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| Olga Grushin |
The structure of Olga Grushin’s original new novel, “Forty Rooms,” is ingeniously simple. Over several decades, we follow the Russian-born narrator — an aspiring poet turned American housewife — into the 40 rooms that represent the topography of a privileged, middle-class woman’s life. We are taken from the “stuffy and bright” Moscow apartment bathroom — the first place to “emerge from the haze of nonbeing” when the protagonist is not yet 5 — to the suburban America entrance hall from which she will finally depart. And along the way, we come of age with the person whom we know, tellingly, only as Mrs. Caldwell. Or perhaps I should say, we come of ages with Mrs. Caldwell, because as any woman in her fifth decade or beyond can attest, most of us come of age in many stages: as daughter, as wife, as mother, as . . . you get the idea. It is a mark of the author’s skill that, while sweeping us along in Mrs. Caldwell’s particular narrative, Grushin indirectly challenges the reader to reflect on her own history; to come up with the labels that contribute to her own identity — writer, sister, for example — and to name the rooms in which she has come to her own realizations.
But, as we learn toward the end of the book, the number 40 has other significances too. It is not just the number of rooms in the life of a more or less contemporary, bourgeois woman; it is also a canonically significant number. “It’s always 40,” the ghost of Mrs. Caldwell’s dead mother tells her now late-middle-aged daughter. “Forty is God’s number for testing the human spirit. It’s the limit of man’s endurance, beyond which you are supposed to learn something true. Oh, you know what I mean — Noah’s 40 days and nights of rain, Moses’ 40 days in the desert, Jesus’ 40 days of fasting and temptation. Forty of anything is long enough to be a trial, but it’s man-size, too. In the Bible, 40 years make a span of one generation. Forty weeks make a baby.”
In this passage — as in countless others throughout the novel — there is enough material to warrant hours of contemplation. Starting with the fact that all of the biblical examples given to Mrs. Caldwell by her mother’s ghost are men. And what’s with “the limit of man’s endurance”? What about the limit of woman’s endurance, especially given this is a novel about a woman? And is the mostly submissive — if emotionally and physically challenging — act of gestating a baby truly a test of a woman’s endurance and spirit? Is that the beginning and end of the measure of her fortitude? And even as these knotty questions arise, others bubble to the surface. What about non-Christian women? What about lesbians? What about women of color? What about non-mothers? What about contemporary young women who will be dealing not only with changing gender norms, but also a changed climate? And what about women without rooms — the poor, refugees, prisoners and the homeless — for whom knowing 40 rooms in a single lifetime is an unthinkable luxury?
The reader’s impulse to grapple with the text, to wrestle it down and to raise objections or to attempt to identify her own place in the context of the story, is a sign not of weakness, but of Grushin’s genius. This is a text that rewards rereading and demands engagement. There is no redemption story to relax into here, and no easy answers. But even as there is much to question, and much with which to argue, there is also plenty of opportunity for empathy, and that is no mean achievement. Grushin isn’t dealing with a supposedly grand life; she is dealing with the mostly unspoken, sometimes desperate, bickering minutiae of a fairly ordinary life. Perhaps we are not supposed to admire Mrs. Caldwell as much as to identify with her, to see the ambitious young woman inside the thickening flesh of the middle-aged, middle-class matron, and to recognize the compromises and broken dreams therein.
Ultimately, it is the heartbreak at the sometimes barely glimpsed edges of these compromises and broken dreams that provides the novel’s dramatic tension. “Now, as always, you have a choice,” a supernatural godlike figure tells the young woman who is yet to become Mrs. Caldwell, near the novel’s beginning. (The fantastical are frequent visitors in this book, lending it a sort of chilly Eastern bloc magic realism.) “You can spend your days baking cookies for your offspring, or — as ever through the ages — you can become a madwoman, a nomad, a warrior, a saint. But if you do decide to follow the way of the few, you must remember this: Whenever you come to a fork in the road, always choose the harder path, otherwise the path of least resistance will be chosen for you.”
The unspoken suggestion here is that to break the bounds of middle-class expectation will be the harder path, but can we blame each other and ourselves for not choosing to be Mary Wollstonecraft, Gertrude Bell, Joan of Arc or Mother Teresa? When we tell our daughters they can be anything, are we really instructing them to take the harder path? This novel reminds us that to pursue her dreams, a woman is working against the establishment, not with it. To the young women into whose hands I will most certainly be putting Grushin’s novel, I would say this: You can’t do it all, but together we can create a world in which we might be able to do more. Because if we don’t keep working for greater gender equality, it’s not in the best interests of the current power brokers to stop us from continuing to spend more than a fair share of our lives elbow-deep in soapsuds whether we choose to or not.
“An average woman — or at least an average married woman with children, which, for all she knew, no longer signified an average woman; to rephrase, then, a woman average for most of human history — almost certainly devoted more of her time to the pursuit of laundering than to the pursuit of love; yet for all the thousands and thousands of poems written about love, only a handful had ever been written about laundry.” So muses Mrs. Caldwell some years after her marriage has turned, if not loveless, at least dreary, and she has long given up the nearly mad fantasy of taking off to Paris with a lover or becoming a published poet.
And yet, by the novel’s conclusion, Mrs. Caldwell has come to peace with the pieces of her life — or has she? Or maybe there is no lasting peace, just moments of acceptance. “I used to wonder,” she says. “Does it happen to others as well — do their lives change bit by bit, a new table here, a new baby there, until one day they wake up and look around and recognize nothing of their past in their present? But I grew into it. Learned to count my blessings. Learned to appreciate the small things. In fact, the older I get, the more I suspect that what we mistake for small things are really the things that matter.” I don’t think this is Grushin’s final answer, I think it is one of her sly challenges. Is it the small things? Or is this what a woman is forced to believe in order to stave off the madness of realizing the possibilities of which she has been robbed?
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