so, too, did the hippie movement ultimately end in overdoses, the SLA and homicides at rock concerts. Manson's messages were never about love. They were more ancient--revenge against a society that had rejected him. It was simply unfortunate for many that he had an uncanny ability to dupe healthy, intelligent young people like Van Houten into believing he was the answer to their confused needs. In this he was not unique: Faith reminds us that other cult leaders, such as Jim Jones and David Koresh, have convinced their followers to reject self-preservation in favor of a blind loyalty that incites murder or suicide.

Faith also points out that it was no coincidence that so many of Manson's followers were women. In the 1960s and 1970s, most women were only starting to recognize that their opportunities and potential were arbitrarily limited. Faith proposes that the reason that Van Houten and Manson's other young handmaidens took to his brainwashing so well was that society taught young women to be submissive to men. In another place and time than California in the 1960s, Van Houten might have met and married a young insurance agent and become the typical suburban housewife. Her fate, however, was to be thrust into a world where the old rules and identities were being discarded. Adrift, she attached herself to someone who gave her a home and the identity she could not create for herself.

Manson, who evidently hated women, was the ultimate patriarch. He not only controlled his women--he defined them. Ironically, only in prison was Van Houten able to wrench herself away from his powerful hold over her psyche and began to understand herself. Even more ironically, discovering a "self," strength, individuality and the ability to be independent from a harmful man, is an experience that is repeated over and over again in this nation's women's prisons. Although Van Houten, white and middle-class, bears little resemblance to the majority of female prisoners, in this she is their soul sister.

THE LONG PRISON JOURNEY is more than an accounting of Van Houten's life. Faith touches on fundamental questions of justice, redemption and the illogic and inconsistency of the justice system. This approach is not completely satisfying. For instance, even though she attempts to convey Van Houten's voice, this is ultimately Karlene Faith's book. Van Houten is revealed only as Faith sees her. The closest we get to a first person is through excerpts from Van Houten's letters. Speaking of the overcrowding that was starting to occur as early as the mid-1980s, she writes on June 5, 1984, "This place continues to go from bad to worse. The overcrowding is bringing on strong alienation between people. I have become rather abrupt and rude as a means of shielding myself from an onrush of lonely, lost souls..." In another letter written in 1996, she writes, "I am 47 and looking forward to 50. I'm stunned I made it this far. [I guess] I hadn't [expected] to live so long.. . . I'm trying to share my unhappiness. It is hard to let go of feeling responsible, to make things ok." These quotations are helpful, but Van Houten herself is still a shadow--larger than life, but ultimately more of a shell than a real person. We believe Faith's rendition of her suffering, integrity and honor, but Van Houten herself is not quite here.

Since Van Houten has spent over thirty years in prison, one would expect a richer, more detailed description of this experience. The years on death row are emphasized, and the letters give the flavor of what Van Houten (and all prisoners) experienced with the rapid growth of the prison population in the 1990s, but a reader unfamiliar with the prison world would not necessarily be enlightened by this book. Faith, who has a deep understanding of the frustration, the monotony and the soul-destroying aspects of even the most benign prison, could have said much more.

Organizationally, the book could have benefited from tighter editing. There are repetitive passages, and the story jumps back and forth chronologically in a somewhat confusing manner. Since Faith detours from Van Houten's story to introduce us to others', including those of the other Manson followers, it would have been interesting to know where they are now. She tells us that Van Houten has endured numerous degrading and hope-dashing parole board hearings, but is no closer to release than she was a decade ago. What about the others? Are they all still in prison? How do they cope? Have they been as involved in volunteer activities and self-improvement as Van Houten?

But these are minor criticisms, and any reader will find much value in this book. Whether you think Van Houten's long incarceration is just or unjust, the story provides food for thought and questions to ponder.

It seems apparent that the most influential player in this whole drama has been the media. Without the media, there would be no tag-line of "the crime of the century," no frenzy at each parole hearing. In all likelihood, if Van Houten had committed any other murder, she would have been paroled years ago. So what can we make of this fickle influence on justice and punishment? Some murderers are executed, some spend their life in prison, some are released after a few years, some never serve any time at all. Can we attribute such disparity to some reasoned logic or simply the random interest of a media on the lookout for a juicy story? Faith asks these questions, but avoids hasty answers.

