Our Kind : A Novel in Stories

Rating:
Summary: Succinct and Perceptive
Review: Although Walbert does not pinpoint her location, various clues lead me to believe that this book is situated around Wilmington Delaware or Philadelphia, a milieu I am very familiar with. The portraits of these women are drawn with such accuracy I feel I could provide their true names, including my mother. Since she still lives there with her cronies from her youth, husbands and children either gone or scattered, through these stories I have a truer insight into her life than I have gotten from the weekly telephone conversations we share. I know this is a very subjective review, but it is rare that a book has hit me at such a personal level.

Rating:
Summary: Mixed though strongly effective in places
Review: Anyone who picks up a collection of short stories knows going in that the stories will probably be uneven in quality, that the odds of the author hitting her mark in all of them is pretty slim. Running a group of stories together so that they focus on the same group of characters in the same setting can help increase the sense of narrative, the sense of concern over characters we see repeated, but it is no less open to the same problem as any group of disparate stories--unevenness. That's the case here with Our Kind, despite its being labeled a novel.
The interconnected stories detail the lives (past, present, and impending future) of a group seldom highlighted in such compassionate terms-well-off divorced women who came of age in the 50's and are now in their later years, musing on husbands who left, daughters who came and went, past lovers, past opportunities, past crafting moments. In the best of the stories, there is a truly heavy sadness and poignancy about the characters and their situations. In the less effective stories, the reader sees them at best indifferently, at worst as near-caricatures or cliches. The plots vary as well, some tightly focused and sharp, others seeming a bit light.
Walber uses the group as a collective narrator, though each has their individual stories and moments. On the one hand, the characters tend to get lost as individuals, lessening the impact of the various tales. Many of them end up a bit airy, a bit ephemeral. On the other hand, one gets a greater feel for, as the title puts it, "their kind". And this sense of kind rather than person grows cumulatively as each story is related, whatever the quality of the individual stories. Overall, the style varies nicely from lyrical and poetic (especially in descriptions of landscape marked by time or the descriptions of the daughters) to sharp and oh so dry. While the more dry and/or somewhat bitter parts will have you chuckling or laughing out loud, it is the more lyrical and sad portions dealing with the many ravages of time (daughters grown up and distant, friends lost to death and disease, the loss of beauty, etc.) that are the true heart and strength of the book. The passages surrounding watching the daughters grow up I thought were by far the strongest and made the book worth reading on their own, despite its flaws.
Individually, as mentioned the stories vary in quality. Some are simply exceptional, others seem flat or at times a bit forced/cute. The good outweigh the bad, but it's a slim book and more than one of the stories are weak, thus the mixed review. To make matters worse, the concluding story is perhaps the weakest, or is at least one of the weaker ones, so the book leaves you feeling a bit disappointed.
It's a very quick read, and its pleasures are many. In the end, I wanted to know at least a few of the characters more intimately and wanted a much, much stronger conclusion. Recommended highly for the strong portions, which as I said make it well worth the read, but with the caveat that the effect as a whole is a mixed bag.

Rating:
Summary: A Powerful and poetic look into a lost generation.
Review: I was completly entranced by this novel. It is steeped in the genre of interconnecting short stories told from the viewpoint of a collective narrator. The narrator being a group of women who have moved from the 1950s and watched all the great women movements pass them by. These charachters are rich and their stories become something to cherish. The stories plots may be nothing new, but the way Walbert tells them is extraordinary. I cannot reccomend this novel enough as it is something I find lacking in many works today and that is a human voice.

Rating:
Summary: The Forgotten Women
Review: I'm not sure why this book didn't win the National Book Club Award. I have read three of the other finalists and this is, by far, the best of the bunch. It is a "must read" for women of all ages.

I am a bit younger than these women - our age group spanned the time before the Feminist Movement and after. We were on the cusp. Therefore, some of the things which affected these women where "preached" to my age group, but many of us were lucky and escaped. We went back to school and finished our educations, and, when our husbands left or died and our children grew up, we had other places and things to which to turn, and now we have new memories to replace the old ones. I am surprised that, none of the reviews I have read mention Viv. She, of all the characters, is the most poignant for me. Viv is the brilliant, but poor girl, who is awarded a full scholarship to Smith. However, it is the time when young women went to college to earn their MRS. degree, and, in spite of being championed by a pair of women professors and pushed toward graduate school, she hears the "siren call" and marries a month after receiving her undergraduate degree. He is a non-entity and soon becomes colorless in her eyes so that, after he is no longer a part of her life, she can't even remember what he looks like. However, she remembers vividly, half a century later, the professors - how they looked - how they spoke to her - how angry they were when she gave up her birthright to get married. Now she runs the "book club" for the ladies and watches the sessions dissolve into "niggling" and nonsense spoken by women who will never be as bright as she, and who just don't understand the inner meanings of the books they read.

This is a book which should be on the reading lists of every Women in Literature class in this country, and it teaches lessons which should never be forgotten by any woman of any age.

Rating:
Summary: A Delightful Gem
Review: Kate Walbert's Our Kind is a delightful gem, a wonderful work reminiscent of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, a novel several of the characters in this novel discuss at a book club. Both novels focus on the circularity of time, but Walbert's novel also focuses on the ravages of time, particularly on this collection of women in the novel. These women were married in fifties and now are all alone, deserted by husband and children by death, by divorce, by choice. Time is running out for them, but not many of them acknowledge that. Time swirls by them, the past comes back, they relive it, it repeats itself. These are wealthy women, not usually pitied, yet their stories echo with horrible tragedy, much death, many sadnesses. The narrative in the novel is lyrical without being too much or two twee. Walbert has done an excellent job; Our Kind is an excellent, moving novel.

Rating:
Summary: beautifully written
Review: This book consists of interrelated stories about a group of women friends who married and started families in the 1950's. The stories are beautifully written, and I found myself continually marking pages for prose that I wanted to reread.

This is also one of those novels that is about Time. You see entire lives having been lived, and it makes you think about your own mortality and accomplishments.

I ended this novel with a heavy heart. Despite the fact that I am too young to have remembered the 50's, I felt like I had known these women, and their own angst and frustrations became mine.

Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: chilling scenes of women from Cheever country
Review: What happens to the wives of the upper middle class when they hit old age, after the decoupage classes and country club eras? This extraordinary novel in stories, told in the unusual first person plural, paints a haunting picture. The subject matter is fresh and the writing is first rate. Kate Walbert has great talent and a keen eye.