The Nature of Things

“After a certain age, time just drizzles down upon your head like rain in the month of March: you’re always surprised at how much of it can accumulate, and how fast.” (From City of Girls .) When we first meet Vivian Morris, a considerable amount of time has drizzled down upon her head. She is in her nineties and she is in the process of giving an account of her life to someone named Angela. Who is Angela? We have no idea and don't learn the answer to that question until near the end of the novel. We only know that she is a woman who has asked Vivian for an explanation of her relationship with the woman's father. To give that explanation, Vivian goes back to what is the beginning for her: New York in 1940 when she was 19. Nineteen-year-old Vivian had proved to be a great disappointment to her parents. She had flunked out of Vassar, having never attended her classes and failed every one. Sent home in disgrace, her parents soon weary of her and she is sent off to New York to live...

My rating: 4 of 5 stars Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love fame has written a remarkable novel featuring a remarkable woman of the 19th century. Alma Whittaker, born in 1800 to the richest man in Philadelphia, grew up to become, in fact, a female counterpart to Charles Darwin in the century of Darwin, a time when the idea of a female scientist would have been laughed at. Before we meet Alma, though, we meet her father, Henry Whittaker, a low-born Englishman who was banished because he stole plants from Kew Gardens, where his father worked as a plantsman. Instead of having him hanged, as could have happened, his father's employer sent him on an ocean voyage to assist his plant collectors. Henry already knew much about plants from his father, and now he learned even more as he traveled to exotic locations around the world. He grew into a man with an unquenchable thirst to succeed and accumulate wealth. He did both. After his ties with Britain and Kew Gardens were severed, he went...

I guess most of the female population of America and much of the world has read Elizabeth Gilbert's book Eat, Pray, Love . It is Gilbert's memoir of her failed relationships and of her decision to travel in order to heal her resulting depression and sadness and to seek spiritual awareness. The book might be summed up briefly, and unkindly, as "Rich American divorcee spends a year weeping through three countries beginning with the letter 'I' while searching for God." It is prophetic that the three countries she decides to visit on her quest all begin with the letter "I" - namely, Italy, India and Indonesia - because that seems to be where all her problems and unhappiness begin as well. I, I, I. I (there's that letter again) found it hard to warm up to Gilbert at first, mostly because I've known so many women in her situation who were not able to take themselves off to exotic places in order to confront their demons with the help of a guru....