You could become a Gilchrist junkie
A DANGEROUS AGE
By Ellen Gilchrist
245 pp. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill $23.95
Reviewed by Ann Hite
A Dangerous Age reunites Ellen Gilchrist fans with the Hand family, including Winifred Hand, her cousin Louise, and Olivia Hand, the best known of the three cousins. After the loss of her fiancé in The World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Winifred is just beginning to experience life again when the impact of war threatens her happiness. Louise, an unfocused moviemaker, has married a soldier twelve years her junior who is desperate to avenge his twin brother’s wounding. Olivia, whom readers last saw as a teenager in Gilchrist’s novel Starcarbon, is now in her thirties, the tough-willed editor of a Tulsa, Oklahoma, newspaper, and newly married to Bobby Tree, who is called up to serve his country.
In true Gilchrist style, the reader is introduced to the use of drones in combat, and the miracle medicine that saves so many soldiers. Curious enough, but not by accident, both the operation center for the drones and the new cutting-edge hospital are located on the same air base in the Nevada desert. The symbolism of this settling is not lost on me. Fighting to live and fighting to defeat is an untidy pair that our government often creates.
Gilchrist’s strength is found in her young southern women. Her female characters always have their own style and self-defeating flaws. But they rise to the occasion, as we see with a section of Olivia’s column for the newspaper about the recent deaths of several soldiers from Tulsa:
I am proud my husband has gone to serve his country. I grieve for the families of the fallen. I pray to God that we find ways to protect ourselves that do not require the lives and limbs of our sons and daughters. Here at the Tulsa World we are opening our letters columns to all of you. I don’t believe our readers are sitting quietly out there, speechless and undermined, or worse, uncaring.
Sun, Olivia’s full-blooded Cherokee grandfather, shows us how he deals with the deaths so close to home:
He sat down cross-legged on his blanket and lit his pipe and inhaled deeply; then he watched the sun go down. He knew about the deaths in Iraq. He knew how bad it would make Bobby feel. He put it out of his mind and thought about good things that were happening. His son Roper was going to be a grandfather again. His son Creek had bought another piece of land on the river and was planning on building a house there. His daughter Xanthe was going to marry the man she had been living with for seven months. She was forty-six and wanted to have a baby.
The author is not afraid to approach death and disaster, even at the expense of her long- loved characters.
Ellen Gilchrist is the winner of The National Book Award for Victory Over Japan, a collection of short stories. She has written over twenty books, and is at her strongest when writing shorter works. With that said, A Dangerous Age is a loosely plotted novel at best. Often while reading the book I was reminded of the way Gilchrist allows her characters to meander through the story and choose tangents on which to vent. The structure is that of sketches barely laced together, but somehow in the end the pieces form a whole. I do have concerns for those readers who are not Ellen Gilchrist fans. As a Gilchrist admirer, I was invested in the characters from having read previous novels and novellas (The Anna Papers, I Cannot Get You Close Enough, Three Novellas, and Starcarbon). I strongly suggest that readers indulge themselves by reading the Hand family’s history within these books. It will enhance the reading of this novel. Just be careful. One of the side effects is becoming an Ellen Gilchrist junkie. That’s okay, because her writings are plentiful.
Ann Hite is hard at work on Where The Souls Go, or, as she commonly calls it, The Beast. Where The Souls Go is the second novel in an intended series of Black Mountain Stories. When not in her fictional community of Black Mountain, Ann can be found hanging out with her family.
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