Ellen Cooney’s comedic eleventh novel, A Cowardly Woman No More, is spoken by Trisha Donahue, a married mother of two who begins by recalling a bus ride with fellow employees to the Rose & Emerald, what my parents would have called a “Yankee restaurant,” located near Mount Wachusett just north of Worcester, Massachusetts. The old mill town of Clinton, where Cooney was born, is nearby, and so are the high technology companies clustered in industrial parks along Interstate 495. Trisha, now “somewhat older” than her age (44) at the time of the story, had been working for eight years as a software analyst for one of those firms – and we soon find out that though she had just been passed over for the promotion she dearly wanted and clearly deserved, she was about to be named Employee of the Year at the company’s annual banquet.
The novel’s title may suggest a grievance narrative with an op-ed’s mission, but that all too familiar format isn’t what one finds here. Not that Trisha doesn’t have ample cause for grievance. When she had to leave work “for school events or to handle some crisis,” she “felt that there was some underlying resentment towards me, never voiced.” In her corporate department, she was the only woman. But the novel’s memorable effects derive from Trisha’s voice, attitude and values. Plot-wise, one waits to see what will happen at the awards banquet. Yet this anticipated climax, too, is deflected by other concerns and events.
Having grown up with few advantages as the daughter of two hardworking parents, she had broken away from her friends in town and received the education that gave her the technical competency for a career in tech. She says:
“So I moved on: the girl from the part of the valley where you were expected to stay where you were, to find a job you didn’t have to go to college for, as if life had a certain type of pathway, on a certain type of slope. The pathway could be, I’d figured out, a simple walk upward. Or a difficult climb made easier if you started with just the right training. But no matter what, the path and the slope were only supposed to be for other people.”
And: “I was a charity case in a world filled with people having no idea what it’s like to outgrow shoes you have to keep wearing until after an overdue bill is paid, or to travel many miles on a bus to a dental school clinic so students will work on your teeth for free. You don’t complain, because you already figured out the only important thing: your eyes had to keep looking at the future, the future, the future.”
As one proceeds towards the banquet, Tricia’s asides add texture to her persona. She voices no impulse to be perceived as especially unique, but she does want us to know that her actions have a firm intentionality: “I have thick brown hair, a little wavy. I’ve always kept it short. I’ve worn no makeup to work, ever, except lipstick now and then, if I thought of it. I never had my ears pierced, and I wear no jewelry, not counting my wedding band and a thin gold chain around my neck, with a gold heart, concealed inside my blouses.”
It occurred to me that Trisha (and her work colleagues) is the sort of white American who, if better understood and less disparaged by progressives (who depend on her vote nonetheless), could deliver a decisive electoral win for them. She lives in a world where inequity is persistent – and where her family’s sustenance depends on her determination: “You have a life, you put up with things, you want to get ahead.” She lives in a suburban development and someone mows her lawn:
“All of me: Trisha Donahue, Patricia Eileen Gilley Donahue, forty-four years old, not ungifted, not untalented, well-educated, striver of betterments, actually an accomplisher of accomplishments, actually of sound mind, in good health, not unattractive, not dangerous to anyone in any way, basically a decent person, not too tall and not too short, not underweight or overweight, and overall lucky, lucky, lucky.” Then she adds, “Exactly what was I luckiest about, this awful day, this wreck of a day?” The unfolding answer to this question is the spirited force here.
The other major character in the novel isn’t a person at all – it’s the Rose & Emerald itself. As a child, Trisha had explored its grounds and became familiar with its interior: “Overall, it looked like a stately country mansion that was also unfussy and earthy, like a tavern that’s mostly genteel, but always ready to host a brawl.” There had been some damage to the place – its employees swore that a comet had struck. Whatever the truth, the Rose & Emerald becomes a very different kind of refuge for Trisha on banquet night.
A Cowardly Woman No More tugged me back to a time in my late 20s – my wife and I had produced our first child and I had decided to abandon graduate school and academia for good. On returning to Massachusetts, I looked for work and was hired at one of those rising companies near Interstate 495. At that time, high tech was just ramping up, and if you could write a complete sentence, had some decent clothes and were white, you could get a job. But what struck me most of all about this new environment was a recognition that my co-workers were the kids I had grown up with in public school – the ones I had left behind in favor of the intellectual refinements of academic life. Within a year I was writing speeches for the company’s president. I felt lucky, lucky, lucky – and did not yet fully grasp how entitled I was. And the men ran everything, of course.
“I’m a very ordinary writer in that everything in my life is material,” Cooney said in a 2020 interview. “It’s mostly an issue of when to use what, and how. Which can take ages to become known to you!” Six years earlier in another interview, she said, “I have never drawn directly from my own life or my own family. But as a fiction writer, you’ve got the raw material of your real experience that goes through this dynamic thing that’s my imagination.” A Cowardly Woman No More expresses the force of something that became known to Cooney through the emergence of Trisha’s voice.
