The Girl Pretending To Read Rilke
Barbara Riddle’s 2013 novel The Girl Pretending to Read Rilke is set in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the summer of 1963, which was not only a seminal period for its protagonist, 19- year-old Bronwen, but for the entire nation as well. While Bronwen pursues both her unrequited love for her boyfriend and her passion for science as an assistant in a Harvard chemistry laboratory under the guidance of a dysfunctional doctoral candidate dealing with his own demons, the country is in the midst of a civil rights crisis, facing a growing communist insurgency in South Viet Nam, witnessing the birth of the feminist movement, and within a few months, reeling from President John Kennedy’s assassination.
Like most young women attracted to the sciences in the sixties, Bronwen faces her share of discrimination in a field traditionally dominated by males. While attending a scientific conference, she observes: “The rating system broke down completely, however, when it came to females: there were so few that almost all the ones who came to speak were outstanding. The terribly clever clumsy ones lived with their mothers, wore brown Oxfords with laces and very thick crepe soles, and no one judged or cared; the sexy ones proved they had a body as well as a mind by wearing heels and tight sweaters, and were the targets of the most aggressive questioning.”
The novel opens with a prologue that provides a glimpse into Bronwen’s state of mind and sets the stage for the coming months. From the time her plane departs Portland and lands in Boston, she has only one thought, to make love to her boyfriend, Eric. At the same time she justifies rushing into his bed, she reveals that Eric may not be as anxious to reunite as she is. “It was not a bad thing, not bad at all, to have finished her junior year at a tough college, to have a paying summer job at one of the best biochem labs on the East Coast, and to have a Harvard Junior Fellow awaiting her arrival. It wasn’t his fault if he was too busy to meet her at the airport.” Indeed, she is filled with self-doubt and anxiety about their relationship. In short, Eric makes her feel inadequate. “It was all starting to come back. The sensation of being watched, and judged. And found wanting. She would never be smart enough.”
But no matter how liberated she feels, or how ambitious she is, Bronwen is ahead of her time. Coming of age in the sixties puts her at a distinct disadvantage. The world is not yet ready for women’s equality. Yet, it is Bronwen’s determination to succeed, despite the odds against her, that makes Barbara Riddle’s novel such a wonderful read. Rather than focus on the troubling historic context surrounding her heroine, Riddle keeps her lens on Bronwen as she experiences her own transformation, while letting us see just enough to connect us to the past. One example is: “Her best present that year was a Brownie Hawkeye camera, nestled in its cardboard nest next to the flash attachment that came with it. The next day her father took her to the opening of the huge black and white photography exhibit called The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art uptown.” And this mention of another early icon of Americana: “One of its main virtues was its proximity to a new hamburger place called McDonald's, where you could get burgers for twenty-nine cents and salty shoestring fries for eleven.”
Riddle also heightens the tension within her story by deftly introducing a second point of view, that of Bronwen’s advisor, Felix. In fact, he inhabits the novels first two chapters where we learn that he is married to Paulette, a much smarter, more capable scientist who endures his absent minded professor persona, complete with its lack of personal hygiene and a penchant for donuts, perhaps only because she must, considering that she was born a woman. “For Felix, women and doughnuts were proof that some kind of benevolent intelligence was responsible for the universe as he knew it.”
As the story unfolds, it is clear that Bronwen’s relationship to Eric is troublesome. He comes across as talented, smart, arrogant, and when Bronwen least expects it, unfaithful. Unnerved by the revelation that Eric is not who she thought he was and the news that her father died, she visits her estranged mother in Greenwich Village, has a one night stand with dire consequences, and receives an unexpected declaration of love from the most unlikely of prospects.
The joy of Riddle’s novel lies in her empathetic and honest betrayal of its characters in a period fraught with revolutions of individual spirit and our collective national conscience. It is how Bronwen succeeds and ultimately triumphs that wins our love and respect. Whether readers are old enough to have lived through the sixties like Bronwen, or are experiencing that tumultuous decade vicariously, The Girl Pretending to Read Rilke, delivers.
***
Published by Pilgrim’s Lane Press / December 16, 2013
—Reviewed by Stephen Newton