Working With Available Light: A Family's World After Violence

On an autumn afternoon, photographer Patricia Evans, out for a run on Chicago's lake front, was attacked by a man who severely beat and sexually assaulted her. Her husband tells the story of a family shipwrecked in the midst of everyday life, trying to make sense of the violence that has entered their lives. This courageous and compelling account covers a period of five years, during which Evans remaps the world in light of the terrible knowledge inflicted on her and regains her place in it. No index. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

What distinguishes this harrowing memoir of the aftermath of rape is that it is written?and written beautifully?not by the victim but by her husband. During a midday lakefront jog in Chicago in 1988, photographer Patricia Evans, the author's wife, was brutally beaten and raped. Her attacker was never caught. Kalven reports that Evans, like many rape victims, experienced a deep sense of powerlessness and disconnectedness. Struggling with overwhelming grief and suppressed rage, she saw a therapist, enrolled in a self-defense course, took sleeping pills and, with her husband's help, analyzed her nightmares. Kalven writes movingly about all this and also about his own feelings of helplessness?especially his discomfort with his own physical strength and sexuality in the wake of the attack. He states that he set out to write this book in a way that would help his wife heal, and it certainly is an act of love?the culmination, apparently, of an arduous therapeutic process that severely tested their marriage. It is also an act of literature. Kalven broadens his cathartic memoir with reflections on the racial divide in America (his wife is white, her attacker black) and on how violence in its many forms shapes society. What is most impressive about this tender and candid book is the balance Kalven strikes between trying to comprehend his wife's experience and knowing that, to some extent, her experience will be forever beyond his grasp. It is immensely touching to see this man feel and, very deliberately, write his way through his own pain and bewilderment into some still deeper knowledge, however filtered, of the woman he loves. (Mar.) FYI: See the review, below, of Patricia Weaver Francisco's Telling, a memoir by a rape victim.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A memoir about the aftermath of violence, from an unexpected perspective. On a balmy afternoon in the late summer of 1988, Kalven received a phone call that effectively blocked out the sun: His wife, a professional photographer and dedicated runner, had been attacked. Rushing to the hospital, he discovered that she had been severely beaten and assaulted, but not raped. His relief, however, was premature. What he couldnt know that afternoon in the emergency room was that his wife's assailant had stolen her freedom and faithqualities that she would never again recover in their original forms. He knew only that she was alive. In the subsequent days, weeks, and years, he gained knowledge of the excruciating process of recovery. In his memoir of the five years following the assault, he documents his wife's slow, difficult healing as her partner, husband, lover, and professional collaborator. What might have been a testament to one woman's transcendence of violence is instead a story of a marriageand the way in which one man attempts to understand how his life has been irrevocably transformed by a single, horrifying event. To his credit, Kalven doesn't hesitate to write about the ambivalence he feels, his own guilt, his wife's fury. He grieves openly on the page, for what has been lost, and observes his own conflicted feelings about his gender and sexuality with careful, measured words. And yet the narrative has a curiously static quality; it seems to turn inward again and again in a tightly drawn spiral of self-interrogation. The effect can be exhausting; one longs for a sense of momentum, of resolution. But there is none to be found. In that way, the narrative perhaps echoes the process of recovery too closely; the demands of the form insist on closure whether or not it has been achieved in life. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.