Kate Walbert

Our Kind (eBook, ePUB)

A Novel in Stories

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

In her last novel, Kate Walbert wrote largely about the effects of World War II on the American girls and women who came of age at that time. In her new book, she continues to study that generation of women - from a different angle, and at a later point in their lives. In Our Kind, Walbert writes about a group of women who came into the quick rush of adulthood, marriage, and child-bearing all within the early 1950s - only to discover that it was not everything it had been made out to be. Employing a collective voice and narrating from the center of a group of 8 companions, Walbert subtly gets at the true feelings -- anger, disappointment, and vulnerability, as well as pride, victory, and a sense of escape -- of this unique culture of unflappable women. These are women whose futures were pre-decided for them: they would marry and have children and stay home, end of story. Occasionally they would entertain. What they wore and how they presented their homes, that would be what mattered. Only it wasn't enough. So they got divorced, all of them, and their children grew up, and now, women of a certain age with a certain amount of money, they are at a loss for what to do. This book is about what happened when they broke free of their chains, when they divorced the conventional lives for which they'd been bred. Feeling unmoored -- though they'd never confess it -- they cling to one another, to the existence of one another, as a source of stability and routine. They have not been raised to be individuals; they have always thought of themselves as one of a group - be it a family, a country club, or a nursing home. The irony is that these women aren't actually particularly close with one another. Even these friendships - like their marriages -- are more about cultural expectation, self-definition, and staving off loneliness. With a certain jaded sense of humor they daily convene as if to view the strangeness of their lot together. They wander through their small town seeking amusement, emerging as a portrait not of one individual character, but of a group whose individuals have melded into one. Walbert's writing is smart and incisive and witty -- just like these women themselves -- but also, in its cumulative effect, quite moving and sad. A thought-provoking novel for what it suggests about the lives and attitudes of this world of women, a generation caught in a cultural limbo somewhere in between 1950s convention and 21st century feminism.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Simon + Schuster LLC
• Seitenzahl: 208
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. November 2007
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781416586449
• Artikelnr.: 37874470

Autorenporträt

Kate Walbert is the author of seven works of fiction: She Was Like That, longlisted for the Story Prize and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; His Favorites, an Atlantic Monthly Best Book of the Year; The Sunken Cathedral; A Short History of Women, a New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of the Year and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Our Kind, a National Book Award finalist; The Gardens of Kyoto; and the story collection Where She Went. Her work has appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize stories. She lives with her family in New York City.