I’m well rid of Birdie, Mrs. Kimble #1, and into Joan, Ken Kimble’s second wife. Birdie was a pathetic creature, unable to get over her husband’s leaving her with two small children, and finding comfort in wine. I was sympathetic to a point–when I found out she was only twenty-six. Her uselessness and lack of ambition–even in the prefeminist days of 1969–was annoying. I was around in 1969; women were always strong, they were just loathe to reveal it in ways that made them independent and self-sufficient. Funny how the housewives of the era are shown to be weak and helpless on their own, yet they ran the households, raised the children, and waltzed around a man whose only required asset was his paycheck while they were married. It’s not the way it was.
Jennifer Haigh steps up the pace a little bit with Joan’s section, although we still get bogged down in details and are just starting to meet a Ken Kimble character who is still alien to us, a third way into the book. There is a smooth enough transition into the hop from Birdie to Joan (although Birdie is left standing drunk and sobbing at her father’s funeral) and I hope that we do find out the trailing stories of all the women to bring them back to the present point of the opening–Ken Kimble’s death.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology