Working With Available Light: A Family's World After Violence

Rating:
Summary: Recommend to advocates for crime victims
Review: The earlier posted reviews from readers and media sources do a good job of summarizing most of the strengths and weaknesses of this book. I want to add another perspective. As a sexual assault victim advocate, prevention educator and survivor, I have been recommending this book widely. Working With Available Light, and Telling by Particia Weaver Franciso, help all of us understand more clearly the years and years long impact of any crime, and particularly of sexual assault. The criminal in this book did commit sexual assault under the laws that apply in most states (despite some confusion on the part of some reviewers.). Sexual assault affects almost every aspect of one's life for many years to come, and yet the sexual assault and reactions to it happen in a larger context of relationships, interests and activities. The impact ebbs and flows and evolves with time. Sexual assault also affects every member of the survivor's family and community. This book provides a new view of that context and the long term effect. Survivors, family and friends, counselors, victim advocates, law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, medical workers should all find this book both affirming and enlightening. Kalven does write from a position of great social privilege. Other feminists may wince, as I did, at some of his comments. This book speaks of stranger rape of a woman over the age of 25. The vast majority of sexual assault happens to people under 25 and the perpetrators are known to the victim. The amount of community support for victims of stranger rape is generally greater than for those who survive acquaintance rape -- and this book illustrates the kind of support I wish every rape victim could receive but rarely does. Working With Available Light is not the "one and only best book anyone should read on rape" but I am very glad this book is available. It now holds a key place on my own suggested reading list for those who work against sexual assault.

Rating:
Summary: the line between light and dark
Review: This book has much to recommend it. And much that leaves me, ultimately, wondering. At times I feel the image of being assaulted from behind is an apt metaphor for the book itself. I have this sense of the author running to catch up with his wife, overtaking her and finally discarding her -- as if her body were simply a vessel to provide him access to an experience otherwise unavailable to him. What I don't know is: Does this say something about him personally? About the ruthlessness of the writing process? About being human? I don't know. But something leaves me uneasy.

He takes liberties with her experience (not just the assault, but other aspects of her life and personhood) that take my breath away. It's as if he's unclear where she ends and he begins -- as if that line doesn't really matter, is subservient to this book, the act of writing, his own sense of the world.

But in spite of this limitation (and to me, it is a limitation), Kalven has much of insight to say. And maybe, ultimately, he and Patsy have carved out a marriage that works for them. After the assault, she turned to him to recount everything she was feeling, every change in her personal barometer, every shift in the weather. And he took it all in. Maybe the invasiveness of this book is the cost of that kind of attentiveness.

Life's a mystery. And Kalven, insufferable at times, mostly recounts it beautifully.

Rating:
Summary: A Rape in the Neighborhood
Review: This is an important book as well as a good book. It is a part of the movement away from thinking of rape as a kind of dishonor and towards thinking of it as a kind of physical and social torture that one can speak of and fight against.

I should note that I am not an objective reviewer. I am a lifelong friend of the author, Jamie Kalven. I have known Patsy Evans, Jamie's wife and the book's hero, for about as long as he has. I am briefly mentioned by name in the narrative. I haven't even finished the whole book yet, because I find it too upsetting.

What Jamie and Patsy are trying to teach us, in part, in Working with Available Light, is something that the people running Serbia already know. Rape is a very effective way to pull people apart from their communities.

Patsy, Jamie and I live in Hyde Park, a neighborhood within Chicago and a sort of character in the book. Everyone here seems to connect with everyone else in at least three or four ways. Typically, I know X because I took her class and I garden near her, and I went to high school with her and she's related to Y and a friend of Z. When Patsy was raped, all those connections stretched and frayed, in addition to the ties with her husband and children. I wouldn't have understood this, but for the book.

Patsy had the courage to rewrite the story that our culture had prepared for her--the one in which she is a devalued victim who either never or only speaks of the rape. In that story, she is soiled goods. She drops out of relationships in her community, because she is not who she was when she formed them. So does Jamie, because the story makes him a shamed and injured party who has suffered a type of irreversible property damage.

We see ourselves as too sophisticated to think this way now. We remind ourselves that we don't live in Kosovo. Working with Available Light is a book about how hard it is to rewrite the old story of a rape, even in a sophisticated American community.

Truisms are true. We can't change how we think collectively unless people have the courage to speak out specifically. My friends Jamie and Patsy are intensely private people who have decided that sexual violence is not a private matter. They want to tell you their story. They want to make some room for others to speak.