If Love Were All

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Taking its title from one of Wallace Stevens's great laments of marital disappointment, Wall's fifth novel (after Mother Love) concerns 47-year-old schoolteacher and widow Charlotte Haberman, who shocks her three college-age children by selling their small-town Nebraska house eight months after the death of her husband, Stan. A newspaperman, Stan was deified by both the community and his offspring, who also idealize their parents' 27-year marriage. What the siblings don't know is that each of their parents had a never-talked-about past: Stan's previous marriage was a subject he avoided, as was Charlotte's first love and the source of her hidden heartbreak, a soldier named Cory Lee Jones, who broke up with her when he was in Vietnam. Now, Charlotte is determined to find out whatever happened to Cory Lee. More important, though, she is aware that she can, for the first time, reach out for what she wants instead of settling for what comes her way. The moral of this gentle tale, that one must choose one's own life and accept disillusionment and disappointment with grace, goes down easily, while the perils of self-denial are played out convincingly by secondary characters. A subplot involving a crisis of conscience for Charlotte over a term paper by one of her students that offends the staunchly Christian community proves to open one door as others close. If at times the Haberman children's overprotectiveness of Charlotte sounds too extreme to be true, Wall's simple prose brings gossipy, claustrophobic, Newberg, Neb., gracefully to life. (Aug.)

Library Journal

Widowed at 47, Charlotte finds herself restless, wanting more, yet unsure of her future. Having always lived as someone else's daughter, wife, or mother, she sees an opportunity to define herself in her own terms. Opposed by her family, especially her three grown children, she begins to break out of her accustomed roles and explore what she wants out of life. As she changes, so do her relationships, often creating tensions and some pain. Charlotte, however, realizes that while she will always love her family, she cannot be responsible for anyone's happiness but her own. Wall (Blood Sisters, LJ 10/15/92) effectively portrays both the positive and negative sides of family bonds and demonstrates the difficulty of staging even the smallest rebellion against long-held expectations. Recommended for public libraries.--Barbara E. Kemp, SUNY at Albany Libs.

Kirkus Reviews

In this sweet soap from Wall (Blood Sisters, 1992), a middle-aged woman juggles self-fulfillment with the demands of family and community. Charlotte Haberman has been a good wife and mother. She's been Donna Reed, Jane Wyatt, and Jane Wyman at home, a Sunday-school teacher at the local Lutheran church, and an English teacher at the middle school in her small Nebraska town. Sheþs a kind sister; a good friend; a dutiful daughter to her aging and difficult mother; a homemaker who has lovingly kept alive the family traditions of summer holidays, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. A monument to domestic virtue, she also spent the past several years taking care of her husband, Stan, a great guy who was dying of cancer. As Wall paints this sensitive, imperfect, striving woman, it's hard not to like her even when, in an act that goes counter to habit, the 47-year-old widow tells her family that sheþs going to sell the old family house, buy a smaller one, and spend the summer traveling in the West, wherever her whim takes her. Eight months after Stan's death, she wants to reassert her own life; and, the real shocker, she wants to locate a man named Cory Leeþher first lover and the great passion of her life, or so she believes. Charlotte's three grown children, one in law school and two in college, try to dissuade her and are for a time estranged. But Charlotte tries to help them through their own emotional crises as she continues to rediscover her own selfhood and sexuality, long on the back burner. In a way not dry or academic, Wall shows how families and communities can stifle the individuals within them, and how the best solutions involve time, patience, and compromise. A gentleconsideration of the options in life taken by women who are both moral and adventuring.