GOODNIGHT, LADIES
By Zane Kotker
Off the Common Books/Levellers Press
www.levellerspress.com
In a country and culture generally obsessed with youth, Zane Kotker offers a welcome antidote with her novella “Goodnight, Ladies.” In her new work, the Northampton novelist, whose first book, “Bodies in Motion,” was published in 1972, profiles three widowed women who have entered their early 70s and are navigating a strange period in their lives.
After years of marriage, work and raising families, Chessa, Nikki and Pru, who live in a New England town bearing a resemblance to Northampton, have more free time they could have ever imagined. But what, exactly, are they to fill those hours with? Dancing classes, volunteer work, reading and sifting through old papers and cards can only take you so far.
With their children grown and living elsewhere, they’re also confronting an unmistakable loneliness and unintended solitude, as well as a sense that their remaining time could be short.
Chessa looks for companionship by adopting a shelter dog that she names Jack L. Johnson, after a long-ago college lover. Nikki divides her day by minutes and is “careful to make a day plan because, without one, she might stare straight into time as it passes.”
Pru, meanwhile, is fretting about her impending move from her now too-large townhouse into a small condo in a retirement complex — not so much because of the diminished space but because, as she tells her daughter, Cori, in a phone call, “It’s just got Last Stop written all over it.”
If the themes in this slim book (111 pages) can be poignant and downbeat, they’re also lifted by plenty of wry humor and elegant, crystalline writing. The three ladies are all part of a weekly book club, and when just the three of them meet one winter night at Chessa’s home, they group themselves by the living room fireplace.
“Now the fire crackles, the three women lean toward each other like so many Shakespearean witches. … All three raise their wine glasses in salute. This is living.”
Chessa later goes on a comically bad lunch date with someone she meets through an online match service, a man who goes by the handle “ProsperousPoet” but has no actual verse to offer her, just a few clumsy sexual innuendoes.
Perhaps the most moving chapter is one in which Nikki, teaching a class in southern Spain to seniors on researching their family histories, travels for a few days with Douglas, a young fellow teacher from London, and finds herself drawn to him, a reminder of her own once-20-something son.
“This was another woman’s son, a woman who was probably missing Douglas as much as she’d missed Matt during the year of his travels. Tonight it was as if she’d somehow managed to meet up with her own son as he made his way years ago from Naples to Prague and down to Gaza.”
That chapter also gives Kotker a chance to describe some of the same land she wrote about so vividly in her most recent novel, “The Inner Sea,” an historical novel set in and around the Mediterranean in the year A.D. 100. That book, like “Goodnight, Ladies,” was published by Levellers Press of Amherst.
In the end, “Goodnight, Ladies” offers a moving meditation on memory and loss, while also staring down the realities of aging in a matter-of-fact way. As Kotker writes, “Death seems so impossible to the young. To the old it’s as common as spent tea bags.”
Zane Kotker will read from and sign copies of “Goodnight, Ladies” Wednesday at 7 p.m. at Broadside Books in Northampton.