When a woman soars

"Independence is freedom, and freedom is the only way for a woman to soar."

Spoken by Arlette in A Promise to Arlette by Serena Burdick

The above line found early in Serena Burdick's terrific 2025 novel A Promise to Arlette sounds like something contemporary feminists might say to one another, but this book covers a period from the 1930s to 1952. The novel disproves that line.

Ida Whipple is an American housewife with two children as the story opens in 1952. At a party a neighbor displays what purports to be a Man Ray photograph showing two nude women. Ida knows immediately that it is not actually a Man Ray photograph. She knows this because she is one of the women in the photograph.

That night Ida leaves her family, steals the photograph and heads across the country to California to try to find Man Ray. A few days later, after getting a clue about where she might be, Sidney, her husband, follows her to California, their two little girls in tow.

Most of the novel is a flashback. Ida seeks her independence by abandoning her family in England when in her teens and heading for Paris. Arlette becomes her new friend, a beautiful young Jewish woman who works for Peggy Guggenheim, the famous art patron and another Jew. When war breaks out and the Germans invade France, Peggy escapes, but Ida and Arlette remain in a chateau. When Arlette is captured, Ida assumes she has been taken to a camp and exterminated. Unable to leave France, she stays at the chateau under an assumed name. Then comes Sidney Whipple, an American paratrooper, who finds his way to that chateau and stays there, abandoning the war after falling in love with Ida.

What is the promise made to Arlette? Burdick saves the answer until near the end, giving the novel a powerful conclusion. Ida has twice abandoned her family, without ever truly finding independence or freedom. She soars, however, when the family she loves finds her.

Journey of discovery

The key is to think about reading as a journey of discovery, an excavation of the inner world. ... What's important is to take the plunge.

David L. Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading

When I was still in school, I never knew which I liked best — the first day of school in the fall or the last day of school in the spring. Both were exciting to me. Similarly I don't know which I like best — reading the first line of a book or reading the last line. (You could probably make similar comments about vacations, parties and a variety of other things.)

Finishing a book is fun because you made it to the end. If it's a long, challenging book, you have finally completed the task. If it's an exciting mystery or thriller, you finally know what's been going on and how the hero is saved. Questions have been answered. Last lines of books are often beautiful and rewarding in themselves.

Yet David L. Ulin above puts his finger on what's exciting about starting a book. It's very much like beginning a journey of discovery. What's ahead? What's this all about? What lies ahead, on the next page, in the next chapter? Will I find thrills or disappointment?

Before I buy a book, I normally read the back cover of paperbacks and the inside cover of hardbacks to see what they are about. If I know the author, I may not even do that. But by the time I actually start reading a book, which may be months or even years later, I have usually forgotten what it is about. I just start in, going blindly into my adventure.

The other day I tossed out a new book, which I had recently purchased, after reading just a few pages. I didn't like where this adventure seemed to be going, so I bailed. I picked up another book, and after about 100 pages I still don't know where it is going. Yet I am remain intrigued. I like this adventure.

Take the plunge, Ulin says. Try something new. Good advice.

Books that murmur

Heather Cass White

Readers like to have books around because they continue to murmur after they have been read; they are living extensions of our minds into a space not wholly ours.

Heather Cass White, Books Promiscuously Read

Let's examine that sentence phrase by phrase.

Readers like to have books around ...

This is not true of all readers. Many readers happily return books, even books they love, to the library. Or they give them to a friend or give them away. Heather Cass White seems to be writing about a different kind of reader, my kind of reader. These readers are the sort who can identify with the next phrase.

... because they continue to murmur after they have been read ...

Can books murmur? I think so, although it has more to do with memory than sound. The best books stick with us, just like the best movies do. We remember something about them — a character, a passage, a feeling. The fact that such books are still around in our homes can trigger these murmurs whenever we see them.

... they are living extensions of our minds ...

Books that murmur, in a sense, are still living, in a sense. Their ideas have become our ideas, even if our own minds have reshaped them into something different than what the authors intended.

... into a space not wholly ours.

White goes on to compare books to children's toys. She uses the psychology term "transitional objects." Children use toys to create imaginary worlds, not wholly theirs. Books work similarly for those who can read. They can take us on a raft with Huck and Jim or into a courtroom with Scout and Jem. Any book that's any good takes us somewhere.

The missing wife

Laura Lippman's standalone novels have been very popular in recent years, yet it is hard not to miss her outstanding Tess Monaghan series of mysteries featuring a female private investigator. One of those gems is By a Spider's Thread, published in 2004.

The Baltimore detective is hired by a Jewish man to find his missing wife and their three children. Tess herself is half Jewish, as well as half Irish, and so she has some understanding of what makes Mark Rubin tick — why he refuses to shake her hand, for instance.

