Alice Mattison’s delightful novel about female friendships pairs Toby Ruben and Deborah Laidlaw, two young mothers who meet in the park one day. Stolid Ruban has baby Peter in his carriage while outgoing Deborah watches her two young girls scamper at her feet. They strike up a conversation and soon become friends, meeting regularly for walks in the park while the children grow and play. One day, Deborah loans Ruben her husband’s favourite book, The Trolley Girl which kicks off an interesting story within a story plotline.
The novel spans twenty years of Ruben’s life and chronicles the ups and downs of her friendship with Deborah as their families grow and weave around each other. Ruben and Deborah both teach underprivileged students prepping for the GED and later college English composition courses. Ruben, in her plodding, structured way, is the more successful of the pair. Deborah, the more egregious personality, fails where Ruben succeeds, and blames Ruben – honest, perhaps jealous Ruben who truthfully answers in the negative their supervisor’s question: “Do you think Deborah is a good teacher?” Yet, their friendship endures.
The story is told from Ruben’s perspective, and thus the story’s viewpoint is very limiting and isolated. Missing is the omniscient narrator who knows all and sees all. Instead, we know and see only what Ruben does, and so we experience her friendship from her limited perspective. It’s a very intriguing way to tell a story between two women. After all, how well do we really know each other and what goes on in other people’s lives? As good of a friend as Deborah is to Ruben, Ruben will always be an outsider to Deborah’s life and so when tragedy strikes Deborah, Ruben can only experience so much, can only infiltrate Deborah’s family so far to lend her assistance and support. The result is a book rich in emotion and experience, one that highlights the delightful ironies of life.
Till next time, happy reading.
L :)
No comments:
Post a Comment