Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Family Tabor
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.cherisewolas.com/
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2017039199
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2017039199
HEADING: Wolas, Cherise
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053 _0 |a PS3623.O536
100 1_ |a Wolas, Cherise
670 __ |a The resurrection of Joan Ashby, 2017: |b ECIP t.p. (Cherise Wolas) data view (writer, lawyer, and film producer whose movies include a SXSW Audience Award winner; native of Los Angeles, she lives in New York City; The Resurrection of Joan Ashby is her debut)
PERSONAL
Married.
EDUCATION:Graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts; Loyola Law School, J.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Has practiced law in Los Angeles, CA, and New York, NY. Former feature film and television story editor and development executive. Cofounded film company where she acquired and developed scripts, stories, and novels, and produced movies.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Cherise Wolas worked as a lawyer and entertainment executive before publishing her first novel, The Resurrection of Joan Ashby. “I’ve written since childhood,” she told an interviewer for Publishers Weekly‘s online edition. “I was a lawyer when I wrote a first novel, and I left the firm to revise it, but ended up founding a film company, where I acquired and developed the scripts, stories, and novels of others. Then I thought, ‘Why am I working on other people’s words when my own are what I want to be working on?'”
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby
The titular protagonist of Wolas’s debut novel is a successful author who ends up subordinating her career to marriage and motherhood, and regretting it. Joan Ashby becomes famous in her twenties with two lauded collections of short fiction. She has vowed never to marry, but changes her mind when she meets Martin Manning, an attractive eye doctor. She soon breaks another vow, not to have children. She eventually has two sons, Daniel and Eric. She continues writing, both short stories and a novel, but does not publish. She reads her short stories to Daniel, but does not let her family know she is working on a novel. Daniel wants to be a writer, but it takes time for him to realize his mother is a famous author. She misses her career and freedom as her life is consumed by mundane domestic tasks, and she is frustrated as she sees other members of her family surpass her. Martin is a renowned surgeon, while Eric becomes a successful technology entrepreneur while still a teenager. After an act of betrayal on Daniel’s part, she goes to Dharamshala, India, to figure out how to remake her life.
Wolas’s novel changed course significantly during the writing process, she told Deborah Kalb in an interview at the Deborah Kalb Books website. “In the beginning, I was certain I was writing a short story about a young man named Daniel Manning, who possesses a desperate desire to creatively outshine his writer-mother,” Wolas said. While working on that, she wrote another short story, “Killing Close Friends.” She decided to include an excerpt from that piece in her story about Daniel, and then realized she had to write a novel centering on his mother. “I wanted to fully explore how this formidable writer, so supremely focused and determined to avoid love, marriage, and motherhood, ends up married and the mother of two sons,” she told Kalb. She made “Killing Close Friends” a story by Joan.
Several reviewers commended The Resurrection of Joan Ashby. “Gorgeously written and completely captivating, the book spans decades and continents, deftly capturing the tug so many women feel between motherhood and self-identity,” related Amy Scribner in BookPage. A Kirkus Reviews contributor called it a “sharp-eyed portrait of the artist as spouse and householder,” and noted that readers may wonder how “Wolas is possibly going to pay off the idea that her heroine is such a genius,” but concluded: “Few could do better.” In the Toronto Star, Rayyan Al-Shawaf dubbed the book “a startlingly self-assured debut novel spanning decades and rendered in luminous prose throughout.”
Some critics voiced reservations. A Publishers Weekly reviewer thought the novel “frustrating, shallowly addressing its central theme of artistic pursuit versus family.” Bridey Heing, writing online at Paste, commented that The Resurrection of Joan Ashby “vacillates between extreme detail and rapid time jumps. It’s a disorienting structure, with Joan seeming to grow too little in the interim.” The novel is “beautifully written and—at times—compelling,” but “isn’t quite gripping enough to fulfill its lofty ambitions,” she said. A few commentators objected to the depiction of Joan’s sojourn in India, with the country seen from the perspective of a privileged Westerner. “It’s striking how many of the people she meets in Dharamshala are white,” remarked Chelsea Leu at the Rumpus website. While Joan there, Leu added, she “doesn’t grapple with any particular creed or belief system,” but “somehow the mere sheen of enlightenment” changes her. In the New York Times Book Review, Edan Lepuvki observed: “I’d expect a character as self-possessed as Joan Ashby to acknowledge her exceptional privilege.” In a way, though, this is a measure of the novel’s strength, Lepucki added, saying: “That I got so worked up about a person who doesn’t exist is a testament to Cherise Wolas’s success in creating a complex and distinct fictional character.” To Full Stop online contributor Lori Feathers, this portion of the book worked because Wolas portrays India as awakening Joan’s sense of vulnerability, essential to an artist. “And there is power in the artistry of Cherise Wolas’ empathetic and resonant portrait of Joan Ashby,” she concluded.
The Family Tabor
In Wolas’s second novel, businessman and philanthropist Harry Tabor looks back on his life and realizes it has been built on a series of lies and misdeeds. Harry is about to receive a Man of the Decade award for his efforts to resettle Jewish refugees from various countries. His wife, Roma, a psychologist, is at his side, and his two daughters and son have come to Palm Springs, California, for the event. Harry begins to hallucinate, though, as he is haunted by memories of all he has done wrong, including an unscrupulous act involving his stock brokerage business. Over the course of the novel, other family members confront upsetting truths about themselves as well.
Some reviewers admired The Family Tabor, but there were those who found it not up to the level of The Resurrection of Joan Ashby. “All the buildup in the first four-fifths of the novel simply fizzles out in the last section,” remarked a Kirkus Reviews critic, who deemed the book “a disappointment” overall. Janet Levine, writing in the online New York Journal of Books, thought Wolas’s focus on five primary characters –Harry, Roma, and their three grown children — meant she gave only superficial attention to each. Also, she said, Wolas offers “tidbits, even some bigger bites,” about the family’s relationship with their Jewish faith, “but we are titillated rather than satisfied.” A more positive summation came from Harvey Freedenberg at the Shelf Awareness website; he observed that the novel “provides compelling evidence” that the past is always present. Levine predicted that Wolas may one day join “the ranks of our foremost literary fiction writers,” explaining: “Perhaps she’ll take the time and space in her third novel to even more fully explore the rich veins of human experience she so instinctively taps into.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
BookPage, September, 2017. Amy Scribner, review of The Resurrection of Joan Ashby, p. 20.
Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) April 19, 2018, Marissa Stapley, review of The Resurrection of Joan Ashby.
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2017, review of The Resurrection of Joan Ashby; April 1, 2018, review of The Family Tabor.
New York Times Book Review, October 20, 2017, Edan Lepucki, “Lost and Found,” p. 10.
Publishers Weekly, July 3, 2017, review of The Resurrection of Joan Ashby, p. 52.
Toronto Star, October 13, 2017, Rayyan Al-Shawaf, review of The Resurrection of Joan Ashby.
ONLINE
Cherise Wolas website, http://www.cherisewolas.com (July 18, 2018).
Deborah Kalb Books, http://deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com/ (October 6, 2017), Deborah Kalb, interview with Cherise Wolas.
Full Stop, http://www.full-stop.net/ (October 31, 2017), Lori Feathers, review of The Resurrection of Joan Ashby.
New York Journal of Books, https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/ (July 18, 2018), Janet Levine, review of The Family Tabor.
Paste, https://www.pastemagazine.com/ (August 30, 2017 ), Bridey Heing, review of The Resurrection of Joan Ashby.
Publishers Weekly website, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (February 9, 2018), “Shared History: PW Talks with Cherise Wolas.”
