American Fiction, Short Story Collections (Single Author), Women's Fiction, Literary Styles & Movements - Fiction

Where She Went

Name: Where She Went
Author: Kate Walbert
ISBN: 9780140283631

by Kate Walbert

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Overview

The first half of Where She Went 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 dutifully attempts to fulfill her mother;s thwarted aspirations, "but isn't sure where to go, whom to pray to, what to say. She hears voices rising in no epiphany only confusion, repeating Marion;s wishes."

From the patchwork of communication that unfolds between mother and daughter, Walbert creates a narrative that is both fractured and lyrical. The stories are linked not only by characters but also by the repetition of certain haunting and idiosyncratic images-Marion's yellow nightgown, "l'heure bleue"-that rise mysterious as talismans.

Rebecca continues her family legacy of wandering, traveling farther and farther afield. But hers is a world 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. Ironically, if Marion had no free will, Rebecca has an excess. This mother and daughter, each uniquely of her own generation, remain locked, firmly, in longing.

Where She Went is an epic for our times-an Odyssey that takes home on the road.

Kate Walbert was born in New York City and raised in Delaware, Georgia, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Japan. She has degrees from Northwestern University and New York University. Her fiction and articles have appeared in numerouspublications, including The Paris Review, DoubleTake, Fiction, The Antioch Review, Ms., and The New York Times. Walbert also writes for the theater, and her play, Year of the Woman, has been produced at the Yale School of Drama and at Villanova University. She is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts as well as fellowships from MacDowell and Yaddo. She currently lives in New York City and Connecticut, where she teaches writing at Yale University.

About the Author, Kate Walbert

Kate Walbert's fiction and articles have appeared in numerous publications, including the Paris Review, Doubletake, Fiction, the Antioch Review, Ms., and the New York Times. She currently lives in New York City and Connecticut, where she teaches writing at Yale University.

Biography

Kate Walbert made her writing debut in 1998 with Where She Went, a collection of interlinked stories about the lives and travels of a mother and daughter. Marion moves frequently, a lifestyle that never permits her to form a stable identity. Her daughter Rebecca, by contrast, travels with the intent of "finding herself," but only becomes more and more rootless in the process. The New York Times named Where She Went a Notable Book of 1998 and said that it "contains many quick flashes of beauty... it goes far and takes us with it."

In 2001 she published The Gardens of Kyoto -- a bittersweet story about the friendship between two cousins prior to World War II. The novel is based on her Pushcart Prize and O. Henry Award–winning story of the same name.

Walbert has published fiction and articles in the Paris Review, Double Take, The New York Times, and numerous other publications. She has received fellowships from the national endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts.

She teaches writing at Yale University and lives in New York City and Stony Creek, Connecticut.

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Editorials

BookLovers

Walbert has devised an unusual interconnected series of stories based upon what might be described as locational dysfunction. . . . The communication which evolves between mother and daughter throughout the individual stories is at once disjointed and poetic. Rebeccas attempt at fulfillment remains eerily vacant; her life ultimately a mere shadow of her mothers, but for her greater free will. Mother and daughter are decidedly of their own generations, yet fused in an interrelated yearning.

Choice

Walbert is a master of technique. . . . The metaphor that most aptly applies here is of a magnificent cathedral over which the scaffolding still stands, partially obstructing the view. . . . These stories of two lives depicted in a series of journeys is a worthwhile read.

Glamour

A small press wonder, Kate Walberts Where She Went chronicles the complicated bond between a daughter and mother, both of whom are deeply affected by the latters career as a company wife, dutifully following her executive husband around the globe. These interlocking stories read like a novel, in which images and characters appear, disappear, and finally, blur into a haunting collage of fractured lives.

Molly Giles

. . .Where She Went contains many quick flashes of beauty. . . .Where She Went goes far, and takes us with it.
—New York Times Book Review

New York Times Book Review

Where She Went contains many quick flashes of beautya Japanese boy glimpsed squatting naked in the snow, an incandescent photo of a white-faced stranger turning up in Marions roll of film, like some kind of angel sent to warn her, a blind man lying in the Arno like a dog to drink, his tongue turning blue then rose red then gold. . . . Where She Went goes far, and takes us with it.

Ploughshares

The fourteen pieces that make up the book are more vignettes than stories, largely elliptical and fragmentary in style. Individually, they are not quite complete, but they accumulate in power, Walberts prose always lyrical, images and phrases recurring to great effect. . . .

