[In the following review, See paints “… And Ladies of the Club” as a ponderous yet valuable look at the realities of small-town life.]

What we will be looking at here in a shamefully short review is a true literary curiosity, an artifact much more than a novel, a monument of words, a tool for the student of American history, a private compilation, a channeling of tremendous, idiosyncratic effort.

Most people interested in publishing must know by now that “… And Ladies of the Club” is the life's work of an obscure woman already living out her days in a nursing home. They know this book was printed in a small edition by the Ohio State University Press. All this is unusual enough, but the truly miraculous aspects of this curious story are that this book was then picked up by a successful commercial publisher and has been made a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. It must be a throwback to a certain kind of philanthropy, a respect for culture as such, the culture described within the pages of this vast volume.

There are problems with this unending narrative, physical and cultural problems aplenty. To read “… And Ladies of the Club,” you're going to have to pick it up. It's chunky and thick, about the size, shape and weight of a five-pound sack of sugar. Its almost 1,200 pages are a mild deception. The print in this book is excruciatingly small: if the type size were in any way normal, the pages might run close to 2,000.

The cultural obstacles are almost certainly more enervating. We live in the 20th Century, but in style, subject matter, treatment, and above all, pace, this is precisely a 19th-Century novel, not merely in length, but in gentility. There are no murders, sex scenes, jokes or adventures here. And—to get the last caveat out of the way—Helen Hooven Santmyer is no Tolstoy, or even a George Eliot. There is no structure here, no particular novelistic cunning or guile. Readers cannot fairly expect to put down this volume with characters like Natasha or Mr. Casuabon imprinted forever in their brains: This is a novel of ordinary life, in an ordinary Midwestern town, whose inhabitants are born, marry, reproduce, grow old and die. That is all.

Yet “… And the Ladies of the Club” is a valuable book, a meticulous, painstaking journey through our American past. It begins in the year 1868, at a commencement on the shaded lawns of the Waynesboro Female College. We see for the first time Anne Alexander and Sally Cochran, young ladies dressed in the height of fashion, graduates on the brink of life, who will both within a year and a half be wives and mothers. Anne will marry John Gordon, a morose young doctor still reeling from his experiences in the Civil War, and Sally's life will be spent with John's friend, Ludwig Rausch, an enterprising young businessman who buys up a decaying rope business and becomes actively involved in local politics.

But just as important as these two marriages, Santmyer suggests, is the founding of the Waynesboro Women's Club. The club, at its beginning, consists of a dozen ladies who agree to meet on Wednesday afternoons, “fortnightly,” to read and criticize papers on literature and history. The charter membership includes Anne and Sally, those two fresh young graduates; Mrs. Ballard, wife of the judge, and her two old-maid daughters; several more old-maid schoolteachers, and one calculating teacher who has just snagged a rather dim Civil War general. …

And life “begins,” at least in the eyes of Anne and Sally. We see postwar politics from their point of view; the serious rifts in the Republican party, the different economic policies that determine depression and recovery. We see the rope business and exactly how it grows—and how you make rope. Again, from the woman's point of view, we watch the dissensions between the Protestant sects: the unfashionable, shabby Baptists; the comparatively liberal Presbyterians, and the rock-ribbed, bigoted and oppressive Reformed Presbyterians, who won't drink, dance, sing hymns or observe Christmas. We see—at a distance—the untouchable, socially impossible, Roman Catholics, made up entirely of the Irish working class.

We see, then, people trying to make a life, make their lives, within a set of rules, mostly self-inflicted, that would seem impossibly stultifying. We read, at the end of the book, that its writer considered this account to be an answer to Sinclair Lewis, “whose Main Street had made her so angry that after a decade, she seethed when she thought of it.” But “… And Ladies of the Club” is more damning by far than that cranky little volume, simply by its exhaustive description of small-town American life.

This is a society where, even to visit your best girlfriend, you don't venture out without gloves, hat, parasol, card case. A society where marriages may be placed in jeopardy if one person wants to see an amateur theatrical and the other considers it certain damnation. Where families are broken because of one mouthful of beer. Where even the “good guys,” Sally Cochran Rausch, for instance, can rant that a wife with a Catholic mother “will never be received in society.”

This is a picture of a society so stultifying that by Page 700 or so the reader is beaten, knowing that there is no point, outside of grim determination, in going on reading, because there will simply be more lemonade: “When Rose had filled the glasses and withdrawn, the two women exchanged the usual amenities before settling down to business. A polite inquiry as to Mr. Cochran's health was answered as politely.” And so on. Forever. For lifetimes.

It must be Santmyer's submerged contention that within these strictures, of course, life did go on, and women contributed much to it. There are those “Glorious Fourths,” with fried chicken, fireworks, grand marches. The women's club, besides writing papers and keeping up with contemporary literature, is responsible, first, for a subscription library, and then a public one—although most of the population is scandalized by the thought of Negroes and Irish touching the books and making them “filthy.”

The women sponsor lectures, lead a temperance crusade. And the stultifying closeness and emphasis on “correct” behavior has peculiar positive effects: When Anne's womanizing husband allows a cousin of his—on whom he has fathered a child—to come to Waynesboro, Anne can welcome her with almost open arms, secure in the conviction that a woman who, again, wants to be “received” into society, must behave with perfect prudence and circumspection.

This book is too long, too thick, too dense, too detailed to be summed up in one review. A reader may object that the pages and pages and pages of time spent in discussion of local Ohio politics are interesting in terms of history, but exhausting in a novel, and wonder that although we see Anne and Sally year by year, from the time they're 18 until they're 80, we don't know a great deal more about them at the end than at the beginning.

What this book is—no more, no less—is a mirror on daily life in a small American town. Infidelity, sickness, death are all submerged in who is going to give whom a ride home from the club, who's going to take cakes to the bereaved, who's going to answer the door, who's going to warm the sheets, who's going to call the undertaker. The theme, if there is one, is—given this life, what do you do with it? Anne, whose husband is unfaithful and gloomy, whose children both die, who never gets to go anywhere, who evolves from being a devout Presbyterian to a mild skeptic, is sure of one thing only. In spite of everything, the trivial and the everyday, we are put in this life to enjoy it, and she sets about this task with the same sad persistence she would employ to write one of her club papers.