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (October 17, 2017), Chelsea Leu, review of The Resurrection of Joan Ashby.
Shelf Awaremess, http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ (June 25, 2018), Harvey Freedenberg, review of The Family Tabor.
Cherise Wolas is the author of The Resurrection of Joan Ashby, a semifinalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Debut Fiction Prize, an Indie Next Great Reads Pick, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, named a Best Novel and Best Debut Novel of the year by Kirkus Reviews, named a Top 10 novel of 2017 by Booklist, in addition to receiving among many other accolades.
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby has been published in the UK, and will be published in Poland, Turkey, Israel, and France, and other countries.
The Family Tabor, her second novel, is forthcoming on July 17, 2018, from Flatiron Books, and on September 18, 2018 from The Borough Press.
She is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and was a feature film and television story editor and development executive. She received a JD from Loyola Law School and practiced law in Los Angeles and New York. She cofounded a film company where she acquired and developed scripts, stories, and novels, and produced movies. She lives with her husband in New York City.
Quoted in Sidelights: I've written since childhood. I was a lawyer when I wrote a first novel, and I left the firm to revise it, but ended up founding a film company, where I acquired and developed the scripts, stories, and novels of others. Then I thought, "Why am I working on other people's words when my own are what I want to be working on?"
Shared History: PW Talks with Cherise Wolas
'The Family Tabor,' Wolas's follow-up to her acclaimed 'The Resurrection of Joan Ashby,' is a piercing and multilayered portrayal of an accomplished yet deeply troubled family
Feb 09, 2018
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Wolas's second novel, The Family Tabor, unfolds over the course of a single weekend during which the Tabor siblings gather to celebrate their father, Harry, who grapples with the demons of his past misdeeds even as he prepares to accept a prestigious honor. His wife, Roma, is a respected psychologist who struggles to help her own children—Phoebe, Camille, and Simon, outwardly successful adults who are nevertheless caught in maelstroms of interpersonal and internal conflict. Wolas spoke to PW about writing complicated lives, the book's religious themes, and the fascinating dynamics of family.
Can you talk a bit about your background and how you came to writing?
I've written since childhood. I was a lawyer when I wrote a first novel, and I left the firm to revise it, but ended up founding a film company, where I acquired and developed the scripts, stories, and novels of others. Then I thought, "Why am I working on other people's words when my own are what I want to be working on?"
Are the Tabors based on any family you know?
No, but certainly I know people who are searching for love or feel they made the wrong choice in love or are hungry to understand their lives or want a deeper spiritual connection or suddenly find themselves unsure of everything or have had their worlds upended or wish they could undo something they've done.
The Tabors are exceptional in many ways, but they are far from happy. Can you talk about the discontent that many of your characters experience?
The Tabors are accomplished, intelligent, and worldly, but those attributes don't safeguard them or anyone—fictional or real—from confusion and struggle. Harry Tabor is delighted with the world he's created for himself, but then everything he believes about himself is upended. Roma Tabor is a "miracle worker" psychologist for children and teens and a mother who loves her children but sees them clearly. Phoebe, Camille, and Simon are at personal crossroads, each seeking something we all want—love or connection or the belief we're living our right life. The Tabors find themselves searching for new paths they hope will lead them in the right direction.
Religious identity—particularly Jewish and Catholic—plays a fairly significant role in the story. Did you always intend for this theme to be present, or did it arise organically?
I knew that the Tabors are Jewish and that Harry Tabor considers himself a "historical Jew." I also knew that Simon is married to Elena Abascal, who is Catholic, and that their marriage is undergoing some strain. But otherwise, I had no idea that religious identity would play the role that it does.
Can you talk about some of your literary influences?
What the literature I love has taught me is that the work must be about so much more than the story. There are books that have wowed me, and I've read them for enjoyment but also with specific intent, to see how the marvels were accomplished. The Extra and A Late Divorce by A.B. Yehoshua, A Person of Interest by Susan Choi, The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara, The Translator by Nina Schuyler, and the novels of Wallace Stegner, among many others, remain with me.
What's the best thing about family? What's the worst?
The best is the shared history, which gives rise to the shared language, which creates the "institutional knowledge." That's what Simon thinks when he's about to question his mother about his father—that she's the one with the institutional family knowledge that predates his birth.
The worst thing about family? Everyone believes they know everything about every other family member: what they think, what makes them tick, what they should do, how they should do it. If we're lucky, it's very loving, but even then, family breeds a wholly unique and binding brand of familiarity that is not always accurate.
Quoted in Sidelights: In the beginning, I was certain I was writing a short story about a young man named Daniel Manning, who possesses a desperate desire to creatively outshine his writer-mother.
I wanted to fully explore how this formidable writer, so supremely focused and determined to avoid love, marriage, and motherhood, ends up married and the mother of two sons.
Friday, October 6, 2017
Q&A with Cherise Wolas
Cherise Wolas, photo by Michael Dickes
Cherise Wolas is the author of the new novel The Resurrection of Joan Ashby. In addition to being a writer, she is a lawyer and film producer, and she lives in New York City.
Q: How did you come up with the idea for The Resurrection of Joan Ashby?
I have long been fascinated by the relationships between parents and children, by the nature of childhood traumas, how those hurts and fault lines manifest in adult life, how we integrate the full panoply of human emotions, the good ones, naturally, but also hurt, despair, destruction, and actual and perceived betrayals.
We all have self-created narratives, and it is the exploration of those narratives and their discordant truths, the psychological underpinnings of our relationships and the Gordian knots that tie us together, that intrigues me.
In the beginning, I was certain I was writing a short story about a young man named Daniel Manning, who possesses a desperate desire to creatively outshine his writer-mother. I was in his skin, feeling his anger, his jealousy, seeing everything from his point of view.
The short story had become a lengthy one when, in reaction to something unrelated, I wrote a few paragraphs about two young women, best friends, roommates, both aspiring writers. Those two paragraphs, perhaps one hundred words in total, was a fragment that kept haunting me and eventually became a short story called Killing Close Friends.
In one of those magical moments that doesn’t accurately reflect the act of writing, I dropped an excerpt from Killing Close Friends into the short story about Daniel and his writer-mother, and I suddenly realized a number of things:
First, that I was writing a novel.
Second, that Joan Ashby’s story demanded to be told.
Third, that Killing Close Friends would be a short story written by Joan Ashby and contained in one of her celebrated story collections.
Fourth, that, at some point, Daniel would come across the truth of his mother, and that truth would alter him profoundly.
And fifth, that I wanted to fully explore how this formidable writer, so supremely focused and determined to avoid love, marriage, and motherhood, ends up married and the mother of two sons.
Q: Can you say more about what it was like to write a novel about a writer and how you created the stories-within-a story that represent your character Joan's work?
A: Luck was definitely with me. For a long time, the story focused on Daniel Manning—a boy who loved writing stories early in his life, who perceives himself as the only writer in his family, who is crushed when he discovers his mother is already the famous writer in the family. During all the iterations of that story, Joan Ashby’s brilliance is seen only through his perceptions, and. thus, at a distance.
Because the writing began where it did, by the time I understood I was writing a novel, and a novel about a brilliant writer, I’d developed the necessary personal gumption.
The stories-within-the-story came about because I was felt it was insufficient to simply assert the fact of Joan Ashby’s talent—her talent had to be on display.
When I dropped in the short excerpt from Killing Close Friends, and I saw how it played as both point and counterpoint, it was a wonderful light bulb moment. And it felt right and natural to use other excerpts from both her published and unpublished work to provide connections to Daniel, and to showcase her talent and provide a wavy mirror of reflection for her life’s progression.