Ultimately, Van Houten's story is one about redemption and mercy and their place in our justice system. As I read, I couldn't help making analogies between Van Houten and Patty Hearst. Faith correctly points out the differences between them. Van Houten willingly entered Manson's family while Hearst was kidnapped; Hearst participated in a robbery, not a murder. However, it cannot be ignored that both of these women lost themselves temporarily to a dominating male figure. We finally (after several years' imprisonment) "forgave" one and let her go back to the tender arms of her family and suburbia; the other we've held as hostage to justice for thirty years.

The other woman whose ghost resonates throughout these pages is Karla Faye Tucker. Again, the stories are different. Tucker actually killed while Van Houten did not; Tucker was in a haze of alcohol and drugs, while Van Houten was under the haze of Manson's brainwashing. But in both cases, even though few doubt the fact that these women "reformed," and even though it's widely acknowledged that they were not in their "right mind" when committing their crimes, we have refused to grant them any vestige of mercy. The two cases raise the same questions: When does someone deserve mercy? Who should give it? Can we forgive murderers? We didn't forgive Karla Faye Tucker; we executed her. It remains to be seen whether Leslie Van Houten will die in prison without ever being granted the simple freedoms to see the ocean or spend a Christmas with her family. Does she deserve to? Perhaps not. But whose humanity is lessened by keeping her in prison?

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Bobbie Ann Mason (© Pam Spaulding)

Reviewed by Susan Millar Williams

Jill McCorkle (© Debi Milligan)

I WILL NEVER FORGET reading Bobbie Ann Mason for the first time. I came across a story in the New Yorker that later became part of In Country, a wrenching novel with a powerful undertow about a girl coming to terms with the Vietnam War. I could not put that story down; it raised the hair on the back of my neck, and I thought about it for weeks afterward.

What got me that first time, however, was not Mason's scope or her willingness to take on big issues. The part that made me laugh out loud was a line about how a young girl in the story kept piercing her ears. Every time she got bored, she put another hole in her ear. This was right when those little half moons of studs started showing up on women's ears. It was, I might add, long before all my college students began piercing everything else. That one line seemed so fresh, so observant, so perfect as a key to the moment and the character, it was as if John Updike had somehow been planted out in rural Kentucky.

And if anybody can match Bobbie Ann Mason's gift for turning small-town boredom and silliness into art, it's got to be Jill McCorkle, who can spin out a tornado watch or a family birthday party into a deceptively hilarious full-length novel that reveals secrets and sadness and deep love. Both writers emerged in the early eighties, and their writing has sometimes been dismissed with names like the Kmart School. But hey, most of us live in a Kmart kind of world, whether we want to or not. And like John Updike in his Rabbit series, Mason and McCorkle have given us bodies of work that document the changes, year by year. For instance, it is no longer a Kmart world--it is now a Wal-Mart world. In the hands of a master, brand names and fads and popular songs can evoke the feel of a time and place better than almost anything else....

"I'm thinking I will have myself a restaurant known as Peckers," says one of Jill McCorkle's characters, an unnamed woman who is stuck giving a party for her husband's raunchy business associates,

and as my model I will use Hooters, where one of Bill's buddies likes to go on Friday night. I will have a woodpecker instead of an owl and waiters instead of waitresses. They will wear uniforms that are, shall I say, a bit revealing below the belt and as manager my job will be saying who looks good in the outfit and who doesn't. Sorry, that's business. It's not harassment if you say right up front that Peckers is all about peckers. The Pecker Burger, the Pecker Shake, the foot-long Peckerdog, the Pecker who serves you.... I think it will be a huge success. (p. 77)

Hooters, for those of you who live somewhere like Montana or Idaho, two of the very few states that don't have at least one, is a chain of bars and restaurants with an owl for a logo. The name does not refer to the owl, of course. It refers to the frontal endowments of the waitresses, who wear outfits that are, shall I say, a bit revealing above the belt. Hooters has been sued over this but cheerfully retains its unrepentant motto, "Delightfully Tacky, Yet Unrefined."

