On sacrificing the writing life to motherhood, temporarily
Wolas’s new book, The Resurrection of Joan Ashby, is fiercely feminist, without ideological baggage
When Joan Ashby, in her mid-20s and already the author of two acclaimed collections of short stories, marries and becomes Joan Manning in the late 1980s, she hasn’t an inkling of what she’s getting into. And Cherise Wolas, author of The Resurrection of Joan Ashby, a startlingly self-assured debut novel spanning decades and rendered in luminous prose throughout, is too ambitious to resort to soap opera fare (an abusive husband, say, or a sickly child) for the purpose of casting a pall over her protagonist’s family life. A single-minded but never hurried Wolas pointedly has Joan grapple with the hindrance domestic bliss poses to her writing, before a shocking act of betrayal on the part of her beloved first-born, now an adult, detonates both her notion of motherhood and her literary pursuits.
Headstrong, flinty Joan, whom we meet in New York City (she grew up in a Chicago suburb), doesn’t marry Martin Manning, who’s on his way to becoming a world-renowned eye surgeon, before extracting a promise from him that they won’t start a family. But when, having moved to small-town Rhome, Virginia, she finds herself pregnant, he’s so happy and oblivious to their still-recent agreement that she selflessly opts to keep the baby boy, whom she subsequently comes to love. Not long thereafter, they have another one, and “the time lost to the mothering maw” begins to add up.
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby is a deeply feminist novel, but one free of didacticism and ideological baggage. Joan chafes at the fact that raising a family impinges more on her life than her husband’s. Movingly, she “debate(s) how long the duration could be, without writing, before a writer was no longer considered a writer.”
In a multi-dimensional tale interspersed with some of its protagonist’s intriguing short stories and novel-in-progress excerpts, only one element comes across as somewhat incongruent. A sojourn in India’s Dharamshala (where the Dalai Lama of Tibet lives in exile) proves engaging enough, but the region’s apparently balsamic properties will have you rolling your eyes, as when Joan’s “splintered soul is sewing itself back together, one loop of thread through the skin at a time.”
To be sure, Wolas eschews full-blown exoticization of India, but the meditation and the spirituality and even the people’s gregariousness come uncomfortably close.
Fortunately, Joan doesn’t lose her edge amid all the soul-mending. In fact, she makes a couple of hard-nosed decisions in Dharamshala that will alter the nature of her relationship with those closest to her. A good thing, too, because by now the reader feels that it’s about time she reclaim the fiercely independent Joan Ashby of old, and sally back out into the literary world as the formidable writer she still is. Rayyan Al-Shawaf is a writer in Beirut.