I wrote as Joan Ashby. I imagined I was her, the focused and determined writer with the unloving childhood, sitting at her old battered dining-room table in her East Village apartment, seeing the world through her particular lens.
Q: The writer A.M. Homes compared your work to that of J.D. Salinger, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, and Joan Didion. What do you think of those comparisons?
A: To be compared to such incomparable novelists is wild and surreal and fantastic! When I first learned of A.M. Homes’ reactions to the novel, and to whom she compared my work, I started shaking, and then I cried. And, of course, for months, I read her words obsessively at least once a day.
Even now, when I read her quote on the back of my novel, I shiver with gratitude, overwhelming pleasure, and a never-ending sense of shock.
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: I didn’t know how the novel would end at all. I always need to settle into the skins of my characters, feel them, hear them, see what they do, how they act and react.
Of course, I am in control, but I give them enormous space and freedom. And I’ve found that with space and freedom, amazing things happen, that I never could have anticipated, that would never have occurred, if I was writing from something predetermined.
I am an extreme editor of my own work; everything goes through umpteen drafts, I make millions of changes as I discover and uncover and revise and hone.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: My second novel, The Family Tabor. It is completely different in story, structure, tone, and themes. It’s about the connective chorus of family, the nature of time, how the past influences the present, the search for love, the desire to explore, the personal need for rites, rituals, and magic in our lives, and the search to perhaps believe in something greater than ourselves.
Set in Palm Springs, California, it follows the members of the Tabor family over one critical and life-changing weekend. The exciting plan is for The Family Tabor to have a 2018 publication.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: It’s been incredible hearing from so many readers of The Resurrection of Joan Ashby about how much they love the novel, are reading it for the second or third time already, have read the novel and are now listening to the audiobook, how much they adore Joan Ashby, want to read all she’s ever written, and find themselves so completely immersed they forget it’s fiction, and ask for Joan Ashby in bookstores and libraries.
So many have written to tell me this novel matters to them and is a novel that matters—that they find themselves considering their own lives, their own dreams, and the choices they’ve made or are making. And that, despite being a big book, it reads fast as the wind!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
Print Marked Items
Quoted in Sidelights: “All the buildup in the first four-fifths of the novel simply fizzles out in the last section,” remarked a Kirkus Reviews critic, who deemed the book “a disappointment”
Wolas, Cherise: THE FAMILY TABOR
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Wolas, Cherise THE FAMILY TABOR Flatiron Books (Adult Fiction) $27.99 7, 17 ISBN: 978-1-250-08146-9
The Palm Springs Man of the Decade suddenly remembers that his gains are ill-gotten and his life built on lies.
"Late in the second decade of the twenty-first century," Harry Tabor is the king of his world, about to be honored for his philanthropy at a
fabulous ceremony that's bringing his three adult children back to town to celebrate with him. Unfortunately, a nasty series of recovered
memories begins to hit him during a tennis match the day before the ceremony. First, he remembers something he hadn't thought about since
1987--that he left behind a pair of dachshunds named King David and Queen Esther when his family moved from Connecticut to California. He
abandoned his dogs? No one can mistake this for anything but the sign of a rotten soul and dark revelations to come. Next (still at the tennis
court, by the way), he sees a white-robed cantor. "Who is he to Harry? Why is he seeing him? Or why is he being shown him? The face, it seems
familiar, a face he has seen before. But where? He hears daguerreotype; registers that it, too, is reverberating only in his head, spoken in a voice
dry and unfamiliar to him."The series-of-questions technique of development is used frequently in Wolas' (The Resurrection of Joan Ashby,
2017) second novel, another big book coming surprisingly close on the heels of her very successful, rather long debut. While that mysterious
inner voice is guiding Harry through the process of recalling his sins, his children show up with troubles of their own, though nobody is honest
with each other in this supposedly loving family. One has a stalled academic career and a secret job at a hospice; another has an imaginary
boyfriend; the third has a non-Jewish wife who is leaving him because he tentatively expressed interest in exploring his faith. Strangely, all the
buildup in the first four-fifths of the novel simply fizzles out in the last section. The ponderous writing is the last nail in the coffin. "Her mother
was a prominent child psychologist and often said to her children, 'You can do anything you want if you have thought it through and are capable
of articulating your reasoning. In other words, so long as you can show your work.' " Would anyone ever say that clunky line once, much less
often? Sigh.
The premises are not believable and the exposition, tedious and overblown. A disappointment.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Wolas, Cherise: THE FAMILY TABOR." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532700596/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c560d4bd. Accessed 27 June 2018.
Quoted in Sidelights: “Gorgeously written and completely captivating, the book spans decades and continents, deftly capturing the tug so many women feel between motherhood and self-identity,”
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532700596
The Resurrection Of Joan Ashby
Amy Scribner
BookPage.
(Sept. 2017): p20.
COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
By Cherise Wolas
Flatiron
$27.99, 544 pages ISBN 9781250081438 Audio, eBook available
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
"Children are not on the table," Joan Ashby tells her future husband, Martin. "I possess no need, primal or otherwise, for motherhood." This is no
surprise, given Joan's white-hot career as a writer of short stories--and her own lonely childhood with two loveless parents. Yet, when she finds
herself pregnant shortly after she and Martin marry, she sets aside her fame to raise one, then two boys in the suburban Virginia town of Rhome.
While Martin's soaring surgical career takes him around the world, the famous Joan Ashby becomes Joan Manning, a housewife who takes yoga
classes and shuttles her boys to school and swim lessons. She tells no one when, during the days while the boys are at school, she comes back to
her writing. To her, the act of writing is "exquisitely important, so much like prayer." Over nearly a decade, she writes a remarkable novel that she
feels sure will signal her return as a force in the literary world.
But the time never seems right to publish. Younger son Eric blossoms into a gifted computer programmer who makes his first million (and many
more) while still a teenager. Joan finds herself a stranger in her own home when a gaggle of coders move in seemingly overnight, much to
Martin's delight.
After a breathtaking betrayal threatens to fracture the family, Joan retreats to India and reclaims a room of her own.
It's almost impossible to believe that The Resurrection of Joan Ashby is the first novel by Cherise Wolas, a lawyer and film producer. Gorgeously
written and completely captivating, the book spans decades and continents, deftly capturing the tug so many women feel between motherhood
and self-identity.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Scribner, Amy. "The Resurrection Of Joan Ashby." BookPage, Sept. 2017, p. 20. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502517418/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8ad576de. Accessed 27 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502517418
Quoted in Sidelights: “frustrating, shallowly addressing its central theme of artistic pursuit versus family.”
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby
Publishers Weekly.
264.27 (July 3, 2017): p52.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby
Cherise Wolas. Flatiron, $27.99 (544p) ISBN 978-1-250-08143-8
This long-winded debut saga takes place over three decades in the life of a writer. By age 13, Joan Ashby, a writer to her core, has vowed never to
allow marriage or offspring to get in the way of her authorial life. By her early 20s she has published two dark, prize-winning short story
collections. Beautiful and poised, Joan travels the world on book tours and the literary world awaits with bated breath her first novel. But she falls
for a brilliant, dashing young eye doctor, marries him, and her plans change. Their beloved son, Daniel, is Joan's doppelganger and loves the
written word from an early age, but she never lets on to him that she is a famous writer. As Daniel grows, Joan writes stories, which she reads to
him, and also novels, which she keeps secret from both her son and her husband, believing she must keep this self separate from her self as
mother and wife. Eventually, she has another son and decides not to publish the novel she has secretly completed, because she believes she must
devote her time to keeping her troubled but brilliant second son from the brink of despair. In the meantime, Daniel discovers his mother is an
author. Joan finally flees to Dharamsala for 200 pages of meditation, recovering her identity, forgiving her son, falling in love again, coming to
terms with her marriage--and writing another novel. The novel, in addition to overextending itself--both in scope and actual page count--is
frustrating, shallowly addressing its central theme of artistic pursuit versus family, and eventually turns into more of an inspirational primer on
Buddhism than character study. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Resurrection of Joan Ashby." Publishers Weekly, 3 July 2017, p. 52. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498381353/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=bb84c0ad. Accessed 27 June 2018.
