charlotte wood the natural way of things review

Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, 'Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?' and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. Haunting, imaginative language brings the characters’ madness and suffering to life.Īn absorbing plot, lyrical prose, and discomfiting imagery make Wood's novel decidedly gripping.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. It makes its point-that “it was men who started wars, who did the world’s killing and raping and maiming”-plainly, just short of perfervidly. Surreal yet intensely vivid, the novel is disturbing and enthralling. When the power goes out everywhere but the fence and it becomes clear that no one is coming to release them-or their guards-they must live by whatever remains of their own strength, dedicated “to the one quiet, animal triumph: survival.” Yolanda and Verla, leaders of this desperate and dehumanized group, become hunters-for sources of life and of death. Their sexuality has been criminalized they have slept with the wrong man or have been raped or have resisted rape, and for these incidents have been shorn, shackled, and shamed. They have been drugged and abducted, accused of licentiousness.

Imprisoned in a desert holding, surrounded by electric fencing, sleeping in dank doghouses, filthy, starving, and beaten, 10 girls struggle to keep alive and keep sane. Wood's allegorical novel-her first to be published in the U.S.-is at once brutal and beautiful. An engrossing novel set in the barren Australian Outback in which women are held captive, victims of a violently misogynist system.

Charlotte wood the natural way of things review