How women cope with dead ends

The main character is Karen Whitney, a Betty who’s equal parts Friedan and Draper, more Stepford and Desperate than Real housewife. She lives comfortably in a fictional Toronto neighbourhood not unlike Leaside or Rosedale, on a tidy street of aspirational bungalows and among other bored women who are keeping up appearances. On her fictional Toronto enclave of Rowanwood, she muses: “For me, it’s a dead end where, in time, I think I would go out of my mind. It isn’t the city, and it isn’t the country. I don’t know how to describe it other than to say that it’s an impossible compromise between the two, and totally lacking the best features of either.”

It has its creaky melodramatic conventions, true, but overall is a prescient, subversive novel of domestic existentialism. Through Karen and her circle, Young explores the roles and choices available to well-todo women in the late 1950s, the early days of second-wave feminism. Behind the smiling veneers of these happily married couples lifted from Douglas Sirk, there’s intrigue and self-deception and a heap of malaise.

Karen also bristles at the tyranny of glamorous and shiny new domestic appli- Elizabeth Sudduth, director of the Ernest F. Hollings Library and Rare Books Collection at the University of South Carolina, points at items in a ledger owned by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

We know our gut is important to our health. But a series of new findings, published by researchers from Cleveland Clinic (the parent organization of Cleveland Clinic Canada, where I work), represent a quantum leap forward in our understanding of just how the bacteria that naturally exist in our intestinal tract can contribute to our risk of disease. And if you’re an omnivore, the news isn’t great.

For years, we’ve known that vegetarian and vegan diets tend to be associated with a reduced risk of heart disease, perhaps because of the fibre, vitamins, minerals, or plant-derived polyphenols, which are particularly abundant in diets rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and legumes. We also have a long line of evidence suggesting that animal fats, and red meat in particular, can be hard on our heart. But this new research, which has been published in the mega-journals and