The Trouble with You
Fanny Fabricant’s husband comes home safely from World War II, and all is supposed to return to normal. Instead, Fanny is left with a young daughter and a life she was never prepared for: that of a woman who must work when jobs that were plentiful while the men were at war are suddenly unavailable to women. It was patriotic for a woman to work during the war. Now it is patriotic for her not to, and to give the jobs back to men. Feldman combines Fanny’s dilemma and her simultaneous blossoming as a writer of radio serials with the looming danger of the McCarthy-era blacklist, which invades Fanny’s new profession like a dark, poisonous gas.
Ellen Feldman is a child of that time, and her memory is spot-on, from seams in women’s stockings to the cloud of suspicion that gathered around a writer who went to the wrong meeting or subscribed to the wrong magazine, much less flirted with Communism twenty years earlier or even knew someone who had. Defending oneself against it is impossible. A blacklisted writer or actor simply disappears.
The narrative follows Fanny and her daughter Chloe in skillful close third person. The secondary characters are equally well drawn: Fanny’s boss Alice; her aunt Rose, an old lefty who knows a thing or two; her straitlaced cousin Mimi; and Charlie Berlin, who can’t resist skating on the edge of the blacklist to thumb his nose at McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. The reader may find uncomfortable echoes of current politics in both the blacklist and the post-war urge to shove women back into the kitchen and nursery. Highly recommended.