I want to go to lunch with this woman and listen to her talk some more, even though she's so angry at men that she gets a little scary. That is McCorkle's brand of genius--to make you want to listen to people you'd avoid like the plague in real life.

BOTH MASON AND McCORKLE have new collections of short stories out this year, to add to a long and distinguished list of books that spans over two decades. Mason's Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail marks her return to the short story after a detour into non-fiction with the fine memoir Clear Springs. McCorkle's Creatures of Habit is almost a novel, though the stories can stand on their own. It is Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson's 1919 dissection of the loneliness and despair lurking behind the picket fences, for the new millennium, a fitting homage to Anderson, a writer who is clearly important to Jill McCorkle. In The Cheer Leader, one of her pair of first novels (published simultaneously with July 7th), the anorexic, depressed, but very funny heroine begins to come back to life when she discovers Winesburg in college. In Creatures of Habit--as in Winesburg--everybody lives in the same town. Characters often gossip about people who appear in other stories. Motifs reappear--for example, the time when a bike-riding child is hit by a car and somehow speared on an iron fence, dying instantly. The mosquito truck, in whose wake children on banana-seat bikes pop wheelies, their "vision blurred by the cloud of poison." A murder-suicide. A monkey named Mr. Simmie, who entertains at children's birthday parties with his gay-but-married owner. The lawyer's parking lot at the courthouse, where illicit lovers meet. The nursing home, Turtle Bay, where the lovers go to die.

Creatures of Habit begins with a quotation from Darwin, and every story is named for an animal--"Chickens," "Monkeys," "Billy Goats," "Snakes," "Toads," "Cats." This seems a little forced to me--some of the titles don't fit all that well, so it's hard to remember which story is which. But the writing is spectacular. The first line of "Snakes" is "I was going to get my tubes tied but I decided to go to the movies instead." The husband of that character later observes that hell is "[h]aving to eat olive loaf and pickled eggs while wearing a Qiana jumpsuit and watching reruns of Diff'rent Strokes." And the story itself, one of McCorkle's best, is a thumbnail sketch of a good marriage, with husband and wife ganging up on an obnoxious yuppie neighbor who crashes their annual night alone, when they turn off the phone, grill steaks, drink too much and "write out our grievances of the past year, read and then burn them." Never has a writer gotten more concentrated comic mileage out of bad songs and TV trivia:

Will says that Jethro has come out and is building a casino in Las Vegas. Also, Jethro is Jewish. Who knew that? I look at Barbara and I say, "Who knew that Jethro was Jewish? Who knew that his dad was a famous prizefighter."

"Who cares?" Barbara asks. "Even my children don't watch things like that."

"How sad," I say. "Poor things." And then I do my hand like Thing from the Addams Family, beckoning Will, until he does the theme song complete with background music. We act like Barbara is really deficient for having never heard of Uncle Fester or Lurch. (p. 175)

To quote a snatch of this dialogue does not really do it justice. What's impressive is McCorkle's ability to make it work, page after page, revealing layers of character and history as she goes. "Snakes" is a tour de force of pop culture, besides being fun to read.

McCorkle has always made brilliant use of the ravings of demented old people. The climactic scenes of her second novel, July 7th, and her third, Tending to Virginia, take place in the home of a family matriarch who veers in and out of the present. Fewer and fewer old ladies with Alzheimer's live at home these days, and in "Turtles" Carly Morgan, former receptionist at the Fulton County Courthouse, lives in the Turtle Bay Nursing Home. Carly is disgusted by the wanderings and rantings of her geriatric neighbors, whom she describes in vivid detail. She develops a raging crush on her neighbor, Wilton White, a retired lawyer who has suffered a stroke.

"Turtles" is vintage McCorkle. On the one hand, it is easy to see that Carly is out of her mind. She drives poor Wilton White crazy with her relentless unwelcome attentions, sneaking into his room to watch him sleep and to rub her cheek against his stubble. She begs for dimes at the front door. She plots to kill the night-shift nurse with a ginger-jar lamp. She hallucinates that her former lawyer lover, Thomas Fenster, has come back to get her. She regularly abducts the nursing home's therapeutic pet, a dog named Homer, and ties him up in her room. On the other hand, she seems unnervingly sane, a funny, sexy, generous woman trapped in the horrors of institutional old age. We have already met her no-good only child, Dennis, in an earlier story, "Hominids," the one that starts with the riff about Peckers and that ends with the narrator's furious outburst about men's fixation on breasts. (Carly had a double mastectomy at age 42.)