Quoted in Sidelights: “sharp-eyed portrait of the artist as spouse and householder,” and noted that readers may wonder how “Wolas is possibly going to pay off the idea that her heroine is such a genius,” but concluded: “Few could do better.” I
Gale Document Number: GALE|A498381353
Wolas, Cherise: THE RESURRECTION OF JOAN
ASHBY
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Wolas, Cherise THE RESURRECTION OF JOAN ASHBY Flatiron Books (Adult Fiction) $27.99 8, 29 ISBN: 978-1-250-08143-8
A literary prodigy allows her husband to convince her to reverse their decision not to have children.Can you be a mother and also be an artist--or,
by extension, pursue any serious ambition at all? This is the question taken up with urgency and all due complexity in lawyer and film producer
Wolas' debut novel. The book opens with a hugely laudatory magazine profile of a fictional writer named Joan Ashby, revealing that at age 13
Ashby articulated nine rules for herself. No. 7 was "Do not entertain any offer of marriage," and No. 8 was "Never ever have children." Then, the
article explains, after having taken the world by storm with two story collections, Ashby got married and became pregnant at 25--and that was the
last she was heard from for nearly three decades. After revealing this much, and providing reprints of two of Ashby's famous stories, the article
cuts off with this line: "Continued after the break." The "break" is a 500-plus-page narrative exploring Ashby's struggles during these decades. It's
a tribute to Wolas' plot that most of it cannot be decently revealed. And heaven knows, a book this big needs its plot. Wolas provides not only the
main story, but several more excerpts from Ashby's work. Maybe she goes a little too far with these digressions, but even in a scene where Ashby
is teaching a writing class and the first lines of a dozen student stories are included--they're all great first lines! Like John Irving's The World
According to Garp, this is a look at the life of a writer that will entertain many nonwriters. Like Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies, it's a sharp-eyed
portrait of the artist as spouse and householder. From the start, one wonders how Wolas is possibly going to pay off the idea that her heroine is
such a genius. Verdict: few could do better.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Wolas, Cherise: THE RESURRECTION OF JOAN ASHBY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495427957/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2cddbc30. Accessed 27 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495427957
Quoted in Sidelights: “I’d expect a character as self-possessed as Joan Ashby to acknowledge her exceptional privilege.” In a way, though, this is a measure of the novel’s strength, Lepucki added, saying: “That I got so worked up about a person who doesn’t exist is a testament to Cherise Wolas’s success in creating a complex and distinct fictional character.”
FICTION
Trying to Follow the Muse While Domestic Life Calls
By Edan Lepucki
Oct. 20, 2017
Image
Cherise Wolas
CreditMichael Dickes
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THE RESURRECTION OF JOAN ASHBY
By Cherise Wolas
534 pp. Flatiron Books. $27.99.
There are the demands and joys of creating art … and then there are the demands and joys of being a parent. My artist-mother friends and I struggle to secure — and pay for — reliable child care so that we may do our strange, sacred work. Even then, the morass of domestic duties threatens to ooze under the doors of our studios and offices.
For the eponymous heroine of Cherise Wolas’s ambitious, problematic debut novel, “The Resurrection of Joan Ashby,” the struggles with parenthood are more philosophical than practical. When she gets pregnant by accident, her new husband, an ocular surgeon named Martin Manning, is thrilled, even though he swore to her he would respect her wishes to never have children. By this time, Joan is 25 and the author of two best-selling, highly acclaimed story collections: “She did not want motherhood, had no underlying faith in her ability to negotiate the enormity of the obligation, had no interest in the supposed majesty of the experience.” And yet. She considers this crossroads as if she were a character in one of her stories. She imagines a fictional Joan choosing this baby, and she steps into the role.
This intimate, introspective scene isn’t the reader’s first glimpse of our heroine. Cleverly, Wolas opens the novel with an essay from a literary magazine about Ashby and her work, providing an overview of an exceptional career, including excerpts from both of Joan’s books. Before we come to know Joan Ashby, the person, we have already met Joan Ashby, the author. This second identity is the one our heroine connects to more keenly — she is the “realest Joan Ashby,” and by the time she is pregnant with her second child, she longs to return to “that place of pure self.”
But will she? From the opening essay, the reader knows that nearly three decades have passed since the publication of Ashby’s second story collection. Did marriage and motherhood derail her? And if so, how? Wolas skillfully dramatizes these answers. Her descriptions of Ashby creating and abandoning work capture that lusty feeling of writing well and that sense of desolation and resignation when the product doesn’t match the initial vision.
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What slows the narrative down are the excerpts from her work. It’s frustrating to read mere portions of a short story or novel, in part because they require we take leave of Joan’s vivid fictional life. Joan Ashby’s writing is a touch amateur; for instance, raindrops are “big as cats and dogs,” and her characters read like fantasies of free spirits more than actual people. It’s hard to believe her fiction would have influenced the literary conversation or made her an international best seller.
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Joan and Martin hire a full-time nanny, the delightfully named Fancy, a cheery young Canadian with hair “the color of wet sand” who takes over all domestic duties. She not only watches the first child, Daniel, and his brother, Eric, but also cleans the house, cooks the meals and even plants a garden.
The problem isn’t that Joan doesn’t have time or the support to write; it’s that her husband, by his bland interest in her work, and her kids, by their presence alone, transgress on her very being. For this reason, Joan decides to start a novel in private, a secret that is at once empowering and dangerous: “She was writing up in her castle, in the tower she had constructed for herself, away from prying eyes and Martin’s need to expose the complicated mechanics of her mind.” Of course, a book written in secret is like Chekhov’s gun, and will have to be read. There is a terrific twist midway through the novel that shifts the focus away from Joan Ashby’s struggles to follow her creative destiny, and toward questions of talent, loyalty and communication within families. Is there room for more than one genius in a household? Can we escape the shadows of our parents? Does a mother need to sacrifice her own success for that of her offspring?
All narratives must manage the passage of time, but a novel that covers decades must distill entire years into paragraphs, a challenge for any writer, let alone a debut novelist. Sometimes Wolas’s book reads like a juicy 19th-century tome, the narrative alighting on essential moments and then jumping forward in years, time sweeping over the reader. The flip side is that a few key events in the Manning family feel glossed over. A major crisis with Eric is swiftly summarized, even though it causes Joan to put her secret book aside for seven years. By contrast, we get a long scene of our protagonist on an airplane, complete with shopworn descriptions of overhead bins and snack carts. The scenic disparity would be a quibble were it not for the novel’s final act, which takes place in India. Far from home, Joan is able to avoid the life she accepted but never really wanted, and the novel thus avoids drama by staying in India for a protracted period.
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She goes alone to Dharamshala to process a familial betrayal and reassert the identity she’s lost. Here, minor characters, many of them Indian, offer her pearls of wisdom and speeches that flatter her ego. When Joan, now called Ashby by her new friends, wonders if she can cut ties with her life in Northern Virginia, she knows “she would miss the grand architectural house, the lap pool in the bucolic glen, the Croatian limestone island in the kitchen.” I cringed. It’s not unforgivable for a successful American writer, married to a famous doctor, to find solace in this foreign country, but I’d expect a character as self-possessed as Joan Ashby to acknowledge her exceptional privilege — and even, perhaps, to question her epiphanies. If she has found succor in this new world, it’s partly because she’s rich enough to turn her back on the conflicts that have so plagued her. For this reader, the ending offered delusions posing as revelations.
