Now, Voyager (Femmes Fatales: Women Write Pulp)

Rating:
Summary: A classic, like the film it inspired
Review: Given the current stagnation of American fiction, it's refreshing to set the wayback machine to the first half of the twentieth century and see how phenomenally fertile our national literature was then. Not only did we have the respectable literary writers like Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Frank Norris, and John Dos Passos, but there were amazing things happening in popular genre literature courtesy of Cornell Woolrich, H.P. Lovecraft, Hammett, and Chandler. Olive Higgins Prouty's "Now, Voyager" is just a romance novel, generically speaking, but it's romance in the tradition of "Jane Eyre" and "Pride and Prejudice" that has as much to say about the morals and manners of its time as it does about the eternal mating dance. Charlotte Vale, like Jane Eyre, is a rebel who dares to question the hyprocritical morals of her elders in order to construct her own morality, based on self-respect and compassion rather than inhibition and fear. In these days when American women are being urged to channel their energies into marriage, motherhood and church, it's nice to rediscover a book that celebrates the joys of independence, self-determination and having your own bank account.