OF A GOLDEN AGE

Twenty-four-year-old Ellen Gulden is hardened and jaded, her opinions black and white, set in stone the way only young people can manage. Like all of Anna Quindlen’s writing, Ellen struck me as a shade of Quindlen’s real life as a gifted, brilliant young woman, and the real guts of One True Thing lie in Ellen’s lack of emotional intelligence to match her booksmarts.

Early in the book, Ellen’s mother is to spend a week in the hospital following a hysterectomy. Ellen narrates:

It had seemed unremarkable to me in a woman of forty-six long finished with childbearing, although every day that I grow older I realize there is never anything unremarkable about losing any part of what makes you female — a breast, a womb, a child, a man.

Her mother finds out she has swift-moving terminal cancer, and Ellen comes to live at the family home in her small hometown. She unwillingly steps into the life her mother chose and which Ellen cannot understand, a life in which her mother’s greatest goal was to make a beautiful life for herself and her family. She is an ideal housewife, pretty, put-together, and likable. She needlepoints, crochets, decoupages, stencils; she belongs to women’s groups and is well known around town. Ellen views these traits with clear disdain and relishes their oppositeness even as she learns to cook her mother’s elaborate signature dishes and finishes her mother’s delicate needlepoint flowers.

Ellen’s father has always been her hero, with their common ground in English, academic intellect, and blanket judgment-passing. But as she lives beside her mother from day to day, her perception of the accomplishments of each of her parents evolves considerably. Throughout the book, Ellen’s boyfriend Jon acts as an ongoing reminder of the person she was before, and when she starts to blanch at his crass remarks and criticisms of her mother, it’s apparent that Ellen is getting a clue. She and her mother begin reading books and discussing them, which alerts Ellen to her mother’s not-even-latent intellectual ability and her equally complex opinions on the subject Ellen lords over others.

Like most things I truly love, Quindlen’s writing lends enormous nuance to situations which seem, at first glance, to be definitely a certain way. I love her all the more for the ending she gives Ellen, which I won’t discuss in any detail; this book makes a very relevant statement without becoming maudlin or politicking, and much to my great satisfaction the story leaves Ellen in a better, less-clear place than where she began.

For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

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