Big Sister Anna Quindlen
Culturebox never dreamed, when New York Times Op-Ed columnist and
suburban mom Anna Quindlen abandoned journalism for fiction-writing five years
ago, that it would be nice to have her back. But consider the hole she left
behind her in the pundit universe. The columns of her successor at the
Times , Maureen Dowd, consist of Heathers -like pronunciamentos
upon the coolness of this politician and the uncoolness of that one, each
punctuated by a saucy flounce. Quindlen's predecessor in the slot at
Newsweek she began to fill this week, the late Meg Greenfield, issued
closely argued bulletins from somewhere deep inside a Washington dinner party.
Quindlen is neither saucy nor one step ahead of the conventional wisdom, but
her virtues are ones that Culturebox suspects it's unhealthy to do without:
She's substantive and stern; she's loyal to husband and kids; she makes peace,
not war; she favors old-fashioned horse sense over brilliance. " 'To see
ourselves as others see us,' was the line my grandmother would always throw out
when she was crabby and I was full of myself," is the sort of thing she's wont
to declare--wisely, self-deprecatingly, and only somewhat preachily. Culturebox
would count herself lucky to have Anna Quindlen as a big sister, though she'd
probably throttle the girl after a year or two.
Let's clear up another common misconception while we're at it. Big
sister-ish though she may be, Quindlen's is not the voice of feminism in our
time. It's easy to mistake it for that, and her critics generally do, making
her a springboard for an attack on feminism in general. She draws on her own
experience, thereby making the personal political, and was for a long time the
only female voice on the white, male Times Op-Ed page. She favors what
one critic, Karen Lehrman, calls "motherhood politics"--she's for stuff that's
good for kids and against stuff that's bad for them. But feminism is an
ideology, which is to say a relatively coherent intellectual position, a set of
arguments attached to a political objective. So weighty an agenda demands a
consistency Quindlen has not, so far, evinced. Insofar as she's a feminist,
she's a pop feminist--an Oprah or Lifetime feminist, a cheerleader for
women in all their travails. But we read Quindlen, if we do, for her peppy
style, and that emerges out of another tradition entirely--not the reformist
rhetoric of Susan B. Anthony and Betty Friedan but the homespun, folksy, and
often surprisingly liberal tones of an earlier era in American journalism, when
newspaper editorialists and magazine editors and advice columnists elevated the
anecdote of daily life to the status of gospel and did more than just about
anyone else to invent our 20 th -century idea of everydayness.
In short, Quindlen is a sentimentalist, which is not an insult in
Culturebox's book, since to harden one's heart to sentimentalism is to take
oneself beyond the reach of much of American culture. Some of those whose
sensibility Quindlen shares happen be female--Ann Landers, Dear Abby, and Mary
Worth, the well-coiffed, well-born newspaper comic-strip heroine who has been
dispensing sage advice to her less well-adapted neighbors since 1938. But
others are male, such as the author and illustrator who create Mary Worth anew
every day, or George Horace Lorimer, an editor of the old magazine the
Saturday Evening Post and an aphorist whose nuggets of wisdom sound
uncannily Quindlenesque: "Education is about the only thing lying around loose
in the world, and it's about the only thing a fellow can have as much of he's
willing to haul away" is one of his more famous ones. Another Quindlen-like
figure was William Allen White, the great turn-of-the-century editor of the
Emporia, Kansas, Gazette , who deployed his aw-shucks tone to attack
heartland know-nothingism and populism, but whose greatest column is widely
acknowledged to be his elegy to his daughter, who died after she ran into a
low-hanging branch while riding a horse.
Ann Landers and her sister believe in good behavior; White believed in the
importance of humor, dignity, and not being provincial; what does Quindlen feel
strongly about? Editorials are supposed to be the literature of opinion, but
for the key to Quindlen's core beliefs you must turn to her novels. These are
as morally instructive in their way as the works of another, far greater
sentimentalist, Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin .
Quindlen's first novel, Object Lessons , is a coming-of-age story about
the perils of letting others tell you what to do in life. The homily is
provided by--who else?--the heroine's best friend's smart and unusually poised
big sister: "Just remember that sometimes you drift into things, and then you
can't get out of them," the sister advises the novel's protagonist. "Not to
decide is to decide." One True Thing , the story of a woman who comes
home to take care of her dying mother and winds up accused of euthanasia,
echoes that lesson but ups the ante: If you're passive enough to let your
parents dump their problems on you, they can darn near destroy your life.
Quindlen's latest novel, Black and Blue , makes the consequences of
letting someone else tell you what to do even more horrifyingly explicit: It's
the movie-of-the-week-type saga of woman on the run from her abusive husband.
Quindlen's message is clear: You have to figure out who you are, think for
yourself, take some responsibility, for crying out loud.
As convictions go, it's not the most original around, but it's not a
terrible one either. Quindlen's first column in Newsweek is more of the
same. This time, the den-mother persona is underscored by the photograph that
accompanies the piece, of Quindlen with sensibly cropped hair. The editorial is
a sigh of disgust at the whole Brooklyn Museum mess. It's slightly smarter than
most on this subject, with more of a sense of history (she tosses the New York
Society for the Suppression of Vice into the mix). But ah, yes, here comes the
grandmotherly language: "Oh, for pity's sake, here we go again." Here's the
liberal common sense: "[I]n other news, cops are being accused of savagery,
priests of impropriety, and thousands of children are failing in the New York
City schools. And civic leaders, both political and religious, are using their
bully pulpits for this?" So what if Quindlen's about a week late to the story?
The point is, she's right, as she usually is. It wouldn't hurt us to eat our
fiber when she tells us to, or to grow up, either.
