After the Prom
It's hard to go unprejudiced into [Burning Questions], which is yet another novel about how an ordinary, middle-class housewife becomes an ardent feminist. It's even harder when there's a bibliography at the end … and when the novel turns out to be, quite literally, a novel within a novel.
The puzzling thing about Zane's story is her extreme distance from her own life. She recounts it in a sweeping way, categorizing, summing up…. Zane has a habit of offhandedly mentioning, a hundred pages late, that such-and-such an event has already occurred, more or less by the bye: her loss of virginity, her marriage, childbirth, two abortions, divorce. Experiences skim past her, as if happening to someone else.
But the surprise is that by the end of the book, we do care for Zane, however impatient we've been with her along the way. I think the reason for this can be found in the title. The "burning questions" are not, as I had feared, queries about women's victimization or men's supremacy, but about "how to live, how to be." What Zane is struggling for is a way of making the best use of her life. What she's struggling against, from childhood onward, is that cursory, pigeonholing glance that "places" her and forgets her; and who wouldn't sympathize with that? The most convincing scenes in the book are those where she attempts to involve herself in the causes of the '60s—signing petitions, joining marches—but is consistently excluded or ignored because she is a matron in sneakers, pushing a stroller: a middle-class white liberal woman, dime a dozen….
She does avoid the temptation to end her story with the end of the '60s, on a note of glory; she admits that the '70s have seen a sort of slackening process. It is this new clear-eyed, steady view of hers that wins us over, finally. I started Burning Questions feeling edgy and suspicious, and some of my suspicions were confirmed; but I think that any book that so satisfyingly and believably portrays the altering of a character's life deserves to be read.
Anne Tyler, "After the Prom," in Book World—The Washington Post (© The Washington Post), March 26, 1978, p. G3.
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