Next to Love by Ellen Feldman

Published by Spiegel & Grau on July 26, 2011

War stories cover familiar ground. Men go to war; some don't return. Those who don't die come back changed. Next to Love tells that story with a twist: its focus is not on the men who go to war but on the wives and lovers left behind. They furnish the novel's perspective on war's casualties: we see their reactions to husbands' deaths and to the erosion of the souls they once knew. The women in the novel are hard hit by war; dozens of the men in their town storm the beaches on D-Day and many die. As the book continues into the 1950s, the novel reflects postwar America in microcosm: the nascent civil rights movement, the baby boom, the displacement of women from the workforce and the blossoming of -- if not feminism -- a growing feeling of discontent on the part of women who are expected to make babies and martinis and leave everything else to men.

Babe Huggins grew up on the wrong side of a small town, about ninety miles from Boston. The nation has gone to war and women (including Babe's friends Grace and Millie) are marrying (and getting pregnant by) men who will soon return to battle. Babe is not married to Claude when she discovers the longstanding relationship between sex and war but she loves him and lives in fear of his death. Babe is an independent, unconventional thinker but she worries about how other women regard her. Knowing them to be hypocrites, she nonetheless judges herself by their standards and (rather unfairly) finds herself wanting. Her story --as it develops over the course of many years -- is one of pain that induces growth.

Millie and Grace have their own stories, yet as important as they are to the novel, the book belongs to Babe. Millie and Grace focus their lives on being good wives and mothers. They are not untouched by the exterior world (one experiences the indirect effects of religious prejudice, the other begins to question her new husband's true nature) but they are content to usher in the 1950s with its illusion of perfect families, stay-at-home moms, and devoted husbands. Only Babe seems to recognize that the national promise of equality for all Americans remains unfulfilled. Only Babe misses the role she played during the war, small though it was, when she held a job and believed in a cause. By the mid-1950s, Babe is "grieving for her own life ... she is, in some way she does not understand, broken."

The novel's biggest flaw, I think, is that Ellen Feldman tries to cover too much ground in too few pages. Millie's story seems artificial, as if Feldman felt the need to dream up a problem for her so that she'd fit in with the other characters. Relatively late in the novel, Feldman gives stories to the children of Grace and Millie. Those stories feel unfinished, probably because the kids' lives are just beginning while the novel is nearing its end. The story surrounding Millie's son Jack contributes to the novel's themes while the one involving Grace's daughter Amy adds little.

To some extent, the novel is populated with stereotypes, or at least with characters we've seen many times before: the small town gossips; the man who resents every soldier who came home from the war in which his son died; the girl whose thoughts are elsewhere as she loses her virginity to a boy who is clearly using her. Occasional scenes are a bit overdone or clichéd (a discharged soldier hiding under a bed at the sound of celebratory gunfire was one) but those are rare. There are also times when the story lacks subtlety, as if Feldman felt the need to make a social evil as obvious as she could so it wouldn't escape the notice of dim readers.

Despite its flaws, this is a strong novel. Feldman writes movingly of grief. She writes perceptively of social change. Her prose is fluid and evocative. She tells an important story that is well worth reading.

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