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What kind of justice can we have in a world driven by power? The actor turned writer Sophie Ward likes to fuel her novels with philosophical conundrums and set herself complex writerly challenges. Her ingenious, Booker-longlisted Love and Other Thought Experiments was structured around philosophical thought experiments, from Pascal’s Wager to Descartes’ Demon, with a chapter narrated by an ant living inside a character’s brain. The Schoolhouse explored the ethics of self-directed schooling and of policing in a complicated cross-period procedural. Now she turns her attention to questions of justice, freedom and power in the 1970s United States, with a tripartite structure bringing together three women – two real and one imagined.
It’s 1971: the Manson Family have just been found guilty and hundreds of thousands are marching against the Vietnam war. In the Netherlands, 25-year-old Andrea Dworkin escapes her abusive husband and attends a debate between Chomsky and Foucault on justice and power. Back in the US, the poet Muriel Rukeyser throws herself into protesting once again, though her lover, the literary agent Monica McCall, tells her rightly that her health won’t stand it. The third character is loosely based on the family history of Ward’s own Korean-American wife. Phyllis Patterson welcomes her son home to rural Illinois from the army base in South Korea, and attempts to build a relationship with her new Korean daughter-in-law and grandchildren. All three women are testing their own capacity for justice in an unjust world.
It’s a clever idea for a novel, using the connections between the women as hinge points. Andrea goes on to become Muriel’s assistant, though their relationship never quite takes off on the page. And in the background is the imprisoned South Korean poet Kim Chi-ha. Muriel campaigns for his release and discovers a connection between him and Phyllis’s daughter-in-law, June, that enables Ward to draw Phyllis and Muriel’s stories together in the rather brilliant but also chaotically accelerated denouement.
The tripartite structure generates problems for Ward to solve. The shifting perspectives mean that the individual sections can sometimes have the unsatisfactoriness of annual catchups with friends, rather than the intimacy of shared daily lives, especially as the years pass and we end up in 1975. It becomes harder to care about Andrea in particular, as she’s glimpsed publishing book after book, and fighting for revolution. It’s also a challenge combining real and imagined people. Ward does an impressive job at making Andrea Dworkin talk, animating her into speech, but when she writes out her thoughts as stark declarative sentences I found it awkwardly fake in ways I might not have with a made-up character. “She thought, This is it. This is my time. I am alive and I have work to do. I must start now.”
The gain of the structure is the sense of a world unfolding in parallel across continents, as these women grapple with the shared dilemma of how to rise to the challenge of tolerance and fellowship. The real triumph of the book is Phyllis: a generous but querulous housewife who came into her own in the war, and now shares her bedroom with a chicken called Dolly. When Phyllis’s husband Boyd dies through an act of sacrifice on June’s behalf, Phyllis becomes aware of “anger like a stone in your stomach”, making it hard to forgive June.
Phyllis’s achievement is finally to see her own cornfield in rural Illinois through June’s eyes, understanding that June stares at this field with such intensity because she misses her home landscape. This is movingly conveyed by Ward, as she shows Phyllis finally ridding herself of her stone, coming to understand that her daughter-in-law is as bright and free-spirited and quixotically determined as she is. It’s Soozie, Phyllis’s granddaughter, who brings them together, and who will take on the mantle of both women in the next generation. And the generosity required to sit back, and to let the next generation do it better, is shown in Muriel’s story too, as she accepts that she may fail the world and the world may fail her, but the work will be done regardless.
There’s not much hope for justice in the wider world in this novel, any more than there is in ours now, and Ward seems quite consciously to be writing from one world to another. Andrea Dworkin learns here from Foucault and Chomsky between them that justice is always an instrument of power. Did Dworkin and Rukeyser and their circles succeed in making the world a little bit more just and a little bit more free, by placing a little bit more power in the right hands? Ward seems to be dramatising her own ambivalence about whether to rage against the loss of revolutionary activism and try to revive it, or to accept that loss and focus on justice in our personal lives. Certainly, the reverberations of revolution are felt by Phyllis, as she sees “how her life was part of these lives, that she existed in all these moments”, and learns to be both more powerful and more just. And, insofar as the revelation of the strength of sympathetic engagement is what the novel has always done best, Ward movingly demonstrates the need to use this to keep freeing ourselves, day after day.
