ALICE WALKER’S BROKEN HEART
Alice Walker’s new collection, The Way Forward Is With A Broken Heart (Random House, $23.95, pp.200) is classic Walker--stories that deal with New Age mysticism, worries about nuclear war, and perennial concerns about racism, misogyny and sexism. These are stories that try to suggest a third way--that valorize love and kindness, that call for a truce in the war between the sexes, that imagine a life better than the one we know.
The problem is, we’ve heard these stories before and often, from the same writer. Many of these stories read like manifestos masquerading as stories. While Walker’s political concerns are real and laudable, there is a tired, familiar quality to how they are presented. Also, the stories are thinly disguised versions of Walker’s own life and somehow, this obfuscation seems dishonest. Many of her themes would have worked better in personal essays rather than as fiction.
Some of the stories, such as Conscious Birth, were clearly written--or at least, set in--the 1980s, and have a dated feel that permeates much of the book. For the most part, the take-your-breath-away insights or the startling prose that made some of Walker’s early novels so distinctive, are missing. Though there are moments of sweet insights--such as when Walker writes that we massage the same spot on others that most hurts in us--they are hidden by the banality of other passages.
The most heartfelt section of the book is the first chapter, titled To My Young Husband, an open letter to the young, white civil rights lawyer who Walker was married to 20 years ago. Walker alternates between remembering the heady, joyous, dangerous, idealistic days of their youth and lamenting the distance and stiffness that now marks their relationship. The estranged couple--he in a second, seemingly conventional marriage, she in a relationship with a woman--meet in a therapist’s office at the behest of their daughter. Merging fact with fiction, the political with the personal, Walker struggles to find reasons to explain why a marriage that began with so much promise and idealism, fizzled out.
There is a diffident quality to this essay that gives it its emotional power. This diffidence is missing from many of the stories that follow and that is perhaps the reason why they sound more like speeches rather than stories.
Alice Walker is clearly a writer who has much to say about the issues facing us today. One wishes she would go the James Baldwin route and produce a book of commentary and personal essays that clearly state the political problems she sees.
As it is, the use of fiction as a tool to sugar coat the political message results in a book that lacks the psychological tussling that is the hallmark of good literature. These stories do not show the evidence of struggle, come to us without tooth marks on them. One does not get the feeling that the writer has learned something new or surprised herself while giving birth to these stories.
--Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Fall 2000
