Where She Went - Softcover

Walbert, Kate

3.65

375 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140283633 ISBN 13: 9780140283631

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1999

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“Incisive, eerie, sensual, and threatening.”—The Village Voice

The linked stories in Kate Walbert’s debut collection Where She Went examine the very contemporary predicament of a family without geographic roots. The first half of the book chronicles the life of Marion Clark, a company wife who repeatedly packs the household and accompanies her husband around the globe with a “melancholy view before her of what seemed like endless houses with endless garages and endless kitchen windows.” In the stories that follow, her adult daughter Rebecca continues the family legacy of wandering, traveling farther and farther afield, seeking to fulfill her mother’s thwarted aspirations. But Rebecca’s world is one viewed with a slightly off-kilter eye, one that invokes Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, Mohammed’s faithful followers at Topkapi Palace, as well as the landscapes of Italy and Jamaica, Istanbul, and Paris. This mother and daughter, each uniquely of her own generation, remain locked, firmly, in longing—Marion with little free will, and Rebecca with an excess of free spirit.

From a patchwork of communication that unfolds between Marion and Rebecca, Walbert creates a narrative that is both fractured and lyrical. Where She Went is an epic for out times—an odyssey that takes home on the road.

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Review:

Paris, Niagara Falls, Tokyo, Rochester, Norfolk, Istanbul: Where She Went's table of contents reads like an itinerary for a nervous breakdown. The mother and daughter narrators of these interlinked stories cover a lot of ground, but they never seem to get particularly far. A quote from the Elizabeth Bishop poem "Questions of Travel" sets the stage: "Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?/Where should we be today?" Marion's travels are as a "company wife," packing and unpacking the same boxes in what comes to seem like the same house reproduced all over the globe. Marrying young to a man she scarcely knows, she's determined that her daughter will enjoy all the freedoms life has to offer, including and especially travel: "You must keep me abreast of everything, darling.... This is our world tour."

And Rebecca does, in a sense. The stories in the book's latter half revolve around a series of postcards, highly fictionalized snapshots of her travels that make it seem she's living out her mother's dream. Much like her mother, however, Rebecca voyages far and wide but gets nowhere. These are subtle, understated stories, domestic dioramas couched in luminous prose. Of the book's two halves, it's Marion's stories that are the more compelling, combining vivid evocations of place and time with a firm sense of character. Rebecca's stories feel less grounded--which is, presumably, the point. Still, they make for occasionally disorienting reading, with long stretches of stunning imagery in seeming free fall. But it's hard not to find yourself beguiled by Kate Walbert's prose, with its richly textured surfaces and sinuous rhythms. As a debut collection, Where She Went promises great things for where she will go.

From the Back Cover:

The linked stories in Kate Walbert's debut collection Where She Went examine the very contemporary predicament of a family without geographic roots. The first half of the book chronicles the life of Marion Clark, a company wife who repeatedly packs the household and accompanies her husband around the globe with a "melancholy view before her of what seemed like endless houses with endless garages and endless kitchen windows". In the stories that follow, her adult daughter Rebecca continues the family legacy of wandering, traveling farther and farther afield, seeking to fulfill her mother's thwarted aspirations. But Rebecca's world is one viewed with a slightly off-kilter eye, one that invokes Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, Mohammed's faithful followers at Topkapi Palace, as well as the landscapes of Italy and Jamaica, Istanbul, and Paris. This mother and daughter, each uniquely of her own generation, remain locked, firmly, in longing -- Marion with little free will, and Rebecca with an excess of free spirit.

From a patchwork of communication that unfolds between Marion and Rebecca, Walbert creates a narrative that is both fractured and lyrical. Where She Went is an epic for our times -- an Odyssey that takes home on the road.

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