San Francisco Bay Guardian

In this debut collection, . . . Walbert produces a feast from a few choice ingredients, deftly illuminating a handful of characters, their ways of life, and the places that held them. . . . The judicious use of evocative, believable detail (the pattern of wallpaper, details of clothing and personal experience) punctuates the dreamier landscape of a mother and daughters dovetailed experiences.

Small Press Review

Walbert successfully creates two voices to communicate the very different lives of these two women. Each story is complete within itself, yet as a whole they have the power to convey the bond that holds these women together even as their lives pull them further apart.

The Hartford Courant

Kate Walbert has a painters eye and a poets voice. In Where She Went, . . . she has composed a work as fragile and melancholy as a watercolor bleeding in the rain. . . . The book abounds with quick impressions, odd and startling images of beauty or grotesquerie that enhance its otherworldliness. This is a book whose wistfulness enchants as it discomfits. It may be the perfect reading for a rainy summer day.

The Village Voice

Told sometimes in third and sometimes in first person, the linked stories in Kate Walberts first collection shift their . . . focus between a mother, Marion, and her daughter, Rebecca. . . . Marions New York is keenly observed; her fresh-out-of-Indiana optimism decked out in white gloves, hat, and wholesome trepidation; and her Japan incisive, eerie, sensual, and threatening. Whats finally apparent is that these stories include all the technique, orginality, and control necessary to the creation of a fine collection. . . .

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Moving through a series of slow-motion vignettes, Walbert's meticulous, unshakably sad collection of linked stories provides glimpses into the lives of two women: one condemned by her husband's career to wander from one middle-sized American city to another; the other her daughter, who takes a series of European vacations in the doomed hope of living up to her mother's dreams of fun and romance. Trapped in a conventional, 36-year-old marriage, '"hollowed out' by depression after the cradle death of her second child, passionate Marion Clark imagines a world of glamour through the postcards and letters of her first and only surviving child. The distinction between traveling for pleasure and traveling by necessity is analogous to other distinctions between the lives and opportunities of mother and daughter. As Marion once did, 30-something Rebecca goes to New York in search of love and success, but without the husband-hunting sense of purpose that guided so many working women of the 1950s. Aimless and melancholy compared to her mother, Rebecca glides from one lonely, lazy affair to another before drifting into marriage (she asks for a divorce on her honeymoon), wishing all the while that she could live up to her mother's expectations of the 'adventurous'" life. Sometimes these enigmatic stories are precious and overworked, straining toward a hush of despair. At their more frequent best, however, they resonate with surprising pathos, and these moments establish Walbert as one of the season's most promising, idiosyncratic new writers.

Library Journal

Walbert offers a debut collection of linked stories about a mother and her daughter. Marion accompanies her husband on a series of job transfers, her rootless existence made all the more painful by loneliness and isolation. We see Marion as a woman of great spirit who lacked the opportunities to realize her potential. Daughter Rebecca, supposed to fulfill Marion's dreams, sends Marion postcard accounts of her travels across Europe and elsewhere. But the Rebecca stories are less compelling: what we get are mostly fragmented accounts of bizarre happenings in foreign countries. We assume that Rebecca's upbringing, along with a family tragedy, has left her unable to commit or find direction, but this connection is never made clear, and the character's self-absorption makes her unsympathetic. -- Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, University of Idaho Library, Moscow

Molly Giles

. . .Where She Went contains many quick flashes of beauty. . . .Where She Went goes far, and takes us with it. -- The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

Walbert's spare first fiction takes the shape of compellingly linked stories—the splintered mosaic of a mother and daughter. Each story, titled by city and date, traces the dual journeys of Marion Clark and her daughter Rebecca, two women possessed by restlessness and entrapped by an unspeakable ennui. Marion's 'life' begins in 'Niagara Falls 1955,' opening appropriately on her honeymoon with the dashing Robert, corporate executive and the era's answer to Mr. Right. Her previous life as a young typist in Manhattan evokes images of Holly Golightly and beatnik clubs in the Village—making Marion's eventual years spent dutifully following Robert from city to city all the more poignant. Tokyo, Rochester, Norfolk, Baltimore—Marion all but withers on the vine as each new move further fragments her identity, until the birth and subsequent death of her second daughter finally ease her over the edge into a suicide attempt and to 'A Place on a Lake 1966' to recover. Yet when she returns, she hasn't really healed—instead, she's picked up the skill of disappearing inside herself. The young Rebecca recognizes her as an imposter.'