That I got so worked up about a person who doesn’t exist is a testament to Cherise Wolas’s success in creating a complex and distinct fictional character. Joan Ashby is like no writer I have ever encountered; I’m sure, if she were real, she would be pleased to hear it.
Edan Lepucki is the author of the novels “California” and “Woman No. 17.”
Edan Lepucki is the author of the novels “California” and “Woman No. 17.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 21, 2017, on Page 10 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Lost and Found. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Quoted in Sidelights: It’s striking how many of the people she meets in Dharamshala are white,” remarked Chelsea Leu at the Rumpus website. While Joan there, Leu added, she “doesn’t grapple with any particular creed or belief system,” but “somehow the mere sheen of enlightenment”
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MOTHERS AND MARGINALIZATION: CHERISE WOLAS’S THE RESURRECTION OF JOAN ASHBY
REVIEWED BY CHELSEA LEU
October 17th, 2017
When I was in high school and fervently reading too many Jezebel articles, I wrote a letter to myself, stuck it in an envelope, sealed it, neatly labeled it “DO NOT OPEN UNTIL 2020,” and tucked it in the back of my diary. The letter was two pages of stern point-by-point argument. Its purpose? To convince my possibly baby-crazy future self not to have kids, thus saving myself from the shackles of structural inequality and a life of servitude.
You can see that exact blend of youthful, norms-smashing conviction in the first few pages of The Resurrection of Joan Ashby by Cherise Wolas, which opens with a profile of the titular fictional character as a towering light in 1980s American letters. That profile includes a list Ashby wrote in her own diary as a thirteen-year-old: “4. Write every day. 5. Rewrite every day. 6. Avoid crushes and love. 7. Do not entertain any offer of marriage. 8. Never ever have children. 9. Never allow anyone to get in my way.” In the following thirty pages, Joan meets a dashing surgeon, gets married, and finds out she’s pregnant in rapid succession. Resurrection is a story about acts of creation, some more reluctant than others: what happens to a woman who has kids and desperately didn’t want them, whose life work is generating rich alternate universes? The book is as finely wrought as a jewelry box, but enclosed somehow, airless even when it tries to be expansive.
To its credit, Resurrection is not a book about an unwilling mother whose worldview is entirely changed once she gives birth. The act of raising a child itself is not ennobling: when Joan’s children are little, she thinks about her life’s “soft poetry and hard tediousness, its spectacular, love-ridden times measured against meaningless hours and days and weeks and months.” It’s a description that could fit pretty much any life, poetic in its averageness.
But Joan weathers a series of injustices from her husband and two sons, the men in her life, each one negating and compounding the impact of Joan’s choices until the central, all-obliterating betrayal, an amazing plot twist that leaves Joan feeling the full weight of the twenty-eight years she spent without publishing a single word. Throughout, Wolas gives an especially careful accounting of the way mothers can be quietly marginalized: at one juncture, forced to choose between caring for her son and writing, “Joan thinks then that writers have infinite choices and mothers nearly no choice at all.” And after her husband Martin draws up plans to renovate their home, “not a single room, Joan would discover, belonged only to her.”
I’ll admit: in these moments and the many others Wolas pointedly renders, I felt my inner seventeen-year-old rearing: Burn it all to the ground and never have kids! Which is why the book’s thesis on motherhood, expounded much later in the book when Joan travels to India, bewildered me:
Is motherhood inescapably entwined in female life, a story every woman ends up telling, whether or not she sought or desired that bond; her nourishment, her caretaking, her love, needed by someone standing before her, hands held out, heart demanding succor, commanding her not to look away, but to dig deep, give of herself unstintingly, offer up everything she can?
Joan is thinking about the older women who have taken her into their orbits, who teach and care for children both literal and metaphorical, as well as a writing class she herself is “mothering.” But it’s not clear why this nurturing resides only in “female life,” other than that all the characters who do it in Resurrection are women. Motherhood is a convenient metaphor, but it feels essentialist—aren’t men capable of that same nourishing self-sacrifice? (Or shouldn’t they be?) Giving unstintingly to someone demanding help sounds noble, but also a little too much like what got Joan into this mess in the first place.
On that other crucial aspect of Joan’s life, writing, Wolas writes like someone well-acquainted with the trenches. Despite her genius, Joan struggles with long lapses in her writing and self-recrimination about those lapses. She gets touchy whenever Martin asks her if he can read any of her writing—an “inquisition,” she calls it—and eventually decides to tell everyone she’s stopped writing and just do it in secret, all while being fiercely protective of the time she’s covertly carved out to write. “[Joan] debated how long the duration could be, without writing, before a writer was no longer considered a writer.” What writer hasn’t thought that?
But this keen-eyed portrayal of a struggling writerly life is overshadowed by the rarefied atmosphere Wolas’s characters seem to move in, an upper echelon of existence. Her husband Martin is an acclaimed surgeon who travels the world bringing sight to the blind, naming procedures, and getting written up in the New York Times; Joan’s son Eric becomes a founder and CEO of a multimillion dollar tech company at thirteen—accelerated even for the ludicrous youth of Silicon Valley. Daniel, the son who feels like “a commoner” in the family, lands a gig as a columnist at a prestigious financial magazine right out of college, where he writes 20,000 words every week about whatever he wants, and somehow still feels bad about his lot in life. And Joan, of course, is a genius—she’s dogged by paparazzi just for writing two arty story collections, which might be the pipe dream of every MFA candidate in the world.
Even the places the characters frequent are all impeccably appointed: Joan’s family house has a glen and a knoll; Daniel’s cavernous post-grad apartment in DC has couches that match the walls, and Eric’s cottage in the Indian town Dharamshala is “celestial,” with French windows and flowers everywhere. (One wonders what the other homes in Dharamshala look like.)
You can see these beautiful, hollow spaces recurring again and again, even in Joan’s fiction, of which we receive large helpings. A woman in an MFA program shanks another to death after stealing her story ideas—a terrifying sort of tunnel vision where artistic achievement is the only meaningful end. Joan publishes a whole collection about a kid trapped in a coma and his own head, and the fictive places he roams. Her later works, after she gives birth, are gentler, more concerned with art as an uplifting, healing force—one is about an artists’ colony and another about an ancient, idiosyncratic, powerful sculptor named Paloma Rosen, who is nevertheless confined to a walk-up in New York because of her bad knees.
Writing, art, and creation are elevated and pure, the book seems to say, spiritual acts separated from the dross of everyday life. (“Joan leaned back and thought the act of writing had never felt as exquisitely important, so much like prayer.”) So Joan’s “resurrection”—a word laden with religious resonance—occurs when she travels to India, begins to write again, and engages in meditation and chanting.
At this point Resurrection starts reading like a particularly well-written self-help parable, vaguely pushing you to fulfill your dreams (but only if your dreams involve surpassing literary ambition). At every turn, it seems, Joan meets an older woman on her trip who dispenses relevant wisdom to her, just in passing. (Among the advice: “Whoever you were as a child, she’s your future.” “The first thing you need to figure out is exactly who you are, only then can you become who you want to be.” “You need to commune, not with nature at large, or the history of where you are, but with your own nature and your own history.”) One wishes insight were tougher to win on a spiritual journey.