THE STORIES in Mason's Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail are not so obviously connected, though they, too, have a Winesburg quality that comes from their melancholy small-town settings. They're funny, but in a quieter way, with fewer belly laughs. Mason once said in an interview that her stories are all about culture shock, that her characters are "rural people meeting the modern age and getting thrown out." That's a pretty good description of Zigzagging, which gives us people like Jazz, a construction worker who can usually be found "between the jug of beet-pickled eggs and the jug of pickled pigs' feet." Every year Jazz flies to Paris, where he visits his kids and picks up suitcases of designer bras supplied by his ex-wife. He sells the underwear to boutiques and gives it to his sometime girlfriend, Chrissie, a grandmother who by now has a drawerful of "snap-fronts, plunges, crisscrosses, strapless--all in lace and satin."

And then there's Boogie in "Thunder Snow," who worries long after the fact about what his wife Darlene might have done when she was serving in the Gulf War. Reversing the situation of In Country, where a girl feels shut out of her uncle's war experience, Mason explores how it feels when his wife goes to war.

Sandra McCain in "The Funeral Side" has left Alaska and come home to Cork, Kentucky, pop. 1,700, to take care of her daddy after his heart attack. In Alaska she lived in a log house with a man who raised sled dogs, though they both worked office jobs at a state agency. Her father, Claude, runs a combination furniture store and funeral home out of an old house in Cork. Sandra ends up helping him do one last funeral for his old friend Bud.

In "Tunica," Liz tries to flee her troubles and her cokehead husband by getting on an excursion bus bound for the casinos sprawled on the Mississippi mudflats. Liz loves going to Tunica--"It was as close to a luxury resort as she would ever get--a bright, clean place where she could feel classy." Her husband, Peyton, whose mother has just had a stroke, pops up uninvited on the bus, and it appears that Liz, for all her resolve, will be sucked back into his orbit.

Despite one story about young people, Zigzagging has a middle-aged feel, philosophical and resigned. Chrissie, the woman with all the fancy bras, won me over completely with this:

It's so hard to be nice to people. It's something you have to learn. I try to be nice, but it's complicated. You start feeling guilty for your own failures of generosity at just about the same point in life when you start feeling angry, even less willing to give. The two feelings collide--feeling gracious and feeling mean. When you get really old, they say, you go right back to being a child, spiteful and selfish, and you don't give a damn what people think. In between childhood and old age, you have this bubble of consciousness--and conscience. It's enough to drive you crazy. (p. 4)

A few pages later, talking about the death of her beloved daughter and the failure of her second marriage, she says, "You can't live with somebody who lectures you on your grief."

Chrissie is also an acute observer of how things look and smell--she remarks on the smell of Jazz's truck, "that peculiar oil-and-dust smell of every man's truck I've ever been in." The story doesn't seem to lead anywhere--Chrissie goes with Jazz to her grown son's cabin, but he's not there. It's really just a portrait of Chrissie at a certain time in her life.

Some of the other stories are slow to start, and some are downright depressing. But the last, and best, "Charger," packs a punch from the first paragraph.

As he drove to the shopping center, Charger rehearsed how he was going to persuade his girlfriend, Tiffany Marie Sanderson, to get him some of her aunt Paula's Prozac. He just wanted to try it, to see if it was right for him. Tiffany hadn't taken him seriously when he had mentioned it before. "Don't you like to try new things?" he asked her. He would try anything, except unconventional food. But she seemed more interested in redecorating her room than in revamping her mind. (p. 188)

Tiffany wears slinky clothes and tons of makeup and has just smashed her thumb in a drill press while taking high school shop. She wants to get married right after graduation, and when the story begins, she is pestering Charger to drive them both down to Nashville so she can shop at a store called Dangerous Threads. Charger works at a fertilizer factory and has been having some problems with anger lately. A good boy at heart, he's ashamed of himself for "deliberately dropping his mother's Christmas cactus, still wrapped in its florist's foil." His mind is on getting that Prozac--he thinks one pill would do it--and going to Texas in search of his missing father. "Charger" is a sad, sweet, funny snapshot that freezes two kids in their natural habitat sometime in the very recent past. There's even a scene in a Wal-Mart.

In Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail, Mason taught me some useful new words, like the name for those plywood cutouts--the hind end of a bent-over fat woman with her spotted panties showing--you see in people's yards. Naturally enough, they're called bend-overs. More often, the way her characters talk provides kick: "Cows ain't his thing," says Beverly Cox of her husband's refusal to go out in the snow to feed the neighbors' livestock. "If it don't eat regular unleaded, he don't want it. He don't even want a dog." "Lord, I'm strangled," says a woman named Loretta after a long day working at a drycleaner's, where the fumes make her throat raw. "We're worky-holics," says a little boy in "Three-Wheeler." "We need to help out at home 'cause Mama's lost her job and has to get oddities." "That ain't it, Abe. It's com-oddities," his older brother explains.

Language like that is pure joy to read, and so are these two fine books.

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Reviewed by Dorelies Kraakman

Jules Boilly, Mme G. Sand (1837). From Eve’s Proud Descendants

AT THE BEGINNING OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, a group of French girls were born, all of whom would become well-known authors. Not one of them would lead the standard life of a woman of her social class, and each would play an active role in the political, social, literary and cultural life of France. Their names were Aurore Dupin (1804-1876), Marie de Flavigny (1805-1876), Hortense Allart (1801-1879) and Delphine Gay (1804-1855).

Sophie Allart Gabriac, Hortense Allart (1829). From Eve’s Proud Descendants

Readers of The Women's Review of Books may know that Aurore Dupin is the maiden name of George Sand, but I doubt whether they know that Daniel Stern is the pen name of Marie d'Agoult, born de Flavigny. As for Delphine Gay, alias the Vicomte de Launay, and Hortense Allart, both are only known to a few specialists. George Sand alone of the four has been canonized in French literary history.

At the time the four were born, the predominant role seventeenth-century women writers had played in the coming of age of the French novel had been forgotten. In the eighteenth century the French author's signature was almost always male and, with the exception of Germaine de Staël, female authorship was relegated to the realm of the sentimental.

This depiction of Marie d’Agoult, of unknown origin, appeared with her obituaries. From The Life of Marie d’Agoult, Alias Daniel Stern.

Women and writing was apparently a dangerous combination, and female authors were always under fire, unless they stuck to the female genres, like the young Delphine Gay, who by the age of seventeen was a popular poet in the salons. Aurore Dupin, who married baron Dudevant, tells us in her memoirs that when she announced her intention to publish books, her mother-in-law made her promise not to put "the name that I carry" on the cover. Marie d'Agoult was disinherited by her mother. Hortense Allart and Delphine Gay were more fortunate: Delphine's mother Sophie was a writer herself, and both Delphine and Hortense had to make their own living. But all four women were confronted, especially in the 1840s, with the social ostracism of female authors and intellectuals as bas bleus, bluestockings. Their insistence upon writing careers is all the more remarkable, as is the success they had in their own time.

Hersent, Delphine Gay, Mme Emile de Girardin (1824). From Eve’s Proud Descendants.

Whitney Walton's study of these four explores the ways in which they created an identity she calls "republican womanhood" during the July Monarchy (1830-1848), as a blend of feminism and republican motherhood. France was, for the second time, trying to come to political terms with Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, and for the second time around the woman question caused a rift between socialists, republicans and feminists. In 1793 women had been excluded from citizenship and women's political clubs and organizations were banned. Republican women could only participate in the welfare of the state in the private sphere. In 1804 Napoleon's Code Civil had reduced the position of married women almost to tutelage--women could not witness in courts and husbands had the right to open their wives' mail. In 1816 divorce was prohibited. The position of all women had actually deteriorated since the eighteenth century.

Walton aptly demonstrates that both in word and deed her four heroines refused to accept this situation. All four resisted relegation to home and hearth and children, and testified in their creative work to a woman's right to follow her heart and ambitions.

