The Lives of Women - Christine Dwyer Hickley

By the time you get to the end of The Lives of Women there's a feeling of incompleteness, of important things left unsaid, but considering the subject and the nature of the lives of the women concerned, that could be intentional. Whether that makes for an entirely satisfactory reading experience, maybe not, but what holds the reader is the possibility of a terrible revelation that is continually hinted at but always seems to be skirted around. You almost wonder whether the whole purpose of the book is to avoid confronting a dark secret that might not turn out to be all that big a deal. Again, this reticence reflects in a lot of ways the mindset of the life that Elaine, the main character in the novel, has lived with all her life.

The revelation does eventually come, but whether it turns out to be a big deal or not, I'll not say, but what you can figure out is that the 'unfortunate tragedy' in the past that was serious enough to never be spoken of again. It would also apparently lead to Elaine being shipped off to New York at the age of 16, only to return to her home after the death of her mother over 30 years later. The descriptions of life on the street aren't particularly gripping - a familiar scene from the 70s where male and female English middle-class family roles are rigidly defined and not particularly liberated for these women. The housewives G&T parties, repressed passions and suspicions of adultery are all very Mike Leigh, but there's a subtle darkness there and a notable change in the temperature when an American mother and daughter arrive.

The setting and the characters feels authentic, the unsatisfied, repressed empty existences of the mothers and housewives leading to familiar problems with drinking and infidelity, with one particularly bad incident evidently on a crashing level that changes everything. Elaine, having lived the rest of her life at a distance and coming back after a long period in a different era, is not entirely objective or disinterested, but her way of dealing with the past gives it a particular perspective and resonance. Once the actual revelation comes though, the author seems to have nowhere else to go, so a lot rides on how you react to it. It might not seem entirely satisfactory, but when you come away from reading The Lives of Women, you realise that you have a surprisingly fuller picture of life from Elaine's perspective, and that the book has been all the more effective for its subtlety and circumspection.