It works, of course—the meditation, the chanting, the writing. But there’s something empty about this form of spirituality. Joan doesn’t grapple with any particular creed or belief system, she’s just going through the motions, and somehow the mere sheen of enlightenment inherent in these activities is enough to get her there. And it’s striking how many of the people she meets in Dharamshala are white, including one of her sons, and how functional this Indian town is to them. Dharamshala is “a place to figure things out,” someone says.
Despite all this, these older women Joan meets—Vita, Camille, Ela—are important. They represent life’s infinite variation and possibility, that there’s always a way to bounce back from massive setbacks and pain, that you can begin again and have a rich life even (gasp!) as a mature woman, something that the book’s sweeping length reflects as well. “[Joan] will keep to herself her own astonishment that the memories of these seven years are beginning to fade, that the human mind can cauterize the misery, allow a strong woman to pick back up where she was, to recover her inherent power, unleash her personal intention, grab at what she wants, now that she is again free.”
But after I finished reading, I craved something humbler, less exalted, more real. The Resurrection of Joan Ashby tries to get at the uplifting power of creation, but in doing so it ends up becoming what so much art created in a vacuum is: self-indulgent and out of touch. And the book ends with a moment that sums that up perfectly. Joan sets out on a three-day trip across Dharamshala’s Kangra Valley, reaches the top of a peak, and—alone, miles away from any real humans or their messy, hard lives—she thinks, “This is what it feels like to be home in the world.” Only from this far up, wholly disconnected from the reality Wolas herself observes so sharply earlier in the book, is it possible for motherhood to be proclaimed “a story every woman ends up telling,” an act of creation as great as any artistic masterpiece.
Chelsea Leu works at WIRED, and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Borborygmi, a humor magazine she co-founded with her sister. More from this author →
Quoted in Sidelights: a startlingly self-assured debut novel spanning decades and rendered in luminous prose throughout.”
Cherise Wolas: sacrificing the writing life to motherhood, temporarily
By RAYYAN AL-SHAWAF
Fri., Oct. 13, 2017
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby - Cherise Wolas
When Joan Ashby, in her mid-20s and already the author of two acclaimed collections of short stories, marries and becomes Joan Manning in the late 1980s, she hasn’t an inkling of what she’s getting into. And Cherise Wolas, author of The Resurrection of Joan Ashby, a startlingly self-assured debut novel spanning decades and rendered in luminous prose throughout, is too ambitious to resort to soap opera fare (an abusive husband, say, or a sickly child) for the purpose of casting a pall over her protagonist’s family life. A single-minded but never hurried Wolas pointedly has Joan grapple with the hindrance domestic bliss poses to her writing, before a shocking act of betrayal on the part of her beloved first-born, now an adult, detonates both her notion of motherhood and her literary pursuits.
Headstrong, flinty Joan, whom we meet in New York City (she grew up in a Chicago suburb), doesn’t marry Martin Manning, who’s on his way to becoming a world-renowned eye surgeon, before extracting a promise from him that they won’t start a family. But when, having moved to small-town Rhome, Virginia, she finds herself pregnant, he’s so happy and oblivious to their still-recent agreement that she selflessly opts to keep the baby boy, whom she subsequently comes to love. Not long thereafter, they have another one, and “the time lost to the mothering maw” begins to add up.
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby is a deeply feminist novel, but one free of didacticism and ideological baggage. Joan chafes at the fact that raising a family impinges more on her life than her husband’s. Movingly, she “debate[s] how long the duration could be, without writing, before a writer was no longer considered a writer.”
In a multi-dimensional tale interspersed with some of its protagonist’s intriguing short stories and novel-in-progress excerpts, only one element comes across as somewhat incongruent. A sojourn in India’s Dharamshala (where the Dalai Lama of Tibet lives in exile) proves engaging enough, but the region’s apparently balsamic properties will have you rolling your eyes, as when Joan’s “splintered soul is sewing itself back together, one loop of thread through the skin at a time.” To be sure, Wolas eschews full-blown exoticization of India, but the meditation and the spirituality and even the people’s gregariousness come uncomfortably close.
Fortunately, Joan doesn’t lose her edge amid all the soul-mending. In fact, she makes a couple of hard-nosed decisions in Dharamshala that will alter the nature of her relationship with those closest to her. A good thing, too, because by now the reader feels that it’s about time she reclaim the fiercely independent Joan Ashby of old, and sally back out into the literary world as the formidable writer she still is.
Rayyan Al-Shawaf is a writer in Beirut.
Quoted in Sidelights: “And there is power in the artistry of Cherise Wolas’ empathetic and resonant portrait of Joan Ashby,”
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby – Cherise Wolas
by Lori Feathers
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby cover[Flatiron Books; 2017]
If you are a man there is no compulsion to compromise, no requirement to choose. Having a family need not impinge upon your career nor frustrate attaining everything within the limits of your intellect and ambition. But for every woman a choice must be made between the conflicting interests of family and career. She might choose with deliberation, owning her decision with full awareness of its consequences. Or instead she may chafe against the notion that she need choose at all, convinced that she can excel all at once with the requirements of motherhood and her vocation, compromising nothing along the way. The weight of this life-shaping choice and its ramifications for a woman who knows that she made the wrong choice are the tensions that drive The Resurrection of Joan Ashby, Cherise Wolas’ remarkable debut novel.
The eponymous Joan Ashby is a woman propelled by relentless ambition and extraordinary talent. By the time Joan is twenty-five she has authored two internationally acclaimed short story collections. Despite her vigilance against the “consumptive nature” of love Joan falls for Martin, a successful eye surgeon. And she marries him, sound in the belief that Martin understands that her writing career is and always will be her only priority and that like her, he does not want children. When only two months into the marriage Joan accidentally becomes pregnant she reluctantly gives way to Martin’s unexpected desire to have the baby.
From this launching point Wolas excavates the years-long emotional tumult of a woman who loves her children but loves her career much more, a reality that taints Joan’s relationships with her husband and two sons and roils her self-identity. Joan resents that her constant family obligations divert her from writing, a resentment that breeds both regret that she has a husband and children and guilt that she feels that way — a guilt that is redoubled by the shadow of her own strange upbringing as the only child of parents who shared an apparent indifference toward her:
How her parents had stared, as if her connection to them, her very existence, was an unsolvable puzzle . . . How they inclined their heads toward each other in those long minutes in the living room, and later at the kitchen table, telling each other about their days, neither ever asking Joan a question about anything.
This parental ambivalence cultivates in Joan a fierce independence and a disdain for emotional vulnerability. It also leaves her abandoned to the imagined worlds and characters of her writing, a pastime that, over time, becomes her life’s sole purpose.
When her first son is four and she is pregnant with a second the mounting distress over her failed attempts to write a first novel culminates in an existential crisis, to which she reacts by resolving to compartmentalize her life:
It was the first Joan Ashby, the realest Joan Ashby, the one who was neither wife nor mother, that she was in immediate danger of losing . . . she needed to reframe her existence, fracture her life, bifurcate Joan Manning, wife and mother, from Joan Ashby, the writer, erect boundaries to prevent any accidental bleeding between the two.
The strain of this self-imposed duality and her conviction that Joan “the writer” is the true, authentic Joan while Joan, mother and wife, is a lesser Joan, infects the Mannings’ quiet domesticity. Joan’s inability to reconcile her two selves sets the stage for a cruel betrayal that irrevocably rents the family’s fabric.
Joan’s striving to bifurcate her life affords Wolas the opportunity to explore how a life’s rhythms, distractions and experiences influence the creative process. And, also, how an artist’s life irrepressibly leaches into her work, which Wolas demonstrates by seamlessly knitting into the narrative about Joan, excerpts from Joan’s fiction which reflect Joan’s deeply held belief that it is futile to try to live in a way incongruent with one’s destiny:
Sometimes against her wishes, her heart turns tender, and she nearly hopes Howard finds what he is after. She thinks it likely they may never see him again, that in order to move on he will need to forget he once had a hand in creating a world he didn’t want. She thinks destiny will always win out over second-best, that it’s an impossible burden on those left behind.