Hortense Allart "evokes Madame de Staël and argues that if sensibility (la sensibilité) is the source of genius, then is not following one's emotions, even to do wrong by society's lights, justified?" For Allart, as for the other three, creative art and love were inseparable: "The superiority of woman almost always manifests itself in the violence of her passions...[but] woman no more than man is made for love alone... the superior woman needs action or intellectual pursuits [des lettres]." Allart had already refused several marriage offers when she met her first lover. When she found out she was pregnant, she set him free. Her affairs of the heart never got in the way of her writing; she raised two sons on her own, spending most of the time in the countryside because she could not afford the expensive life of Paris. She published under her own name, to which she added the aristocratic de Méritens of the man she eventually married. The marriage lasted one year, after which "she joyously threw his wedding ring out of the window of her carriage as she left his house forever."

The other three also made choices that jeopardized their birthright and respectability. All entered the public arena to plead for social and civil justice. Hortense Allart believed in the ideal Platonic republic, based on meritocracy; George Sand called for universal--male--suffrage. Why, the reader might ask--remembering that in France women acquired the vote only in 1944--did women like George Sand, Marie d'Agoult, Hortense Allart and Delphine Gay, who had access to men in power and framers of public opinion, not join forces with the feminists? After all, women in France had been organizing since the Revolution to fight for equal civil and political rights.

Why did Sand rebuff the feminist journal Voix des femmes, which wanted to elect her to the Constituent Assembly in 1848? Sand responded (in a male republican journal) that she considered this idea a "joke," that she hoped "that no elector shall wish to lose his vote by succumbing to the whim of writing my name on this ballot," and that she did "not have the honour of knowing a single one of the ladies who form clubs and edit newspapers." Sand was fond of irony and overstatement and one can read her words as intended less offensively than they might sound. But Walton rewrites "did not have the honour of knowing a single one" as "was not personally acquainted"--as if she feels that she has to downplay Sand's denunciation of the feminist demand for the vote. The real question is why Sand--and Walton's other three subjects--did not endorse female suffrage.

Walton's goal is to explain how these four women constructed a political gender identity for themselves in their historical circumstances. But I find it hard to follow her construction of a "third way" between republican motherhood and feminism in the 1830s. What is the difference between the women of the time who called themselves feminists and "republican" women like Sand or d'Agoult? The feminists too gave up home and hearth for the cause, or for a new life; they did not extol motherhood as the only possible fulfillment for a woman, and they demanded the right to govern the republic. A right Sand would not grant them, not yet: "Should women participate in politics some day? Yes, some day,... but is this day near? No, I think not, and in order for women's condition to be transformed, society must be radically transformed," she wrote. "According to Sand," Walton believes, "the majority of women simply were not prepared for political participation; having been oppressed so completely and for so long, they needed even more time than men to cultivate independent characters and ideas." Allart, Gay and d'Agoult were of roughly the same opinion.

"Here I am, busy like a statesman," George Sand wrote to her son Maurice on April 1st 1848. April Fool's Joke? Maybe, but she could joke about it because she belonged to the minority of women who had cultivated independent characters and ideas and who had access to the men with cultural and political power. And just like these men, the women of the elite thought as yet little of the rational capacities of la femme du peuple. I see no point in claiming them as feminists.

HISTORIANS IN THE PAST have accused Marie d'Agoult of being jealous of George Sand's talent and success with books and men. She would be pleased at the attention of two recent biographers, Richard Bolster and Phyllis Stock-Morton. Stock-Morton acknowledges the major changes several decades of women's history have brought to the historical profession and to her own perspective on the lives of women. Finding that most biographies of women need to be rewritten, she tells us that she chose Marie d'Agoult as her subject because of the bad press d'Agoult received from previous writers. Richard Bolster, by contrast, seems either unaware or heedless of feminist contributions to historiography. Reducing Marie's actions and inner motives to glib one-liners, he inadvertently perpetuates the nineteenth-century male idea that women could not think for themselves: "It was difficult to resist Franz Liszt, and Marie did not try very hard," or, "She might have reflected on the force of heredity and saved herself the trouble," ŕ propos of Marie's anger at her daughter Cosima's adulterous affair with Wagner--Marie had herself eloped with Liszt.

