The Evening Wolves by Joan Chase

From the beginning Dad said Gloria would bring a ray of sunlight into our darkness. He warned us to find the same star--win her heart or hitch up to the next wagon West. Sometimes it's dazzling, Gloria up in the morning, dressed to the nines for ham and eggs. Ready for a date if one should come knocking, lipstick prints on the coffee cups. Gloria has done us the great favor of leaving her wonderful home and responsible job for a thankless task. She did it of her own free will, including giving up smoking, although I think nothing is quite what she expected. Still, she can say, "I always wanted a family of my own," real tears and her smile breaking together. I can't think what it will come to and I wring my hands, avoiding her eyes. Sometimes she says I'm laughing at her, but I don't think so, although I don't always know what comes over my face when I'm not looking.

Francis Clemmons is red-haired, with the fiery personality to match, and so is Gloria--a perfect match. But Gloria doesn't quite know what she's getting into with Francis' children. The young boy--to young to remember his late mother--is no problem, really, but the two girls, Margy and Ruthann, are headstrong.  Francis handles them with the power of a mad king, making elaborate jokes, pouring cereal over their heads when they complain about being hungry, leaving them on the side of the road when they provoke his ire. (It's hard not to see, though I am constantly reminded of it, the tyrannical father of Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children, though deep down we sense that Francis is a good and caring father, unlike Stead's.) The girls, for their part, give as good as they get. They grow up in this unusual household, become young adults with sexual yearnings, and Gloria is only partly capable of giving the guidance that they miss from their mother. A family that can be made can be unmade, too, and soon the two girls are off on their own, sundering the fragile ecosystem that the five had built.

I really loved Joan Chase's During the Reign of the Queen of Persia. It is, I believe, the only other novel that Chase wrote in her lifetime. It also tells the story of a big family, but it's fun trick is that it is narrated by all the family's young girls at once, in a "we" that can be split or combined as needed. Here, the narrative skips much more ordinarily through a series of first person narratives: Margy, Ruthann, Gloria, Tommy--though never Francis. This choice, in fact, is one of the reasons that the novel doesn't really seem to work. The novel is so fragmented, so hectic, that I felt as if I hardly knew what was going on, and I didn't get much out of the choice to depict the same moments from the perspectives of different characters. The two girls, I found, were not different enough, and they all share their father's elliptical, allusive speech, that made it hard to distinguish one from the other. Eventually I understood that Ruthann is more studious and more beautiful, more precociously sexual but also tormented by it--she marries a preacher to expiate her guilt over losing her virginity--while Margy is more lumpen, more aloof. But they both sounded a little too much like Francis, who perhaps sounds too much like Joan Chase.

Chase was an excellent prose writer, and I enjoyed the headlong flow of the sentences, which can be quite beautiful even as they borrow liberally from stock phrase and cliche ("win her heart or hitch up to the next wagon West") but the "big picture" was entirely lost on me. Big jumps in time, the introduction of new characters--it all gets lost in the thicket of language. It's hard to say exactly why this novel fails when The Queen of Persia works so well. Partly it's the point-of-view choice, but that's not it entirely. Perhaps it all comes down to the suspension of disbelief and the persuasion of character; I never really felt these characters were anything but curtain-thin. In The Queen of Persia everything comes together to give the illusion of a wholeness, a whole family--but the fractured, broken family of The Evening Wolves never has that kind of wholeness.