A Hundred Small Lessons

By Ashley Hay

Atria  2017

288 pages     Literary

I had an existential experience yesterday as I was nearing the end of A Hundred Small Lessons. Not sure if it was my existential moment, or one projected onto the two main women characters in the book—each of whom is experiencing her own existential moments.

Elsie Gormley lived in her house in Brisbane, Australia for more than 60 years, raised her twin son and daughter there, buried her husband Clem, and lived by herself until she fell and her kids moved her to an assisted living facility. She is totally disoriented and keeps trying to get home.

Lucy, her husband Ben, and her toddler, Tom, have purchased Elsie’s house, but Lucy is as disoriented as Elsie. Lucy and Ben had lived internationally, and when Tom was born, they moved to Ben’s home town of Brisbane to settle down, buy a house, and raise their family. Lucy doesn’t come to motherhood easily, and she is upset that she is struggling. She thinks that she keeps seeing Elsie when she is wandering around the house at night; who is this woman who used to live in her house?

A Hundred Small Lessons is a lovely, reflective book. Nothing moves very rapidly; there is no enormous plot twist, but the novel is always engaging and satisfying. There are three main themes: the first is about choosing and being chosen. Both women are loved, and both women have chosen to love. It is also about motherhood. All Elsie wanted in life was to be a mother, and she is completely fulfilled in that role. Her own daughter, Elaine, is of another generation, and although she has a lovely daughter, she has spent her adult life trying to distance herself from her mother’s form of motherhood. Lucy, another generation behind Elaine, knows that being a mother is just one part of the life she plans for herself. Finally, it is a meditation on the many decisions that a person makes that change the course of a life.

The house, itself, plays a huge role in the novel.  All of Elsie’s memory is attached to that house, and as Lucy attempts to create a home, she can’t get the aura of Elsie out of the house. Part of the emotional resonance of the book is the understanding of home. The Kirkus review begins with the statement, “If home is where the heart is, when does a house become a home—or, conversely, stop being one? Two women struggle to find the answer.” I have lived in houses, and I have lived in homes. The difference, I believe, is what happened within that structure.  

Hay is an accomplished novelist, and is well known in her native Australia. She mentions that there are some autobiographical moments in the book, and those who know Brisbane recognize places where scenes take place. The plot is spare and sometimes non-existent, but the atmosphere and the finely-drawn characters are what moves the reader forward. Someone called it a comfort read. I guess I would describe it that way as well, and thus the existential experience I had yesterday. I saw myself in both women’s places—the old woman having to leave, and the young woman just beginning. I loved them both.  

 

Ashley Hay’s website.

 

The Waiting Room

by Leah Kaminsky

Harper Perennial     2016

304 pages     Literary Fiction

Dina is a family practice physician in Haifa, Israel, during an extremely difficult time, the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. Born and raised in Australia, Dina met her husband Eitan on a trip to Israel several years before. They have a young son, and Dina is pregnant and about to deliver a baby girl. Haifa is a very multicultural and multi-religious city, and Dina's practice includes Jews, Muslims, Christians, and Bah'ai. She muses: "At school the children sing songs of wild cyclamens and anemones in the hills—of a time when there will be peace. People in this country live with a hope that all these wars will end someday. Even a simple hello or goodbye in both Hebrew and Arabic—shalom, salaam—has the word 'peace' embedded in it. The whole region utters it like a mantra, millions of times every day."

Most of The Waiting Room takes place during the morning and afternoon of a single day; a day that there is the threat of a terrorist attack. The actual attack happens in the first chapter, with Dina present for the chaos. The plot quickly shifts back to the morning—before the attack when the family is getting ready for work and school, and worrying about the possible attack. Eitan is quite blasé about it; he is a native Israeli and bombing threats are an everyday occurrence in his mind. Dina is extremely worried about sending their son to school and going to work at her clinic that morning. Besides, she is very pregnant and very tired. She shouldn't be going to work, her mother says.  We become aware almost instantly that Dina and Eitan are not getting along very well. And we wonder if one of the irritants is Dina's mother who seems to be living with them, kibitzing and smoking and offering unneeded advice constantly. It isn't very long, however, before we discover that Dina's mother is dead and has been dead for 20 years. All the conversation, advice, and annoyance with her mother is in Dina's head.

Dina's mother is a Holocaust survivor, and her life story is the source of much of the existential back story that motivates Dina's current anxiety and depression. Dina is suffering from what psychologists are currently calling "inherited trauma." Scientists first began to notice inherited trauma in the second generation of the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. Now they are seeing it in the second generation of Vietnam war soldier's children. I recently read and reviewed a book that addresses this issue, It Didn't Start with You by Mark Wolynn. A reviewer of The Waiting Room suggests that "Kaminsky's novel explores intergenerational trauma with approachable simplicity." The dissociation that Dina is experiencing when she separates herself from reality is apparently a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. As an example, Dina wears shoes that her mother wore in the concentration camp, Bergon-Belsen. She wears them on this particular day—a very overt symbol of her inherited trauma.

This is not an easy book to read. I began it the week of the election, but had to put it down because it was too depressing. However, when I picked it up again, I appreciated it very much. The Waiting Room is extraordinarily well crafted, with intensely written descriptions that make the scenes come painfully to life. It was, for me, a truthful, albeit fictional, follow up to my new understanding of inherited trauma. It is, in the words of Geraldine Brooks, an early reviewer, "both haunted and haunting."

The Waiting Room just won the Voss Literary Prize 2016, which is Australia's top literary prize. Leah Kaminsky, the author, a physician, lives and works in Australia, although she lived for a time in Israel, and there is a definite autobiographical feel to the novel. Here is Kaminsky's website.

I especially appreciated the thorough review in Slate.