The New Woman: A Staggerford Novel

With warmth, gentle humor, irony, and repeating characters, Jon Hassler has kept readers fascinated with life in Staggerford, Minnesota, for nearly thirty years. Friendships, loyalties, gossip, and jealousies--all the raw material of smalltown community activity--come to life in the relationships among the characters, many of whom have been featured throughout the twelve Staggerford novels. The 87-year-old grande dame of Staggerford, Agatha McGee, formerly a teacher at St. Isidore's school, has finally moved out of her house along the river and into the Sunset Senior Apartments, where she finds the closeness of her neighbors to be stifling, at times. When her diamond brooch turns up missing, Agatha looks carefully at her neighbors, trying to figure out who might have taken it. As always, Agatha's opinions reflect her strict world view--she is appalled at John Beezer's eating habits, at Big Edna's crassness, at the decline in grammatical speech, and at the general loss of civility she remembers from the old days in Staggerford, but she cannot imagine who might have taken her brooch. A twenty-year-old magazine article about an MX missile, ready to fire, which the US government once mounted on a train and moved around the country each night, inspires Agatha and her friend Lillian to create an "MX Box," into which each resident puts his/her valuables, to be moved around the complex in the care of a different resident each night. Hassler's gentle, wry humor devolves into dark humor here when the box is "misplaced" by a forgetful resident--everyone knows where it is, but no one knows how to retrieve it, and the resulting farce is black humor at its hilarious best. Plot is not Hassler's primary concern as he recreates the lives of Staggerford's elderly residents. His characters are believable, their dialogue is pitch-perfect, and his elderly readers (especially) will undoubtedly see themselves in the characters. Events are realistic and often poignant. Two long-time residents die. Agatha finds herself in charge of a young kidnapped child. Her visits to the local school leave her appalled at the lack of order, but her decision to set up a support group at the apartment complex meets with enormous success. No world-shaking events occur here, but Staggerford is not a world-shaking community--just a typical Midwestern, middleclass town observing the commonplaces of everyday life. It is these commonplace observances--and celebrations of the lifestyle they represent--that make Hassler's novels so winsome, nostalgic, and beloved. n Mary Whipple

Jon Hassler published his first Staggerford novel in 1977. That event set the scene for the subsequent books that tell the stories of the events that touched the lives of its inhabitants. When asked in an interview about his choice of locale he said, "I've been rooted in northern Minnesota all my life; I've never moved." Clearly this is his "place" and that is where he set his latest novel, THE NEW WOMAN. THE NEW WOMAN is the story of Agatha McGee, an octogenarian who taught sixth grade for almost 50 years in Staggerford. At 87 her health is good and her mental faculties are as sharp as they were when she was a much younger woman. She still lives in the house she grew up in, and until recently she managed very well. "She has carried around the image of Staggerford as a bucolic, serene little hamlet, and she was under the false impression that she was still acquainted with all its citizens, as she had been in her teaching days." For years she had based that view on what she was able to see from her windows in "her house on River Street." We meet her three days after she's moved into the Sunset Senior Apartments. And as she gazes from the window of her new home she stares at the Kmart parking lot across the street. She is amazed at the number of cars coming and going. "...she realized that there were hundreds of people living in this town whom she didn't know." When her lifelong friend Lillian, also a resident of the building, pays a call, Agatha thinks, "Oh, dear, this move was certainly a mistake." She "had feared that living here would compromise her independence." But in Hassler's imaginary Staggerford, things don't always turn out as expected, and as the story unfolds Agatha moves back and forth from the present to her past. And these journeys give the richness and texture of what otherwise could have been a novella without much punch. When one considers Hassler's words in another interview, a real connection is made between the writer and his theme and the reader and his message: "I spent seven years visiting my mother in a similar place in a small town in Minnesota," Hassler recalls. "I'd go up there once a week and we'd have our peach delight and our coffee. I got to know these people pretty well. I just felt so at home with them that I wanted to write about them. People get outspoken at that age, and I like that. I just love people talking at odds, going off in their own directions." Add to these flights of verbal disconnects the eccentricities of each member, and sparks fly. Over the course of a few weeks Agatha slowly works her magic and gains the respect of her fellow residents, realizing that since she retired what she missed most was being taken seriously. She really is the "grand old lady" of the town, and when she starts reaching out to her former students who are now the movers and shakers of Staggerford, she realizes that she was never forgotten. Hassler stages several scenes in which one or more of the characters experience