The Little Women

I loved "The Little Women." Now, I will confess up front: I also cherished the child's book "Little Women" by Louisa May Alcott, on which it is loosely based. However, you can enjoy this book without having read the Alcott version. Meg (age 20), Jo (age 17) and Amy (age 15) Green are three lovely and accomplished young women who live on the upper West Side of New York in an enclave of liberal, educated privilege and wealth. Everyone wants to be the Green Family. Their father is a successful inventor, their mother is a beloved literature professor. Both parents set the highest ideals of family values for themselves and for their children. Thus it comes as a great shock to the children when they find out that their mother has had an affair and their father has gotten over it. They can't. And so the children "divorce' their parents and move to New Haven where Meg is a junior at Yale. The book is at once idealistic and incredibly realistic. On one hand, it seems very difficult to believe that these children would endure such hardship for more than a few days because of their adherence to their principals. On the other hand, their life in New Haven-complete with gritty descriptions of the public high school, the homeless situation, the rundown apartment-ring true. The reader comes to care very much about these three sisters and their roommate Teddy, an orphaned Yale student who serves as a reality check to these children so willing to give up two living parents. The book's "narrator" is Jo--with "reader's notes" from Amy and Meg. This device bothered some reviewers. I actually liked it and it made me think more about the art of novel writing. Now if you have read "Little Women" (the Alcott version), you can enjoy this book on another level. The author basically riffs off certain elements of the earlier one. Some of her riffs are extended--Teddy, the roommate, is clearly a substitute for the beloved neighbor "Laurie" in the original. Some of her riffs are only one or two notes-but on perfect pitch such as Jo dealing with a Lesbian pass being made at her. In addition, the "readers' notes" from Meg and Amy may make more sense--Alcott based her characters on her sisters and Meg and Amy fared the worst in her version. I recommend this book highly for lovers of good literature everywhere--even if you haven't read the original!

I'm not going to go into the plot as most other people have. I just want to talk about style, which only some have done. The Reader's Notes and Author's Comments are indeed charming and as one reviewer said in these pages - it took a while to get the rhythm (every book has its own, this one has two) but once you do - you miss when things happen in the narrative and there are no notes. The other thing I loved is the sentence structure that at times mirrors actual sentences from Alcott. It shows the mastery of the author despite "Shlockbuster"'s comments. Glad to hear Weber teaches at Yale. Gives me hope for the future of novel writing.

What if Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women," Meg, Jo and Amy, were transported into 21st century lives and their exemplary family circle was besmirched by infidelity? Weber's third novel (after "Objects in Mirror Are Closer than They Appear" and "The Music Lesson") poses this question in a playful, multi-referential coming-of-age comedy.Affluent New Yorkers, the elder Greens, Janet and Lou, are brainy, academic, sophisticated, loving, and fascinating to each other and to their three devoted daughters. Meg, 20, a student at Yale, is levelheaded and deliberative; Joanna, 17, is a plainspoken tomboy, and Amy, 15, is impetuous, hotheaded and artistic. They revel in being sisters and family life is stimulating, comforting, wholly engaging. In a word, bliss.Then Janet, the English professor, has an affair with one of her students. But Lou refuses to be enraged and Janet refuses to prostrate herself in abject shame; both reject histrionics. Their rapprochement is civilized and does not involve their daughters. Janet and Lou refuse to even discuss the matter with the girls, stubbornly ignoring their outrageous taunts and vicious insults. Betrayed, infuriated, the sisters decide to go live with Meg in her New Haven apartment. "We left our mother and father because they wouldn't leave each other."Joanna narrates. It's four years later and she has written an autobiographical novel. Since her account involves her sisters she has entered into a "binding agreement" to allow them to insert "reader's notes" in the text, which she responds to in "author's notes." They settle in with Teddy Bell, their orphaned flatmate, and attend an inner city school, which presents a ghastly contrast to their privileged private school, while learning the alarming value of money when it's lacking. Joanna relates their solidarity, their sorrow and their disagreements, sparking affronted commentary from her sisters, who see events differently. These interjections offer lively variations on the events of the story - a witty, sisterly bickering that explores the role of the unreliable narrator, the wobbly relationship between perception and reality, the novelist's responsibilities and the self-serving aspects of fiction. These notes also create new dimensions to the characters Joanna has depicted in her novel.Though the ending is a trifle abrupt and the story's climax - a revelation of secrets and coming-of-age ambiguities - feels rushed and unresolved, this is a delight from first page to last. Written with humor, compassion and irony, the novel explores issues of class and fairness as well as family dynamics and the all-important role of perception and point-of-view. Weber's prose is elegant, spare, charming, witty and engaging. A wonderful novel from an author who continues to surprise with each new book.

I've read all of Katharine Weber's novels. Each explores very different themes. That alone makes Weber worth reading. So many novelists write the same book over and over, rehashing their own discoveries -- when I find a novelist who doesn't -- its worth noting.Weber's writing is always spare and pared down. Nothing excessive. But still full, rich, and in the case of this novel, funny and even sweet. Weber always makes an effort to look depper and unearth some truth in her fiction.In this case, it is amusingly, the line between fiction and fact, and the way novelists use reality. The novel succeeds in doing that admirably and I personally found the marginalia one of the most interesting and charming parts of the novel.I'm guessing that this book will become part of many college classroom reading lists for what it says about literature and how we are meant to read between the lines of what an author chooses to tell us.

Katharine Weber has taken a classic story and reworked it. That alone could be a warning. But, oh, what a wonderful rework this is! The three sisters are so deftly created and defined that Weber hardly needed to identify which one was delivering the lines. The girls feel betrayed, devastated, when they learn of their mother's infidelity and their father's quickness to forgive. How could the two people they love most think so little of their perfect little family? Bereft, angry, offended, the two younger girls leave home to live with big sister at Yale. Simple story, but there's so much more: it's in fact a novel within a novel because one of the sisters writes about the intimate facts of their post-NYC lives. To do so, she agrees to allow her sisters to comment (which we see in Reader's Notes). Her responses to their comments also appear (Author's Notes). It's a device I've never seen and, although it took me a few pages to get into the rhythm, I began to look forward to the next Notes. So this is actually a novel within in a novel, with a second story (the exchange between sisters and sister-author) running concurrently. It's remarkable that Weber did this...even more remarkable that she succeeded with near perfection.I recommend this novel to anyone who loves a beautifully crafted novel of literary quality. It's a perfect choice for book clubs and I'm about to suggest it to mine!