Godwin still challenging herself

Old Lovegood Girls Gail Godwin Bloomsbury RON CHARLES

One is tempted to speak in hushed, valedictory tones when talking about Gail Godwin. After all, she has now been publishing novels for half a century. At

82, she’s still challenging herself and us.

Her latest book, Old Lovegood Girls, is a richly layered novel based on a lifetime of reflection on friendship and storytelling. In a culture obsessed with youth, it’s a welcome reminder that age and wisdom can confer certain advantages, too.

Godwin writes women’s fiction that deconstructs the condescending presumptions of that label.

This story begins in

1958 at the Lovegood College for women, one of those prim academies corseted by tradition and good manners. As the novel opens, the dorm mistress, who “displayed the ramrod posture of a woman born in the last century,” and the dean are discussing the proper placement of incoming students. But the dean and the dorm mistress are not the focus of Old Lovegood Girls; hoping to engineer a mutually beneficial match in the dorm, they decide that a troubled new student named Feron Hood might benefit from the “positive, steadying influence” of Meredith Jellicoe.

Old Lovegood Girls is the story of that relationship: a friendship fused in the intensity of college and then refined and tested afterward for decades. Along the way, Godwin explores two very different lives, changing roles for women and the ways we use the people we admire.

Meredith seems, at first, a mere foil to her mysterious roommate. The happy daughter of successful tobacco farmers, Meredith is bright and outgoing. Feron, on the other hand, comes trailing clouds of horror: a runaway with a murdered mother and an abusive stepfather.

The novel’s most interesting manoeuvre is the way it explores the persistence of competition between old friends.

Feron moves to New York and develops an independent life, while Meredith stays anchored to her family’s farm in North Carolina.

The result is an extraordinary novel about the nature of rare friendships that fade for long periods of time only to rekindle in an instant.