Posted on: Sunday, May 9, 2004
BOOKMARK
Societal blips shape us in Quindlen's world
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By Amy Driscoll
Knight Ridder News Service
"Loud and Clear" by Anna Quindlen; Random, hardback, $24.95
Reading Anna Quindlen's new collection of essays is like following a fever chart of American society as it intersects with her life.
Motherhood? The line goes up. Teenage alcohol use, Enron, racial profiling? The line slopes down. Sept. 11? Down, down, down. And finally, the privilege and hard work that come with writing columns for the New York Times and Newsweek? The line climbs higher again.
Quindlen's essays here come across as both broad in scope and personal in nature, a way of processing the world at large along with her world at home.
"Think of it as a letter to yourself," she urges a classroom of students in one essay about writing. The blank page, she tells them, is "a rebuke and a challenge."
Quindlen has written four novels and four nonfiction books prior to this one, and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for her Times column, Public & Private. She has risen above the rebuke of the empty page. Yet as she makes clear in this book of columns that span a decade, she still struggles — with work, with family, with expectations — just like the rest of us.
That's Quindlen's appeal, the ability to capture the societal blips that shape a culture. The conflict between workplace and home life. The feeling of being under assault by forces great and small, from Columbine and terrorism to standardized testing and "Survivor."
"I needed my mother again the other day," she writes in a January 1997 column. "This time it was a fairly serious matter, a question from my doctor about our family medical history. Most of the time, what I want is more trivial: the name of the family that lived next to us on Kenwood Road, the fate of that black wool party dress with the killer neckline, curiosity about whether those tears were real or calculated to keep all five of us in line. ... I've needed my mother many, many times over the last 25 years, but she has never been there, except in my mind, where she tells me to buy quality, keep my hair off my face, and give my father the benefit of the doubt."
This is Quindlen's territory, from Power Rangers to prayer in school, asking questions of meaning and identity. And at her best — as she is in many of these essays — she hits it dead on, reshaping the issue, redefining the moment.
