Women’s roles in the 1930s were more circumscribed, with marriage a given, love more of an afterthought and career options limited at best. There were scant opportunities to live outside socially sanctioned boundaries.
With his latest book, Clara Callan, Richard B. Wright was interested in documenting how an “intelligent, responsive woman would deal with all that” in a society where “the horizon of people’s lives was narrower.” Adopting a female voice in his protagonist Clara, Wright set himself the onerous task of imagining a female sensibility during a period of sweeping technological change.
Set in Depression-era Ontario, Clara Callan explores the lives of two very different sisters. They communicate through letters sent between Whitfield, a small Ontario town where Clara toils as a schoolteacher, and New York City, where Nora, the younger, more vivacious sister, is a radio soap opera starlet. The novel also relies on Clara’s diary entries, which provide insight into her inner life, and the often hilarious musings of Evelyn, a gin-swilling radio soap opera writer who corresponds with Clara.
The diary or epistolary novel is a rarity in contemporary fiction. And in many ways it can be frustrating for readers conditioned to receive the story under the seamless guidance of a sure but invisible hand. But for Wright, the scrawled missives between the sisters reflect how they would have kept in touch with each other during that time.
“In an age of email where thought disperses into cyberspace,” Wright opted for “a reflective response to someone else.” He notes that selecting this genre to tell his story “required a leisurely approach to narrative.”
This choice succeeds in encapsulating the ebb and flow of days. However, the reliance on letters saps the immediacy from the characters’ lives and often dissipates the urgency of the story. It also makes for arduous reading.
Clara Callan offers a meditation on the everyday, the result being that sometimes we nod off. It conveys the quiet desperation of lives unfolding in all their mundane glory.
But there is little respite from the slow, deliberate pace. We experience the daily vicissitudes of another era, but the novel conveys the everyday too concretely without offering the reader enough of a payoff.
At one point Clara exclaims, “Art demands that we pay heed, but I want only diversions.”
Perhaps what the book finally forces us to observe more closely is our desire to escape into a world of fantasy created for us by someone else.
