Red Clocks

Terminations were lawful then, but (she) wanted to know how it felt to grow a human, with her own blood and minerals, in her own red clock.

Red Clocks should have been perfectly appealing to my tastes – I am always interested in women's stories and nontraditional writing styles – but this just missed the mark for me: too political, too tricksy, too manufactured at the expense of conjuring any real emotion. (I'll not flog my dead horse by blaming MFA programs, like the one where author Leni Zumas teaches, for shaping modern American storytelling in this direction that does not appeal to me.) There were certainly bits and passages that I enjoyed, and I surely support women's reproductive rights, but the whole simply didn't add up to a successful novel for me. 

The United States Congress ratified the Personhood Amendment, which gives the constitutional right to life, liberty, and property to a fertilized egg at the moment of conception. Abortion is now illegal in all fifty states. Abortion providers can be charged with second-degree murder, abortion seekers with conspiracy to commit murder. In vitro fertilization, too, is federally banned, because the amendment outlaws the transfer of embryos from laboratory to uterus. (The embryos can’t give their consent to be moved.)

Red Clocks begins in this near-future/alt-present in which abortion and in vitro fertilisation have both been outlawed in the US, and through the stories of four interconnected women in coastal Oregon, we learn how this legislation affects their lives. To underline the fact that women have been reduced to their societal roles, each rotating section is titled “The Biographer”, “The Mender”, “The Wife”, or “The Daughter”. The reader does eventually learn these women's names when other characters speak to them, and so the four are: Ro, an unmarried high school history teacher who is trying to become pregnant while writing the biography of an unheralded female polar explorer (the story of this Eivør Mínervudóttir, as written by Ro, is also interspersed, providing a fifth lens on womanhood); Gin is a woods-dwelling herbalist who provides clandestine health care and fends off accusations of witchcraft; Susan is an unhappily married mother of two young children who feels both superior to and jealous of Ro and her freedoms; and Mattie is a bright fifteen-year-old student of Ro's who, while treasured by her adoptive parents, suffers the psychic ache of having been given up as a baby and has her own ideas about the rights and best fate of the unborn. Each of these characters intersect, and beneath the big questions about what right a government has to control what a woman does with her uterus, is this thrum of female angst and jealousies and to what extent marriage and motherhood are intrinsically desired or culturally imposed – with each of them concluding that every woman should do whatever she damn well pleases, even if that includes impersonating a man in order to join a Victorian Age polar expedition. 

After January fifteenth, when Every Child Needs Two goes into effect, no adopted kid will have to suffer from a single woman's lack of time, her low self-esteem, her inferior earning power. Every adopted kid will now reap the rewards of growing up in a two-parent home. Fewer single mothers, say the congressmen, will mean fewer criminals and addicts and welfare recipients. Fewer pomegranate farmers. Fewer talk-show hosts. Fewer cure inventors. Fewer presidents of the United States.

With this second phase of the legislation about to take effect, the clock is ticking for Ro who, in addition to her artificial insemination treatments, has been languishing on a list at an adoption agency as a prospective single parent, and this deadline adds some urgency to an otherwise unexciting plotline. This urgency also causes Ro – who is probably the most centered and politically engaged character in the book – to uncharacteristically attempt to pit her own desires against another woman's agency, and this adds some shades of subtlety to an otherwise black and white debate (I don't think that most readers would hope for this legislation.) As a side note: I found it curious that Zumas didn't refer to how same-sex parents might be affected by this law – despite some queer hanky-panky in the book – does “Every Child Need Two” mean any two? Not that it affected the plot, but it made me wonder. 

As for the writing: Every switch from The Biographer to The Wife (or whomever) was jarring, and especially in the beginning when I didn't have the rhythm yet – it took me a while to realise that the title at the top of each section often (but not always) served as the subject of that section's first sentence, and caused me to reread these opening sentence fragments for their meaning. I tend to like wordplay, but this was a bit annoying. I did like the fragmentary nature of the bits on Eivør Mínervudóttir – her story is a work in progress, after all – and while Ro, Susan, and Mattie's sections were straightforwardly standard prose, the witchy recluse Gin's sections reflected her wyrd inner thoughts:

A witch who says no to her lover and no to the law must be suffocated in a cell of the hive. She who says no to her lover and no to the law shall bleed salt from the face. Two eyes of salt in the face of a witch who says no to her lover and no to the law shall be seen by policemen who come to the cabin. Faces of witches who say no do resemble those of owls tied by leashes to stakes. Venefica mellifera, Venefica diabolus. If a town be plagued by a witch who says No, I won't stop mending and who says No, you can't hide in my house, and the lover Lola does feel sorrow and shame, and the hard-fisted husband of Lola does discover the betrayal of his wife, and the lover Lola, to save her own life, tells a lie about the witch, the witch's body shall be lashed to a stake. Her owl teeth shall catch flame first, sparks of blue at the white before the red tongue catches too. A witch's body when burning does smell of blistered milk; the odor makes onlookers vomit, yet they still look on.

This was all just fine; interesting without adding up to something artful or truly edgy. And as for the political undertones: this felt like more than just a warning against the return of desperate women into the hands of back alley butchers. Red Clocks reads like a fictional companion piece to Lindy West's book of essays, Shrill – in which not only are women encouraged to “shout their abortions” (West suggests that an abortion is a morality-free medical procedure equivalent to a teeth-cleaning) but also to “break the period taboo”; writing that we need to routinely talk about women's bodies and their functions so that male legislators aren't scared into creating laws about (and against) them. I reckon this is why Zumas gives us not only a teenaged girl calling her friend for advice when she loses a tampon “up there” but also a woman imagining asking her OB/GYN to rank the tang of her vagina on a scale from “an elderly cheese” to no odor at all, a mother of two thinking about how a labiaplasty might fix all that flapping in the nether-regions when she exits the shower, or a housework-shirking husband being offended by pubic hairs on the toilet rim. I see some reviewers write that all this pushes the limits of taste, but I'm thinking this was exactly Zumas' intent: normalise to demystify. 

And a final note as a Canadian: The “Pink Wall” (that Canadian customs agents/law enforcement who suspect an American woman is trying to enter Canada in order to procure an abortion or in vitro fertilisation would be obligated to return her for prosecution) would never ever happen – we are a sovereign nation with the most liberal abortion policies in the world (there are no laws restricting access to abortion, for any reason, and they're free). Not only did it make me snort grumpily when a fictional customs agent referred to Canada as “the True North” (ugh, as if) and said, “I've got two daughters aboot your age...” (uggggh, as iffer), but what was the point of Zumas writing that a Canadian prime minister would give the “Those whom nature hath so joined together, let no man put asunder” speech about our two countries and then credit those words, in the end notes, to JFK? Annoying Canadians doesn't come at too steep a cost, but consider me annoyed. And rather disappointed overall.