Midwives by Chris Bohjalian

My most recent book was Midwives by Chris Bohjalian (ain't that a mouth full?). I've wanted to read it for years, and finally pulled it off my shelf a week or two back and took it up.

At first, I was uncomfortable with the "hippie" attitude of the parents of the protagonist. I wondered if I had to buy into pot-smoking, flowers in guns, and that love is all you need. But Bohjalian is very good at never requiring you to buy into a belief to enjoy his story. You can even believe that Sybil, the midwife accused of manslaughter after her patient dies in childbirth (and she subsequently delivers the baby via C-section with only a sharp kitchen knife), is actually guilty throughout the novel and still appreciate the drama of the courtroom scenes and the tense situation her family finds herself facing every day.

I once wanted to be a midwife, or an Ob-gyn. I thought it was such an interesting field, and I thought I would really like helping women through labor. Now, I'm not so sure. I think hanging out around women's vaginas is really not what I'm intended for, considering how much annoyance I experience around women. But the fascination is still there, and Sybil's diary entries, which punctuate the chapters of her daughter's narration, were fascinating and provided a welcome insight into her character. What women wouldn't want to know about massaging a perineum with baby oil to ease the passage of a baby and avoid cutting the mother? Well, many women probably don't want to know that, but I do. I like the idea of finding solutions to such difficulties in labor. I also like Sybil's word for contractions: surges. It isn't a contraction, which sounds like tightening and pressing and fighting against something. It's a surge, a wave rolling through your body to help you labor, to help you press the baby out into the world. I think I'll hold onto that idea when I first go into labor - the idea that each surge is a wave that helps me get my child into the world, that helps press my child out of the ocean and onto the beach. It also syncs well with the article I just read in National Geographic Adventure about surfing. But, yes, I like the idea.

And the novel was beautifully written. Prior to reading Midwives, I finished Leonardo’s Swans by Karen Essex, her first novel if I recall correctly. While I love historical fiction and loved the descriptions of paintings and the portrayals of two very powerful sisters (each strong in very different ways), the novel jumped in time from one moment to another. At first we would be in the 1st person with one of the sisters, and they would be a few years ahead of the last chapter, and disgusted or delighted by some recent occurence, and then the novel would slowly catch us up, backtracking and piecing together moments to explain how we got to this place. But the suspense of so many moments is severed by the very fact that we know the fate of Isabella and Beatrice. The novel is ruined because we are told at the very beginning who will die and who will survive. Two different women, each ruling over their court in very different ways, but only one's method will preserve her against her husband's infidelity and other men's mistakes. The final chapter really is triumphant as we view the victor and how she has stayed alive and charmed her way into success, and we are happy for her. But again, the repetitiveness, the loss of suspense, and the annoying repetition of facts - first Leonardo reveals a detail in his notebooks (the entries of which punctuate this book much as they punctuate Midwives). Then we hear the same detail all over again from one of the characters. Midwives impressed me so much because of the fact that it never repeated itself - if a journal entry said one thing, the narrator did not repeat it, and I was charmed by the creativity and attentiveness of this fact. I love reading for pleasure again, but I can't help noting techniques I would like to emulate in my own writing, as well as critiquing novels that show less attentiveness than one would desire. I am looking forward to reading more of Bohjalian's novels.

*One more note: I must credit Chris Bohjalian (a man) for writing so convincingly in two women's voices. I pray my own male characters may feel so real and come so close to what it is to be male as his female characters come to what it is to be a woman.