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Our Kind: A Novel in Stories, by Kate Walbert
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From the award-winning author of The Gardens of Kyoto comes this witty and incisive novel about the lives and attitudes of a group of women -- once country-club housewives; today divorced, independent, and breaking the rules.
In Our Kind, Kate Walbert masterfully conveys the dreams and reality of a group of women who came into the quick rush of adulthood, marriage, and child-bearing during the 1950s. Narrating from the heart of ten companions, Walbert subtly depicts all the anger, disappointment, vulnerability, and pride of her characters: "Years ago we were led down the primrose lane, then abandoned somewhere near the carp pond."
Now alone, with their own daughters grown, they are finally free -- and ready to take charge: from staging an intervention for the town deity to protesting the slaughter of the country club's fairway geese, to dialing former lovers in the dead of night.
Walbert's writing is quick-witted and wry, just like her characters, but also, in its cumulative effect, moving and sad. Our Kind is a brilliant, thought-provoking novel that opens a window into the world of a generation and class of women caught in a cultural limbo.
- Sales Rank: #2199957 in Books
- Published on: 2004-03-23
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.80" h x .85" w x 5.78" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 208 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Mannered yet curiously moving, this novel in stories by Walbert (The Gardens of Kyoto) tells the collective tale of a group of wealthy suburban women who came of age in the 1950s and are now facing life long after husbands and children have flown the coop ("We were married in 1953. Divorced in 1976. Our grown daughters pity us; our grown sons forget us"). Free of old inhibitions and with nothing left to lose ("they think us heartless and we are, somewhat"), they embark on odd crusades and projects when they aren't shopping or gossiping around the pool. In the brilliant "Intervention," they decide to save their favorite realtor, Him, who represents "our faithless husband, our poor father. He is our bad son, our schemer, our rogue.... Still, we love Him," then realize they need help themselves. Love recalled (and often ridiculed) is a recurring subject. In "Esther's Walter," Esther, the group's "artistic one," invites the group to a sinister party on the anniversary of her husband's death; in "Bambi Breaks for Freedom," the wheelchair-bound Bambi seeks her friends' support as she sets herself free from an old heartbreak. Walbert offers other sharp snapshots of the remaining members of the group, among them earnest, forgetful Judy; Canoe, the bouncy, ever-recovering alcoholic; Barbara, whose depressed daughter kills herself; "frigid" Gay who married a gay man; Suzie, the country club matron who fails to get her female lover admitted to the club; and lonely Louise. In an era when women went to college to study "the three Gs: Grooming, Grammar, and Grace," Walbert's characters are caught like insects in amber as they make late-in-life discoveries no school could ever teach. Brittle, funny and poignant, this is a prickly treat.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Walbert daringly depicts the golden years of a generation of women, better described as the 1950s country-club set, now that they're either divorced or widowed and their homes are devoid of children. Their men, who have left them for younger women, are ailing executives in need of a boost to their sorry egos from someone naive enough to be of service. For the most part, though, these ladies are not sitting around crying. They're taking action: calling up old boyfriends in the middle of the night, organizing to save the geese at the country club--they've learned plenty about intervention. This is a unique novel about eight companions finally taking the path of their choice without the socially imposed restrictions of yesteryear. Walbert incorporates bittersweet humor as her characters sort through the rubble of their lives while sitting alongside the pool watching the tan pool boy do his work. An eye-opening experience for anyone who thinks that the 1950s woman is still in the kitchen wearing a housecoat. Elsa Gaztambide
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"A portrait emerges from selective moments--some sharp and painful, others tender and questing. They evoke all the details." -- Chicago Tribune
"I have never been a fan of 'related short stories'... Walbert has changed my mind about this...startling and cumulative." -- The New York Times
"Our Kind is the book you read along with Updike and Cheever…touching and often surreal…Walbert writes with insight and compassion." -- Washington Post
"There's no denying Walbert's talent - or her ambition." -- Newsday
"[E]xquisite. Of all [the] first-person narrators, this gang is the most inviting. They are good company." -- Laura Miller, The New York Times Book Review, April 18, 2004
Walbert adores her characters...they're...giddy, resilient possessors of a girlish beauty. They have a blast; the reader does too." -- Organic Style, April 2004
Whole lives are handled with grace, deftness, and skill . . . [these pieces] are among the finest there can be. -- Kirkus Reviews, January 15, 2004
Most helpful customer reviews
20 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
The Forgotten Women
By Patricia H. Parker
I'm not sure why this book didn't win the National Book Club Award. I have read three of the other finalists and this is, by far, the best of the bunch. It is a "must read" for women of all ages.
I am a bit younger than these women - our age group spanned the time before the Feminist Movement and after. We were on the cusp. Therefore, some of the things which affected these women where "preached" to my age group, but many of us were lucky and escaped. We went back to school and finished our educations, and, when our husbands left or died and our children grew up, we had other places and things to which to turn, and now we have new memories to replace the old ones. I am surprised that, none of the reviews I have read mention Viv. She, of all the characters, is the most poignant for me. Viv is the brilliant, but poor girl, who is awarded a full scholarship to Smith. However, it is the time when young women went to college to earn their MRS. degree, and, in spite of being championed by a pair of women professors and pushed toward graduate school, she hears the "siren call" and marries a month after receiving her undergraduate degree. He is a non-entity and soon becomes colorless in her eyes so that, after he is no longer a part of her life, she can't even remember what he looks like. However, she remembers vividly, half a century later, the professors - how they looked - how they spoke to her - how angry they were when she gave up her birthright to get married. Now she runs the "book club" for the ladies and watches the sessions dissolve into "niggling" and nonsense spoken by women who will never be as bright as she, and who just don't understand the inner meanings of the books they read.
This is a book which should be on the reading lists of every Women in Literature class in this country, and it teaches lessons which should never be forgotten by any woman of any age.
22 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
A Delightful Gem
By Elizabeth Hendry
Kate Walbert's Our Kind is a delightful gem, a wonderful work reminiscent of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, a novel several of the characters in this novel discuss at a book club. Both novels focus on the circularity of time, but Walbert's novel also focuses on the ravages of time, particularly on this collection of women in the novel. These women were married in fifties and now are all alone, deserted by husband and children by death, by divorce, by choice. Time is running out for them, but not many of them acknowledge that. Time swirls by them, the past comes back, they relive it, it repeats itself. These are wealthy women, not usually pitied, yet their stories echo with horrible tragedy, much death, many sadnesses. The narrative in the novel is lyrical without being too much or two twee. Walbert has done an excellent job; Our Kind is an excellent, moving novel.
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
Succinct and Perceptive
By KasaC
Although Walbert does not pinpoint her location, various clues lead me to believe that this book is situated around Wilmington Delaware or Philadelphia, a milieu I am very familiar with. The portraits of these women are drawn with such accuracy I feel I could provide their true names, including my mother. Since she still lives there with her cronies from her youth, husbands and children either gone or scattered, through these stories I have a truer insight into her life than I have gotten from the weekly telephone conversations we share. I know this is a very subjective review, but it is rare that a book has hit me at such a personal level.
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