Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 8, 1995 TAG: 9501130013
SECTION: BOOK PAGE: F8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY LUCY LEE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
\ Anna Quindlen is an eloquent spokeswoman for her baby boomer generation. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for her syndicated New York Times column, "Public and Private." In it she has addressed such "women's" issues as balancing career and family, sexual harassment, abortion, rape and prenatal testing. Her greatest journalistic contribution may be that she has given validity to the feminist premise that the personal is, indeed, political.
Quindlen says her great journalistic contribution to her family is that she writes obituaries. The most recent was for her 41-year-old sister-in-law who died of lung cancer. The first was for her mother.
Quindlen was a sophomore in college when her mother developed ovarian cancer. She dropped out to spend a year caring for her and four younger siblings. It was from this experience that she came to write "One True Thing," the struggle of a daughter caught between duty to a homemaker mother she never particularly admired and the demands of a brilliant father she emulated and adored.
The narrator is Ellen Gulden, a budding journalist in New York, who is summoned home by her father to care for her mother who is in the final stages of cancer. As he succinctly puts it, "A woman's wanted here." When Ellen hesitates, he reels her in with, "You have a Harvard education ... but you have no heart."
Ellen's not big on heart but then, she is her English professor father's own child - bright, ambitious, clever, and grounded more in his world of words than in her mother's world of feeling. She thought, in fact, that her mother's life of domesticity had "the anachronistic traditions of a distant tribe." She compares her to dinner: "I needed her in order to live, but I did not pay much attention to what went into her."
Her father, on the other hand, was dessert. When he came home from work it was like "that moment in 'The Wizard of Oz' when Dorothy opens the door of the house and the black-and-white world of Kansas turns Technicolor."
We learn in the prologue that Ellen has been arrested on suspicion of giving her mother a fatal dose of morphine. But did she? That's a question that looms throughout the story.
We see early on that Kate Gulden is much "smarter" than either her intellectual husband or daughter. She is the "One True Thing" of the title. Kate's most masterful technique in winning her daughter's love and respect is the formation of "The Gulden Girls' Book Club."
Her first selection is "Pride and Prejudice" and she takes Jane Austen to task for making women into that "either-or thing." She claims the book "... does that cheap thing that people do, it makes the sister who is sweet and domestic and good a second fiddle to the one who is smart and outspoken. ... It didn't seem fair to me, that Jane was so good and yet Elizabeth is the one who is admired."
Quindlen uses this dichotomy as one of the central themes of her story. She criticizes the father (a not so subtle symbol of the patriarchy) for grouping women, although he doesn't do it in the traditional "madonna and the whore" sense, but as "the woman of the mind and one of the heart."
She goes overboard in putting down Ellen, the woman of the mind, and in exalting Kate, the woman of the heart. Although Ellen emerges, in the end, a more balanced character, it is only because of the insight gained through her mother's dying. (One would hope such dire circumstances aren't necessary for escaping the "either-or" stereotype.)
It's unfortunate that Quindlen uses great literary works (Austen's, Dicken's and Tolstoy's) to frame her story since they are an ever-present reminder that her work is not in that league. She introduces important issues -- the unfairness of early death, mercy killing, what really matters in life, the conflicting roles of women, especially as mothers - but doesn't develop them fully. There is a lack of complexity to the characters as well, especially Ellen's.
Despite these flaws, I recommend the book. It makes you think and feel, and it's a compelling story. I read it in a day and a half and would have finished sooner if I hadn't had to wipe my eyes and blow my nose every few pages.
"One True Thing" is a beautiful tribute to what the mother-daughter relationship can be. And it is a poignant reminder of what Ellen learns: "When your mother's gone, you've lost your past. It's so much more than love. Even when there's no love, it's so much more than anything else in your life. I did love my mother, but I didn't know how much until she was gone."
Lucy Lee is a former director of the Women's Center at Hollins College.
by CNB