Octogenarian Jane Campbell may be “new” to the publishing industry, but her first book, Cat Brushing, is refreshingly accomplished. The thirteen exquisitely drawn short stories in the collection are woven with wit and bold enlightenment. Each meticulously crafted gem focuses on the lives of aging women who grapple with their shrinking places in the world while coming to terms with feelings and failings, choices and losses.
Longing, need and
sensuality surprise: A woman who “never put a foot over the line,” lives out
her days in a care facility. Having grown distant from her self-interested
adult children, the woman experiences an unexpected awakening amidst the gentle
touch of her attentive manicurist. A similar theme infuses the tender story of
one writerly woman’s life and a sense of loneliness that persists throughout
marriages, affairs and motherhood. When she settles alone in a small village
later ravaged by a violent storm, she takes in a displaced neighbor whose house
is destroyed. The two disparate souls form a bond deeper than either could have
imagined.
Reflective pleasures abound in
the title story, where a woman “judged too old to live alone,” moves in with
her son and his younger wife. Feeling “dispossessed… of control and elegance,” the
woman and her Siamese cat become fellow inmates. The cat arouses charms and
wiles the woman once had in abundance—maybe all is not lost?
Many stories deal with women
forced to give up rights, respect and desires: An older woman takes a fall that
sets in motion a series of events that drag her back to the past and a
questionable issue of adoption. A simple lunch resurrects a memory of parental
love that suddenly transforms, through the prism of retrospect, into control. A
chance meeting on a train depicts the effect of consequential choices. Revenge
tastes sweet when an unassuming neighbor privy to a long-suffering, powerless
wife and her ogre husband cleverly settles a score.
Aspects
of regret, mourning, fantasies, and lost love infuse these eloquently rendered,
skillfully plotted stories that pack a wallop. “Ageing is often represented as
an accumulation, of disease, of discomforts, of wrinkles,” says the narrator of
the title story. However, in these wholly original, late-in-life stories
crafted by Jane Campbell, the limitations incurred by
aging ultimately become surprising sources of wisdom and empowered liberation.
Grove
Press/Grove Atlantic, $26.00 hardcover, 256 pages,
9780802160027
Publication Date: August
9, 2022
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NOTE: To
read this review as published on Shelf Awareness
for the Book Trade (June 20, 2022 ), link HERE
NOTE: To read a
condensed version of this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's
Edition (August 12, 2022), link HERE