Review by New York Times Review
IN "LITTLE LABORS," a highly original book of essays and observations, Rivka Galchen writes, "The world seemed ludicrously, suspiciously, adverbially sodden with meaning." The birth of her daughter, she observes, "made me again more like a writer ... precisely as she was making me into someone who was, enduringly, not writing." This brilliantly described state is familiar to me, as is her experience of maternal sleeplessness and dim memory of Russian formalism. Galchen writes, "Another problem with being the mother of a baby is loneliness." What friends we might have been, she and I, pushing our strollers around together. I fantasized that we might have breast-fed while watching the sexy anti-hero Louis C. K., recited the poetry of Sci Shonagun, talked about the new Jenny Offill novel that we couldn't put down, sharing our well-worn copies of Jane Bowles. But probably we are both too guarded with our time; we would have seen each other at the park, and looked away. There were times I laughed out loud reading Galchen's accounts of encountering her nemesis in the elevator, who never failed to comment on the size of her baby. (In the middle of writing that sentence, my daughter told me that the streak of gray in my hair was silver like the moon, and that I should never change it, and then I checked her temperature.) "Little Labors" chronicles the state of continual interruption faced by the mother who writes, a state I understand perhaps too intimately. A writer friend told me never to quote children or taxi drivers. But I insist - as I think "Little Labors" does - that motherhood is an undiscovered country in the literary sense, one we must venture into lest our experience goes unrecorded, or recorded only by men. Galchen gallantly traverses this country - particularly the nonlinguistic bond between baby and mother. She observes cannily that "among the mother writers of today probably two of the most distinguished are Karl Ove Knausgaard and, in his way, Louis C.K." I have often thought (perhaps cynically) that male writers have more literary freedom to detail 21stcentury parental domestic life, and only when a goodly number of men are stay-at-home parents will this country ever pass laws about universal pre-K. But I digress. Some of the essays in this volume resonate more than others - some feel more like amuse-bouches - but they all made me want to keep reading, to keep listening to the subtle quality of the author's voice: her irony, smarts, unexpected associations. Galchen writes that she admires certain male writers with a feminine quality (Kafka, for example) and then backpedals, writing that perhaps her taste has less to do with gender and more "to do with the volume of certain kinds of quiet." I adore Galchen's quiet, and the bravery of this book's fragments. You get the sly sense reading this book that you are not seeing the whole writer; there is a sleight of hand - something only partially revealed - so that the fragments glow more. Her kaleidoscopic subjects leap from the literary to the mundane and back again. In discussing the form of "The Pillow Book," an 11th-century miscellany written by a Japanese lady of the court, Galchen writes that she associates the book with "the ?small' as opposed to the ?minor.'" This is an important distinction, and, I think, a defense of her own form. Detailing the few literary representations of babies available to us, from Judy Budnitz to Tolstoy, Galchen writes that "literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions." I might add Chekhov, whose grating Natasha in "Three Sisters" can't stop cooing in baby-talk to her infant Bobik, worrying about his catching a small cold. I recall that I felt differently about the character after I had children. Upon first reading "Three Sisters," Natasha seemed an insensitive upstart, fixated on the temperature of her baby's room over the comfort of her more refined sisters-in-law. After having three children, I thought: Of course she's more concerned about whether her infant has caught the flu than about a fire that might consume the whole village. It is this shrinkage of concerns that is worrisome to the mother who writes. How can one write with ethical breadth - with what Chekhov called "objectivity," after his medical training - if one is mired in the subjective small concerns of motherhood? (Particularly white-lady motherhood in Manhattan, 2016, the setting of "Little Labors.") The book seems to be making an argument for the bigness of motherhood's labors, while defending the choice to approach the subject matter with the humility of a slim volume, in fragmented form. But what could be bigger than the project of motherhood itself? Galchen writes of children: "Their arrival feels supernatural, they seem to come from another world, life near them takes on a certain unaccountable richness, and they are certain, eventually, to leave you." Given the tenderness of that situation (life's richness or design flaw), how can we as writers, and as people, not pay attention? I am happy that Galchen did, and I am confident that many mothers (and other sleepless readers) will pick up this book and feel that they have found an unexpectedly intimate friend. SARAH RUHL is a playwright and the author of "100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write." Her plays include "In the Next Room; Or, The Vibrator Play" and "For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday," currently at Berkeley Repertory Theater.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 3, 2016]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Galchen (Atmospheric Disturbances) brings both humor and serious inquiry to this collection of short vignettes about the curious nature of babies and the experience of becoming a mother. Her infant daughter, whom she nicknames "the puma," a "near mute force," imbues Galchen's life with renewed enchantment: "So that the world seemed ludicrously, suspiciously, adverbially sodden with meaning. Which is to say that the puma again made me more like a writer." Referencing the Japanese classic The Pillow Book, the musings of an 11th-century court lady, Galchen observes the prosaic everyday of her own life in order to uncover the wonder behind it. She also contemplates the limitations and assumptions forced on female writers of the past, such as Jane Bowles and Patricia Highsmith. Galchen includes a trove of cultural references, from television (Louie, I Love Lucy) to literature (Beloved, Anna Karenina), drawing observations from their varying representations of babies. Among her observations: Godzilla is "child-like," and paintings of the baby Jesus have seldom borne much resemblance to actual infants. She also deconstructs strangers' compliments on how nicely shaped her daughter's head is. Each literary morsel is imbued with Galchen's unique wit and charm. The book is an endearing compilation of social criticism, variously contentious, commonplace, funny, and incisive. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An engaging mind offers reflections on being a mother, being a writer, and having a baby. It would be tempting to term this slim volume "singular," but Galchen herself (American Innovations, 2014, etc.) provides the inspirational template when she discusses The Pillow Book, written in Japan more than 1,000 years ago. That book "is difficult to characterize. It's not a novel and not a diary and not poems and not advice, but it has qualities of each, and would have been understood at the time as a kind of miscellany, a familiar form." Now a decidedly less familiar form, this work presents dozens of sections, some a sentence or two, none longer than a few pages, which encapsulate her experiences as her daughter matures from a newborn baby into a more mobile toddler. Or, in the author's words, "when she began to locomote, she ceased being a puma and became a chicken." She has almost invariably been referred to in the preceding pages as the puma, without sentiment but with a range and depth of feeling that has obviously transformed the author. None of this is offered as instructional about mothers and babies in general but about this particular baby and her effect on this particular motherwho had never intended to write this book. "I didn't want to write about the puma," admits Galchen. "I wanted to write about other things. Mostly because I had never been interested in babies, or in mothers.I almost hated the topics.' " Many of these reflections concern the baby in art and literature and how having a baby affects the output of a writer. The author also traces the development of a feminist consciousness, as she describes herself as someone who mainly read books by men and had friends who were men, but finds that the years and personal circumstances have shifted her perspective. A talented writer delivers a miscellany about her maternal transformation. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