Through this and many other of Joan’s writings we see what Joan refuses to — that she has not and cannot inoculate her writing from her life; that her art and her life are symbiotic.
Perhaps most interesting is Wolas’ interrogation of personal ambition, which she examines not only from the vantage of society’s double standard toward the demonstrated career ambitions of a mother of young children versus a father, but also by looking at how personality and individual experiences determine the resilience of ambition. Wolas draws contrasts among the four members of the Manning family, each ambitious in his or her own way, but most significantly, between Joan and her eldest son, Daniel, also a writer. While Joan’s writerly ambition seems indelibly imprinted from childhood (due, at least in part, to her isolation), young Daniel’s ambition to become a writer is fragile and is nearly extinguished by his feelings of inadequacy to ever meet his mother’s measure as an author. Wolas’ vivid, revelatory writing cracks open the intricate and subtle shifts in how Joan and Daniel see themselves and each other as mother, child, and writers.
Late in the novel Joan makes a pilgrimage to India, a journey that proves to be transformative. But contrary to the suggestion of the novel’s title the trip does not bring about a resurrection of Joan’s former, “writer only” self. Instead it results in her surrender, not to the idea that a woman needs to be a mother to be complete, but rather to the reality that the need to be nurtured and nurture others in turn is an inherent grace of humanity. That it is allowing ourselves to be vulnerable to this need that enables the experiences of personal joy and pain that vitalizes art, that makes art powerful. And there is power in the artistry of Cherise Wolas’ empathetic and resonant portrait of Joan Ashby, a woman who struggles every day to understand herself and to live the life that is true and authentic for her, despite demands and expectations to the contrary. Joan Ashby is every woman.
Lori Feathers is a co-owner of Interabang Books in Dallas, Texas and the store’s book buyer. She writes freelance book reviews and currently sits on the Board of the National Book Critics Circle. She can be found @lorifeathers.
Quoted in Sidelights: vacillates between extreme detail and rapid time jumps. It’s a disorienting structure, with Joan seeming to grow too little in the interim.” The novel is “beautifully written and—at times—compelling,” but “isn’t quite gripping enough to fulfill its lofty ambitions,”
Motherhood Usurps Identity in Cherise Wolas' The Resurrection of Joan Ashby
By Bridey Heing | August 30, 2017 | 5:24pm
BOOKS REVIEWS CHERISE WOLAS
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Motherhood Usurps Identity in Cherise Wolas' The Resurrection of Joan Ashby
Sacrifice looms large in many women’s lives, and a woman who becomes a mother is often expected to accomodate others’ needs at the expense of her own. In The Resurrection of Joan Ashby, Cherise Wolas examines the choices women make for the sake of their families, questioning the long-term impact these decisions have on women’s identities.
Joan Ashby is already an acclaimed writer when she falls in love with Martin, a surgeon who takes her out of her comfort zone and brings balance to her life. The couple get married, but before doing so, Joan makes it clear that she never wants children—a rule she made for herself in order to pursue her writing career. Shortly after wrapping up a book tour and moving to a small town, however, Joan learns she is pregnant and decides to become a mother, with a second child following within a few years. While Joan finds happiness in motherhood, she struggles to fit her work into her life, particularly as her two sons start requiring more attention and energy.
1joanashbycover.jpgJoan attempts to keep her writing alive, until one of her sons commits an unthinkable act of cruelty that leaves her emotionally reeling. It prompts Joan to travel overseas and reconsider her identity, including her relationships with her sons and husband.
Wolas makes a great deal of Joan’s talent. The story opens with a long article about Joan’s writing, and the over 500-page novel is littered with excerpts from Joan’s work. Wolas constantly reminds the reader that not only is Joan passionate about writing, she’s good at it. Woefully, it’s one of the only things about Joan that feels fully realized. There’s a passivity to the character that makes it difficult to understand her views; her motivations, aside from the drive to write, are too neglected to feel complete.
That said, Wolas’ own writing talent is abundantly clear, and her decision to tackle the strain traditional domesticity can have on relationships proves timely. But there’s a shallowness to the narrative that’s difficult to shake, and that undermines the book’s ultimate relevance.
Covering around three decades, The Resurrection of Joan Ashby vacillates between extreme detail and rapid time jumps. It’s a disorienting structure, with Joan seeming to grow too little in the interim. Although a beautifully written and—at times—compelling look at a gifted woman trying to fit into a life she never imagined, the book isn’t quite gripping enough to fulfill its lofty ambitions.
Bridey Heing is a freelance writer based in Washington, DC. More of her work can be found here.
BOOK REVIEW
Review: Cherise Wolas’s The Resurrection of Joan Ashby and life's many uncomfortable, fascinating truths
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MARISSA STAPLEY
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED APRIL 19, 2018
UPDATED APRIL 19, 2018
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby
By Cherise Wolas
Flatiron, 544 pages, $38.99
Joan Ashby is a literary wunderkind who captivates the world with her brilliant debut short-story collection and its dazzling follow-up, but has yet to deliver a full-length novel when an unexpected pregnancy derails her career. She had planned to avoid love, marriage and children altogether, but reveals during her final public interview – transcribed in tantalizing detail in the novel's clever opening – that she has fallen in love with an irresistible man who appeared to be a hippie at first but is really a brilliant eye surgeon. I can see how this bohemian/gainfully employed combo would be alluring to an author but getting to know Martin as a character proved a huge disappointment – which was likely Wolas's point. His joyful reaction to the unintended pregnancy is a betrayal of his ardent promise to forever respect Joan's desire to remain childless. She gains much, emotionally, by having first one child and then another, but it's what she could have had professionally and spiritually that haunts her daily and stills her fingers on her typewriter's keys. The hotly anticipated novel doesn't get written. Joan gives herself to motherhood instead. The three decades during which Joan isn't publishing drag, as they would, but it should go without saying that novels need to make even the most painfully mundane entertaining. There's a drawn-out section of the novel during which Joan is at an ashram in India that I wanted to end as badly as I wanted Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch's pages and pages of adolescent drinking and drug-doing in a Vegas desert mansion to end (I know, I know; not everyone agrees with me on that) – but at no point did I want to put the novel down. The resentment of motherhood is a topic that puts many off but I was happy to see it through Wolas's clinical eye. She shines a light on many uncomfortable, fascinating truths. I just wish she'd done it with more attention to pace and tension.
Quoted in Sidelights: “provides compelling evidence”
Book Review
Review: The Family Tabor
The Family Tabor by Cherise Wolas (Flatiron Books, $27.99 hardcover, 400p., 9781250081452, July 17, 2018)
Adored by his family and admired by his community for a life of good works, Harry Tabor is a man who seems to have it all and to appreciate the good fortune that has brought him to this place at age 70. But as Cherise Wolas (The Resurrection of Joan Ashby) shows in her introspective second novel, "luck is a rescindable gift."
Wolas takes her time getting to the heart of her story, delivering ample servings of the history of Harry, his child psychologist wife, Roma, and their children, Phoebe, Camille and Simon. Phoebe and Simon are successful lawyers in Los Angeles, while Camille, her career stalled, has abandoned her work as a social anthropologist in the mold of Margaret Mead to volunteer at a Seattle hospice.
