"I don't believe there's such a thing as ordinary life. I think all life is extraordinary," American author Hilma Wolitzer once told an interviewer. It's a quotation highlighted by Elizabeth Strout in her foreword to Wolitzer's newly issued collection, Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket. Strout commends the New York author for writing searing, indelible stories about ordinary individuals, a description that could easily apply to Strout, or indeed that great chronicler of everyday worlds and families, Anne Tyler.
Wolitzer (mother of the author Meg Wolitzer) is less well known than Tyler and Strout, though her writing is every bit as sharp, funny and insightful as her contemporaries. Wolitzer is also significantly older. Now in her 90s, she has come out of retirement to write what is to date the best piece of fiction or non-fiction I’ve read about the toll of the pandemic.
The Great Escape, the final story in the collection, is an astute and shattering piece inspired by Wolitzer’s experiences of coronavirus. An elderly New York couple, Howard and Paulie, are at the stage of life where “there was only one mystery left after a lengthy marriage: which partner would die first?” This mordant wit of Paulie, the narrator, becomes cruelly poignant when the pandemic lands.
The structure of the story is deft and realistic. The couple initially dismiss their daughter’s worries as unnecessary panic, before realising, like everyone else, that something extraordinary is taking place: “Novel coronavirus, Covid-19 – like the devil, it had alternate names.”
The Great Escape is a universal horror story brought to life through specific detail: book clubs on Zoom, “each [member] in a separate little frame, like the celebrities on Hollywood Squares”; denials and misinformation from those in power, “the president’s cruel and cloying voice”; the weeks that turn into months of isolation: “Sometimes I looked through the peephole just to see the back of another human being receding down the hallway.”
The loss, when it happens, is startlingly clear in the cadence and precision of Wolitzer’s prose: “My throat ached with contained language.”
Each of the 13 stories in the book includes the year of publication. Most were written in the 1960s and 1970s, so to call this a new collection isn’t entirely accurate. Rather, it is an overdue reissue of some great writing, culminating with a contemporary pandemic story.
Wolitzer is a recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. She has taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, New York University, Columbia University, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Her first published story appeared when she was 36 and her first novel eight years later.
Throughout the collection there are plenty of these strange, fitting twists or moments, queer and vivid and memorable
Other acclaimed authors who have seen renewed interest in their work after modern reprints include Rachel Ingalls, Elizabeth Taylor and Penelope Mortimer. Fans of Mortimer's Saturday Lunch at the Brownings collection will find a similar style and approach in Wolitzer's stories: cutting humour and discernment on the everyday events that can quickly descend into tragedy or horror.
In Nights, the loneliness and eeriness of insomnia is palpable: “I am here alone in this stillness in which I have a dog’s sense of hearing, can hear beds creak, distant telephones, letters whispering down mail slots on every floor.” The haunting Mother follows a woman who has just given birth in a creepy maternity ward at Bellevue Hospital: “‘They need [the name] for the certificate,’ Jon said. She had a sudden, dreadful image of the small, toppled tombstones in the old churchyard near their house.” Elsewhere, drollness is in abundance as Wolitzer charts the fortunes (over multiple stories) of the marriage of Paulie and Howard: “I couldn’t help thinking that men whose mothers have established an early habit of guilt in them are probably the easiest.”
The stories start brightly – “Everybody said that there was a sex maniac loose in the complex and I thought – it’s about time. It had been a long asexual winter”– and frequently end up in surprising places.
Whether it’s the titular woman in the supermarket, or a wife who brings her husband to open house viewings to manage his depression, Wolitzer is observant and truthful on the tensions that exist in daily life, particularly in the domestic realm. The stunning Bodies, third from last, is a case in point, where a story ostensibly about the death of a family member turns into one about indecent exposure.
The collection is full of these strange, fitting twists or moments, queer and vivid and memorable. As Strout sums it up in her foreword: “This is what literature does for us; it breaks down these barriers for a moment within which we all live.”
