To review a memoir written by a book reviewer feels a bit like being stuck in a house of mirrors. One needs only to cast the first image, drop the first allusion, and the reflections and refractions begin their endless ricochet.
Someone like Gail Caldwell, senior book critic for The Boston Globe, amplifies this tenfold, as one who has turned her lifelong study of other characters – both real and fictional – into mirrors in and of themselves, tales in which she has found her own truths and revelations.
Throughout her life, Caldwell has ridden others’ narratives like an ocean current, only to look back and realize that she unwittingly wrote her own in the process. It is in this looking back that she weaves for us, poetically and with precision, “A Strong West Wind.”
To meet Gail Caldwell, as she is in the first pages of her memoir, is to meet a woman firmly rooted at home but with her gaze constantly turned outward. Born and raised in the 1950s Texas Panhandle, Caldwell spent her young life immersed in the world of literature. From the children’s stories that acquainted her with good and evil, to the war stories that cemented her understanding of her father’s Word War II service, to the Faulkners and O’Connors who strengthened her identification with the South, Caldwell approached life fortified with lessons learned on the page.
As the nation underwent its midcentury growing pains, Caldwell, just as susceptible to reality as to literature, experienced a transformation of her own. As a teenager, she embraced the more global, revolutionary stance of 1960s youth, living in co-ops and flanking war protests.
An unfinished university career segued into what for her became infinitely more defining than undergraduate work at the time – the feminist movement, in which she found the cohesion of literature and reality. It was in this movement that Lily Briscoe came alive and Emma Bovary, with whom she always empathized, was vindicated.
This movement, however, ended up landing her, first back in academia, and then on the road east to pursue a writing career. Chronologically this is where we see her last, although the book continues to explore her life’s various stages.
What makes Caldwell’s memoir a success – and it is a success – is her ability to return to the various spaces of her youth, and to inhabit so faithfully the perspective of a given time. She presents her life as a series of overlapping spheres – provided by the physical terrain of the Panhandle, the intellectual solace within the pages of a novel, the claustrophobic imprisonment of adolescence.
This reliance on space (and, inseparably, the influence of fiction) is apparent in her structure as well, as she creates for us a narrative that continually loops back on itself, enclosing us fully only at the very finish with the answers it provides and parallels it creates. The same vast Texas roads that allow for Caldwell’s youthful shenanigans provide an extremely moving final send-off for her father. A life lived almost as a reaction to fiction turns out, thanks to a tragic Aunt Connie, to serve her interpretation of novels in equal fashion.
Sometimes problematic in the memoir, a large part of hers is a life lived secondhand in experience, albeit entirely immediate in digestion and emotion. This is not the story of one who overcame great personal tragedy or insurmountable odds, but one who lived in reaction to outside circumstance. She deals with this intellectually, referring to her “secondhand dreams,” but Caldwell nonetheless lost me emotionally at times, giving the feeling more of an objective historical account and less of the passion with which her personal experience was clearly infused.
Adding to this, unfortunately, the book sometimes veers away from autobiography and more toward philosophic doctrine. Her life lessons are undoubtedly profound and beautifully phrased, yet she feels comfortable in applying a certain universality to her pronouncements. More effective might be to keep her observations personal – a problem that could be fixed easily with a few added pronouns – and allowing us to relate to her, as opposed to getting wrapped up in whether or not her blanket statements apply to us.
Yet for each of these slightly sticky parts, a dozen exist where Caldwell captures beautifully the “tragedy” of teenage experience, the frailty of an aging veteran, the hubris of a young feminist. Having returned to school after years of absence a professor wrote on an essay of hers, “There is too much cleverness in the world, and too little truth. Let’s try to have more truth.”
Caldwell has internalized this statement as deeply as she internalized the canon, giving us a text that is smart but not clever and, above all, true.
Miriam Robinson is a freelance writer in Boulder.
“A Strong West Wind”
By Gail Caldwell
Random House, 256 pages, $24.95