The children, along with Simon's wife, Elena, and their two young girls, arrive in Palm Springs for a gala celebrating Harry's selection as Man of the Decade, for his 30 years of work resettling Jewish refugees from around the world in his California community. But as Wolas deliberately scrapes away the surface sheen of the Tabors' lives, she reveals how the secrets they've been keeping from each other have affected them. Chief among these is a massive transgression in Harry's previous life as a stockbroker that impelled him to uproot his family from their Connecticut home and move west in the classic paradigm of American reinvention.
As Harry approaches his award celebration, he's haunted by aural and visual hallucinations that seem to call him to account for his past wrong and erode his feelings of worthiness. And with the shocking climax of that glittering evening, each member of the family is forced to confront a concealed truth in his or her own life.
Despite its roots in family drama and the mystery that propels its final third, The Family Tabor is, at its heart, a philosophical novel. Wolas poses big questions: What does it mean to live a good life? How can we atone for a serious misdeed? And how do we seek forgiveness when others have been wronged profoundly by our conduct? For contemporary Americans like the highly educated, affluent Tabors, who think of themselves as "good people," but who, at best, are only loosely rooted in any tradition, she suggests, the road to redemption can be elusive.
"The past is not dead. It's not even past," wrote William Faulkner. The Family Tabor provides compelling evidence of that truth. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: A loving family is thrown into crisis when a secret from the patriarch's past emerges.
Quoted in Sidelights: “the ranks of our foremost literary fiction writers,” explaining: “Perhaps she’ll take the time and space in her third novel to even more fully explore the rich veins of human experience she so instinctively taps into.”
"tidbits, some bigger bites"
The Family Tabor: A Novel
Image of The Family Tabor: A Novel
Author(s):
Cherise Wolas
Release Date:
July 17, 2018
Publisher/Imprint:
Flatiron Books
Pages:
400
Buy on Amazon
Reviewed by:
Janet Levine
“Clearly, Cherise Wolas is not yet in the ranks of our foremost literary fiction writers—but she can be one day. Perhaps she’ll take the time and space in her third novel to even more fully explore the rich veins of human experience she so instinctively taps into.”
Author Cherise Wolas scored a home run with her debut novel published in August 2017, The Resurrection of Joan Ashby. Highly acclaimed on publication it achieved bestseller status for literary fiction as one of the best books of the year. On this site it was reviewed as, “A stunning debut novel. The Resurrection of Joan Ashby by Cherise Wolas encompasses a wealth of superb writing, mature insights, and breath-taking risks.” Naturally, there has been a buzz of expectation around Wolas’ second novel, and here it is, scarcely a year later, The Family Tabor.
The two books have interesting contrasts and similarities. There are the same luminous patches of writing, particularly lush descriptions of landscapes and other settings, as well as in much of the reflective prose, as characters wrestle the essence of their inner selves.
Present is the same storytelling ability that makes it hard for the reader not to binge read. Yet the plotting is perhaps overly obvious in the second novel; it is easier to know where Wolas is headed. And some of the direct speech jars as it reads more like exposition than someone talking.
In the first novel, Joan Ashby emerges as such a well-realized character that we can scarcely believe she does not exist, that she only lives in the novel and that we are not reading biography. There is little of that intimacy between reader and protagonists in The Family Tabor. But this may be intentional on the part of the author; Joan Ashby is the eponymous character in that book’s title, whereas in this second novel the eponymous character is the Family Tabor.
Just as a pack of cards is made up of individual cards that can be shuffled, arranged and rearranged into sequences and patterns, so can a family. And families are not limited to the nuclear present—mom, dad, children, and sometimes grandchildren but include two sets of generational families moving back in time as well as into the future. Follow that trail and you can soon arrive at 52 cards if you need them. But if you build a house of cards and one card is removed, that house collapses. Roma, the family matriarch knows this.
“She thinks about how family is an amalgamation of the solid, the liquid, and the vaporous. A shambling creature made from accidental love, a meshing of beliefs occasionally disarrayed by inevitable bafflement, and the creation of others adorned with names signaling hope for their natures, prospects for their futures. Whether there is love, happiness, contentment, success, health, and satisfaction, or sadness trauma, and tragedy in any family, so much is dependent on ephemeral luck.”
This idea of family as the central character is an ambitious construct on Wolas’ part, and she deserves praise for attempting it. But unfortunately perhaps, it becomes the weakest part of the novel. Wolas tries to give each character equal time for the reader to know them but she probably needs 150–200 more pages to do so effectively. (She juggles five main characters.) The shift in voice and point of view are often confusing and interrupt and slow the narrative which is already hindered by overly long back stories.
Some of the character issues are frankly unbelievable. (The patriarch, Harry Tabor, carries a deeply buried secret that will upset the family house of cards. The secret is submerged in his consciousness for 20 years. How can he not be aware of his misdeeds when their presence is in his face every day in the name of his company, CST, and that the secret is the source of how he finances his work? Why does eldest child Phoebe need to construct a lie about a nonexistent relationship? Why do these issues arise so prominently in this supposedly brilliant, worked out and successful family? The almost superficial treatment of these issues (and others pertaining to each character) hinder the book from delivering on its impact and promise.
Wolas shows in both novels that she is not afraid to venture into “big themes”; in this book, secrets and lies, sibling relationships, marriage relationships, philosophical musings on time, repentance and atonement, the baggage and sometimes glory of history—both familial and historical. Toward the end of the novel, Simon, the only son, realizes that the world is not black and white “but a world made of whole cloth sewn in shades of grey.” He muses further on his research into Einstein’s beliefs on the fabric of time.
“That the past, present and future all exist simultaneously, that there is no true division between past and future, but rather a single existence. That knowledge sometimes quiets his thoughts, affords him a temporary becalming, a brief cognitive peace.”
Whatever the Tabors do as a family in the present becomes part of the past for future generations.
Details of the impact of the Tabor family’s Jewish history and the way different characters do or do not relate to its reality, is central to the novel. For instance, Harry remembers listening when he was thirteen to a rabbi explicating the ways and meaning of atonement.
“. . . explaining the Torah’s requirement to ask for forgiveness in person, specifying the sin, as soon as harm had been inflicted. That the Jewish people were born possessing innate kindness, knowing the nature and the power implicit in forgiving, in the act of seeking and providing it. That if the wounded, the offended, the hurt, the victim, the transgressed, refused at first to forgive, one had to continue on, facing the pain he had caused, facing himself, returning to atone again, and again each time in person, each time speaking original words of genuine, earnest and candid apology. That path toward atonement, it was intended as a deliberately humbling walk, and one had to keep walking forward humbly, until forgiveness might be granted.”
This is a central memory that triggers Harry’s “baffling” actions.
These quotes point to where Wolas could have delivered in major fashion on the novel’s impact and promise. She seems to feel the urge to move toward philosophical discourse in order to expand on her characters’ thoughts and emotions. In this book it is Judaic philosophy. Fascinating material. We receive tidbits, even some bigger bites, but we are titillated rather than satisfied.
To illustrate this point, two novels (of many novels) that do deliver on that impact and promise are Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Both deal with well-developed characters in singular families, but these authors set their characters in the context of shattering socio-political dynamics on a large scale. Beloved tackles the unspeakable horrors of America’s struggle with slavery. The Corrections grapples with corrosive family dynamics in the 1990s in America, a decade of greed and corruption that entrenched the players in the unsustainable, oligarchical political system we are living with today.
Clearly, Cherise Wolas is not yet in the ranks of our foremost literary fiction writers—but she can be one day. Perhaps she’ll take the time and space in her third novel to even more fully explore the rich veins of human experience she so instinctively taps into. Or perhaps she’ll turn to writing more popular fiction. That will be a loss for us all.