So protective is Mark that he refuses to divulge to Tess key details that might help her find Natalie, his wife. One such detail is that Natalie's father  has long been in prison, and that she used to visit him there. Mark used to work with Jewish prisoners, which is how he met Natalie.

It turns out that Natalie has long been in love with Zeke, one of those prisoners. While waiting for Zeke's release, she married Rubin and had three kids with him. Now that Zeke is free, she runs away to join him. The three kids, however, are a surprise to Zeke and upset his plans.

Lippman gives us both sides of the story, alternating from Tess and Mark to Natalie and Zeke. One of the key characters is Isaac, the oldest son, who misses his father and works behind Zeke's back to make his life difficult.

It's a grand story that readers will love.

Unintended art

At the beginning of the twentieth century ... novelists began making a case not only that novels were art, but also that certain qualities of certain novels were more artistic than others.

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

If Jane Smiley is correct in what she says above, and I believe she is, then some of the greatest novels ever written — Pride and Prejudice, Our Mutual Friend, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, Crime and Punishment, etc. — were written before novels were considered art. Thus the likes of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen were creating art without realizing it. They just wanted to tell good stories.

Folk art might made a good parallel. Unassuming people in isolated places make quilts or carvings because they find them beautiful or clever, not because they are trying to create art that one day might be on display in a museum.

Did the quality of novels become better after they were recognized as art? Maybe. Maybe not. Before the 20th century the quality of novels was measured primarily by their popularity. If people wanted to read them, they must be good. Since then popularity has actually been considered a detriment to art. If people like it, it must not be very good. Or so many in the literary field seem to think.

I am not making a case that a bestseller like Lessons in Chemistry is art. I haven't read it, and I have no idea. But not all books that were bestsellers in the 19th century are recognized as art today. My point is simply that something need not be obscure or difficult to be artful.

Further, some of the worst novels being written today are by authors deliberately trying to create art. And some of the best are written by people just trying to tell good stories.

The women in his life

We never grow up. I never did anyway.

John Banville, The Sea

When a man's beloved wife dies, would his mind focus mostly on women and girls from a lifetime ago? Somehow it almost makes sense in John Banville's 2005 novel The Sea.

Max Morden's wife, Anna, has just died after a long illness, and he is heartbroken. Yet this first-person novel focuses mostly on boyhood memories about a family that lived nearby during summers by the sea in Ireland. The family includes husband and wife, a twin boy and girl of about Max's age, and Rose, a young woman in her late teens, who helps care for the children.

Partly these memories seem an attempt to remember happier times. "Happiness was different in childhood," he says. His memories are also a record of his discovery of women, which eventually led him to Anna.

His first obsession is Connie Grace, the mother. His eyes follow her everywhere while he pretends to play with her children. Then he falls in love with Chloe, the daughter. Only later does Rose enter the picture, and this leads to Banville's interesting conclusion that, to some degree anyway, wraps everything up.

Banville's literary prose does not make easy reading, which is why he has had much more financial success with his wonderful mystery series featuring Quirke, an Irish pathologist. But for patient readers, The Sea has its rewards.

Ideas out, ideas in

Both writer and reader experience the same basic pleasure — something in one form on the page takes another form in the mind. This is the essential pleasure of literature, ideas going into and out of words over and over and over, any time the readers opens a book, or the author takes up a pen.

Janes Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

Jane Smiley

What Jane Smiley writes about literature above would seem true about language in general — about communication in general. Ideas out. Ideas in.

Good communication is usually thought to be when the ideas coming in (to the readers or the listeners) are the same as those going out (from the writers or the speakers). Yet sometimes we misunderstand entirely. This seems to happen all the time in conversation. What I hear isn't what you said, or vice versa. Even the written word can be badly misunderstood, even though writers can take more time framing their words and readers can always reread to better understand what they are reading.

But I am intrigued by one phrase Smiley writes: "something in one form on the page takes another form in the mind." This suggests that the two ideas, what is written and what is read, are rarely identical, and that this can actually be a good thing. Words are read (or heard) by someone with a very different mind, a different perspective, different beliefs, a different history. These differences color almost every attempt at communication. When a writer describes a scene, for example, readers will each picture something in their minds that is not quite what the writer pictured.

This is not necessarily failed communication. It is what makes language so magical. What readers read may often be something deeper, more profound, than what was written. Readers can find ideas in books that never occurred to the authors themselves, which is what makes literary criticism so valuable. Ideas inspire new ideas.

The spoken word and especially the written word are vital not just because they express ideas but because they give birth to ideas.