In an earlier post, I wrote about Kathleen Rooney because she teaches a course entitled "The Writer as Urban Walker" at DePaul University in Chicago and my novella "Manhattan Morning" falls squarely into that genre.
To see how Ms Rooney handled the task, I just finished reading her novel "Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk," which fulfilled my expectations in most ways, but fell a bit short in one respect.
The book, which took Ms Rooney 10 years to research and write, is a tour de force when it comes to drawing the portrait of both a particular woman and at the same time, a certain type of woman found, one could argue, mainly if not exclusively in Manhattan.
Rooney's story of her protagonist, Lillian, was inspired by the life of Margaret Fishback, who was the highest paid female advertising copywriter in the U.S. if not the world when she worked for Macy's department store in the 1930s. And like Lillian, Margaret was also a poet and a woman possessed of strong feminist inclinations.
We encounter Lillian in her mid 80s and learn of her life through a series of flashbacks as she takes a lengthy walk from the Murray Hill neighborhood of midtown Manhattan to the base of the island and back on a New Year's eve.
When reading about her, I thought of several other women who one might view as similar types for one reason or another. One is the feminist Vivian Gornick who at age 80 published a short memoir entitled "The Odd Woman and the City," which is worth reading. The other is a fictional character named Florence Gordon, her name serving as the title of a Manhattan-based novel by Brian Moore. She, too, is nearing the end of her life as a prominent, but difficult woman.
Rooney captures the personality of the clever, confident young Lillian as much in her style of writing -- cocky, effervescent prose -- as in the details of her life. And the style shifts in a commendably subtle but ultimately noticeable fashion as Lillian's life changes. This, I suspect, is great fodder for one of those MFA courses on the craft of writing. (Rooney has an MFA from Emerson College and probably excelled in her craft courses there.)
How did this book come up slightly short? Well, although there is a map inside the back cover of the book showing Lillian's route, which takes her to or past a number of real places in Manhattan, there actually isn't much material descripting the sights and sounds of the city -- at least not relative to the bulk of the material one finds in the book's 284 pages. She does meet a few characters on her walk, one of whom in particular (a young man working in a somewhat sorry convenience story) is illuminating of the city. But I thought the book could have used more of this and perhaps less of Lillian herself. One could argue Rooney used far more words than she needed to depict Lillian -- an example of writing for the sake of writing, or falling in love with her prose style, one might say.
But that's picking some highly personal nits.
I recommend this book as both a good read about an interesting woman and as a depiction of the trials of real-world, as opposed to navel-gazing, feminism in the face of prevailing societal conventions.
One last observation: Lillian does for a time have a husband named Max, but despite being the great love of her life, he is something of a stick figure compared with Lillian in terms of what we learn about him. This is first and foremost a book by a woman about a woman. Other than being exceptionally good looking, the man is, well, just another one of those people with predictable tendencies.
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