Stock-Morton places Marie's words and deeds in the context of other nineteenth-century women's lives. She asks what a woman with literary, political and intellectual ambitions could make of herself in nineteenth-century France, a question not unlike Walton's. Stock-Morton sees two ways for a woman like Marie to escape from the "ordinary"--meaning submission to the lack of civil and political rights, regardless of class. She could have chosen to join the socialist feminists who demanded the vote for women. But the aristocratic Marie, who had in her early married life been lady-in-waiting to the wife of King Charles X, felt ill at ease with the feminists, who mostly came from the working classes. She saw direct action for suffrage as damaging to the cause of all women: it would merely elicit ridicule from the men, and "send the timid women scuttling back to their state of passive obedience."

The other avenue of escape would have been to take male lovers and live "vicariously" in the male world. Now it is interesting that this is exactly what Marie d'Agoult and other women writers were accused of by their contemporaries as well as by later biographers. The Goncourt brothers claimed that George Sand "sucked the moral marrow out of the bones of a throng of lovers" to acquire their creative genius. But even less viciously misogynist authors have continued to attribute the significance of remarkable women such as Sand and d'Agoult to their relationships with famous men. Including Richard Bolster.

Marie d'Agoult, the Rebel Countess is one long parade of men who mattered in the intellectual and political life of France between 1805 and 1876, whether or not they mattered in the life of Marie d'Agoult. Jules de Polignac, prime minister under Charles X just before the July revolution in 1830 (to give just one example), gets eight pages plus a portrait, though d'Agoult met him only once in her life. By pretending to speak in the voice of their wives or lovers, Bolster insinuates that Marie only flirted with men to further her career: "Marie did her best to charm Herwegh's wife, who was naturally observing the approach of this mature beauty with alarm." In fact, he seems ignorant of the historical context in which Marie made her choices.

Stock-Morton, by contrast, carefully analyses Marie's motives. In her friendships with intellectuals of her day, she combined the aristocratic tradition of the salon with the new social idealism of the Romantics, who believed that art could improve the world. Liszt first introduced Marie to this ideal, and she tried to live it through writing about his work: "I wanted the two of us to make a beautiful and noble protest against prejudice; to show the artist and the aristocrat equal in all ways (except in genius, in which I fully recognized his superiority to me), showing that a free love could be stronger, more faithful, more serious than marriage," she wrote.

After Liszt and d'Agoult broke up, she tried to rediscover that same creative inspiration in her later friendships with men. As "Daniel Stern" she wrote serious works on art, history and politics. Contrary to Bolster's allegation that "In spite of this [recognition of her authorship] one senses that she would have given it all up for the love of Liszt, and secretly she probably never ceased to relive the years of passion," she wanted to be a writer all her life. But like the Saint-Simonians of an earlier generation, who believed in the androgynous social couple, Marie believed in the androgynous ideal of the Romantic genius, composed of male and female spirits working together--not the male genius and his muse, but a true interaction. That is why she stuck to her love with Liszt long after it was clear he had abandoned her. Stock-Morton ascribes Marie's depressions to frustration at her lack of power as a woman. I agree, but I would add: frustration at her lack of genius.

Bolster's Marie d'Agoult, in short, is the all too familiar portrait of a woman who serves as the mirror of male self-importance. By contrast, Stock-Morton's sympathetic and conscientious rendering of Marie d'Agoult's life is, as she says, the story of Marie's "self-analysis" in a "world that occasionally allowed her full expression." Unfortunately Stock-Morton's psychological approach leaves that world untouched: she evidently accepts at face value the standard historical account of nineteenth-century French society and politics. Whitney Walton, on the other hand, constructs new possible public identities for her subjects, and forces the reader to imagine the difference these four women made to history. Even though I disagree with some of her conclusions, in the end I prefer Walton's more radical approach, one that furthers the disruptive impulse that lies at the heart of women's history.

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• Linda Gardiner lgardiner@wellesley.edu
• The Women's Review of Books
• Wellesley College Center for Research on Women
• Created: April 2nd 1996
• Last Updated: October 23rd 2001