Half a Heart

Rating:
Summary: An emotionally rewarding answer to the question "what if?"
Review: As the mother of several grown children, I've often wondered who my children would have been without my influence...who I would have been without them at the center of my life. This wonderful story explores those "What if" questions in an engrossing and authentic way. By creating a mother and daughter who are desperate to compensate for a lifetime of seperation, this book pays beautiful tribute to the amazing power of parenthood. As is always true of Ms. Brown's books, the writing is lush and lovely.

Rating:
Summary: Intriguing premise, flawed execution
Review: Readers of Brown's BEFORE AND AFTER, a novel that packed a tremendous emotional wallop, may be disappointed in HALF A HEART. The author starts with an intriguing premise: Miriam, an idealistic young Jewish woman, gets caught up in the civil rights struggle during the 1960's. In the course of teaching at an African-American college in Mississippi, she has a passionate love affair with a charismatic fellow teacher, the consequences of which profoundly affect the course of her adult life. While the reader is made to care about how Miriam will resolve her conflicts, the author spends far too much time describing the characters' feelings and emotions instead of letting their words and actions speak for themselves. In addition, Miriam sometimes comes across as a kvetch! Get on with your life, woman, you want to say, and stop all this analyzing and brooding. The book would have been far more effective had it been one hundred pages shorter. (For a more tightly written, suspenseful examination of how the baggage of the 60's can affect lives in the 90's, read Sue Miller's WHILE I WAS GONE.)

Rating:
Summary: A disappointing book from a good writer.
Review: This novel disappointed me deeply because it started out so good, with so much potential. A white woman gives birth to the child of a black man in 1960s Mississippi. She leaves the child to be raised by the father, but eighteen years later, still haunted by the daughter she lost, she goes looking for her. That premise has potential for melodrama, of course, but also for an interesting exploration of what it means to be a mother, as well as some complicated racial issues.

For the first hundred pages, I thought this novel would probe those issues in a sensitive and intelligent way. The two main characters Ð Miriam, the mother who left her daughter behind, and Ronnee, her bi-racial child Ð start out as intriguing characters. The pain of Miriam, who has a good life, but canÕt appreciate it because of the hole left by her absent child, is palpable. And Ronnee is a beautifully written character. We learn early on that she agrees to meet with her mother mainly because sheÕs hoping for some money to finance her way to college. And yet she doesnÕt come across as a greedy villain, but rather as an intelligent, ambitious and complex young woman.

But once Rosellen Brown goes into flashback to tell the story of MiriamÕs affair with RonneeÕs father, the novel goes astray. The biggest problem is that the author doesnÕt seem to know what to make of MiriamÕs lover, Eljay. She begins with a promising portrait of a charming and intelligent man, somewhat edgy and resentful because of all he has had to suffer to get where he is. But then, out of nowhere, he gets involved with a group of black separatists who seem to take over his personality. Suddenly heÕs a different, incomprehensible, man. Because we never get inside EljayÕs head, but only see him from MiriamÕs point of view, the change in him seems weird. I have the feeling Rosellen Brown was merely trying to make the point that black racism can be just as bad as white racism, but her political point gets in the way of the story. It would have been a lot more interesting to see what Afrocentrism meant to a man like Eljay. Dismissing his point of view seems like a betrayal of a potentially fascinating character.

And the novel goes downhill from there, with one clichÂŽ after another. Almost all the characters, black and white, are bigots, and the bigotry is so blatant and obvious, so crude, that it makes the novel seem anachronistic. God knows racism has not disappeared, but the author seems unaware that it usually takes subtler forms than it did in 1960.

Rosellen Brown is obviously a talented writer, and this novel had a lot of potential, but unfortunately the promise remained unfulfilled.