Reviews
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BOOK
The Daughters of Erietown: A Novel by Connie Schultz Drawing on her roots in northeast Ohio for her first novel, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Connie Schultz serves up a multi-generational saga of a working family set in fictional Erietown, Ohio. Looking through the windows of the McGinty family home, we witness a half century of social change in America. The interplay of gender, class and ethnicity is a fascinating constant in racially segregated Erietown. Set in the heyday of union strength, the novel depicts Brick McGinty’s union membership as central to family identity. Vivid period details anchor the McGintys firmly in their historical context: Ada’s quilting bee, the “Jack & Jesus” wall in the dining room of this Irish-American family, Ellie McGinty’s beehive hairdo, the softball league, the Women’s Guild, food, music, games and more. We see parents dictate their children’s choice of playmates in order to carry out feuds or signal status. Not until she goes off to college does daughter Sam meet people who don’t know anyone who fought in Vietnam. This hopeful story of family experience is peopled with interesting characters whose lives are rife with unresolved contradictions.
Brick both requires and resents wife Ellie’s financial dependence, while Ellie learns that her compliance has not safeguarded her marriage. Sam is conflicted about her professional success and the very real prospect of upward mobility. Misunderstanding and secrets can survive within a relationship for decades. Love is often imperfect, may fail us many times, yet it endures, and is in the end still what matters most. Schultz is unsparing about the impact of early choices. Brittle in his 20s with his sense of the road not taken, Brick is hungry for adulation and attention, which bodes trouble ahead. He becomes an authoritarian husband and father, but keenly aware that his sphere of influence is limited to home and union. While Brick’s actions drive the plot, the book’s rewarding core is the warm relationships among the women of Erietown throughout their hardworking lives: Ellie, her grandmother Ada, her aunt Nessa, daughter Sam, best friend Mardee and others. Communication and emotional support bolster resilience, aid understanding and may even provide a route to peace of mind
and acceptance of change. Perhaps the most complex and satisfying arc, both humorous and touching, is between Ellie and Sam. Ellie worries that the child Sam’s obvious leadership ability is unfeminine, chiding her gently “you don’t always have to be in charge.” Much later, we enjoy watching Ellie devour early feminist works such as Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room, courtesy of Sam. Brick and Ellie make many mistakes but manage to raise children with the confidence to forge their own paths; Sam and Reilly grow up without the violence and abandonment their parents suffered as children. Brick cannot pass on his prejudices. Sam has black friends, and Reilly’s lunch pail is for him just a container, not the symbol of defeat it is for his father. Most gratifyingly, while we see two generations abandon their dreams, we know that the last will continue pursuing theirs.
—Katie Swett, Ohio History Connection
BOOK
The Planter of Modern Life: Louis Bromfield and the Seeds of a Food Revolution by Stephen Heyman It’s interesting how littleambulance driver in WWI France, Heyman to Malabar, the farm he established in his known Ohioan Louis establishes early that Bromfield was cut from native Richland County in 1939. Malabar Bromfield is today. A classic Lost Generation cloth. Driven by is the heart of the Bromfield story, and Pulitzer Prize-winning restlessness, filled with unbounded energy, fittingly, half of The Planter is dedicated best-selling novelist Bromfield wrote his first novel in 1924 and to it. The reader will be struck by how courted by Hollywood, the next year found him in Paris, at the Bromfield was reshaped by Malabar into a celebrated expatriate center of the expatriate movement. But as a true man of the soil: he remade himself member of the Lost his literary successes piled up, Bromfield as an impassioned, often angry advocate Generation, an agricultural pioneer with sensed that his true calling might not lie of ecology and conservation. an outspoken passion for the land, a with a pen, but with a plow. “I have half a According to Heyman, Bromfield made conservationist with the fervor of an suspicion that I shall end up a horticulturist “his greatest impact not on the page but in evangelical, Bromfield is a true American rather than a novelist” he wrote to a friend. the soil.” Perhaps his legacy, then, is not in character, one long overdue for rediscovery. In 1930, his family moved to the village of the literary works that once brought him Simply put, Bromfield’s life is a biographer’s Senlis, where, fascinated by the “French way” fame and fortune, but with the causes dream. And Stephen Heyman’s excellent of planting, he created a lush and bountiful that he put his name to, causes that live new The Planter of Modern Life is just the garden that became the center of the social on in the environmental and organic food expansive and deeply researched biography world of the expats. movements that followed. that such a life demands. The Senlis garden was the genesis of an —Matt Benz, Ohio History Connection Opening with Bromfield arriving as an agrarian vision that Bromfield would bring 50 Echoes | SEPTEMBER & OCTOBER 2020