For Trisha, not being “a cowardly woman” involves something more than specifying her displeasures. The engaging directness of her narrative – its spokenness, sharpness of vision and recall, and willingness to place an exclamation point at the end of a sentence when she amazes herself – comprises her bravery.
[Published by Coffee House Press on April 4, 2023, 206 pages, $16.95 US trade paperback]
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In the introduction to This Is Not Miami, Fernanda Melchor describes some of the book’s texts “under the journalistic genre of crónica, a hybrid form at once informative and interpretive, which has no entirely satisfying translation in English.” She labels others as relatos, “which in English might be closest to ‘accounts.’” Writing in The New York Review of Books on Clarice Lispector’s collected crónicas, Alejandro Chacoff says, “The crónista hunts big game with a pocketknife.” He traces the genre’s emergence to Rio de Janeiro in the 19th century where by the 1920s the genre had become a fixture in the Brazilian press. Lispector’s crónicas included aspects of stories (sometimes serialized), memory, aphorisms, drifting thought, brief conversations, short essays. In Europe between the wars, Walter Benjamin as a flaneur in Paris inspired the cross breeding of forms – journalism, citation, exegesis, philosophical asides, flashes of memory. Although his own narrative impulse was negligible, his successors have added prose fiction, poetry and memoir to the mix.
Melchor tells us that most of her texts were written “over a ten-year period between 2002 and 2011 … during a period in Mexico’s recent history defined by the calamitous coincidence of Fidel Herrera Beltran’s administration as Governor of Veracruz and Felipe Calderón Hinojosa’s as the President of the Republic.” She says of her crónicas, “They have no journalistic claims … nor can they be called realist fiction.” Yet some of the most striking of Melchor’s pieces peer with a journalistic eye, and in some places she quotes from apparent interviews. She adds, “The real focus for these texts was not the incidents themselves, but the impact they had on their witnesses.”
The narco-cartel’s activity in and around Veracruz appears in the first of the collection’s 12 pieces and persists throughout. In “Lights in the Sky,” Melchor writes about different sightings of lights in the night sky during her youth, “Mexico’s UFO wave,” and moves on first to memories of reading comic books and watching TV shows, then to a confrontation between Mexican forces and a Colombian narco plane. During the Hinojosa regime, the Los Zetas narco-cartel consolidated its hold over the sale of drugs in Mexico, dashing the aspirations of those who had dreamed of becoming independent narco-kings in their neighborhoods. Many of Melchor’s stories involve such people.
But Melchor’s interests extend beyond the narco world. In “Queen, Slave, Woman,” she tells the story of a young woman, Evangelina Tejera Bosada, charged with murdering her two boys, and the community’s response during her trial. Tejera was a former Queen of Veracruz Carnival and had been seeing a psychiatrist about her psychotic episodes. Like a journalist, Melchor mentions “documents I consulted” about the proceedings and public opinion. It all reminded me of a similar current story here in Massachusetts. Melchor sums it up: “Opposing yet complementary archetypes, masks that dehumanize flesh and blood women and become blank screens on which to project the desires, fears, and anxieties of a society that professes to be an enclave of tropical sensualism but deep down is profoundly conservative, classist, and misogynist.”
“A Jail Out of the Movies” describes the emptying of a prison in 2010 in order to make the facility available as a set for a Mel Gibson movie. The prisoners are transported en masse while their families seek information about the transfer. There are background stories about the prison. There are rumors about a payoff from Gibson to local officials. One of my favorite pieces is “Don’t Mess With My Boys” which covers the rise of crack cocaine in Veracruz. Until the 1930s, a person could go into a pharmacy and buy cocaine hydrochloride in tablet form; the narco chiefs took over, “a select community of businessmen, owners of the city’s largest customs agencies, hotels and real estate companies.” The raw materials came from Colombia. The spread of crack was “a narcomarketing success story that impoverishes the user and makes them prey to their basest instincts.”
The longest of these texts is “The House on El Estero,” and as a sort of ghost story, it is the most atypical of them. The prevailing beliefs of Veracruzanos – whether about UFOs, the calls for vengeance when children are murdered by their mother, or the haunting of an old mansion – swirl through Melchor’s relatos. Her texts are usually more critical than classic crónicas which are often elliptical and fleeting – and represent for me an updating of the genre to address the oppressiveness and unpredictability of contemporary life in Mexico. Melchor writes, “We want to give a faithful account of reality, of a small fragment of reality, and we end up saying more about our own finitude, fears and desires.”
[Published by New Directions on April 4, 2023, 177 pages, $15.95 US paperback]