Our Better Nature by Sophie Ward – Reimagined by Andrea Dworkin | books

WWhat kind of justice can we get in a world driven by force? Actress-turned-writer Sophie Ward likes to infuse her novels with philosophical puzzles and set herself complex writing challenges. Her innovative, long-listed Booker-listed novel Love and Other Thought Experiments revolved around philosophical thought experiments, from Pascal’s Wager to Descartes’s Demon, with a chapter narrated by an ant living inside the character’s brain. The Schoolhouse explored the ethics of self-directed education and policing in complex procedurals across periods. She now turns her attention to questions of justice, freedom, and power in the United States in the 1970s, through a tripartite structure that brings together three women—two real and one imagined.

It’s 1971: The Manson Family has been found guilty, and hundreds of thousands are marching against the Vietnam War. In the Netherlands, 25-year-old Andrea Dworkin flees her abusive husband and attends a debate between Chomsky and Foucault on justice and power. Back in the United States, poet Muriel Rukeyser rushed to protest again, even though her lover, the literary agent Monica McCall, rightly told her that her health would not take it. The third character is loosely based on Ward’s Korean-American wife’s family history. Phyllis Patterson welcomes her son home to rural Illinois from an army base in South Korea, and tries to build a relationship with her daughter-in-law and her new Korean grandchildren. The three women test their ability to find justice in an unjust world.

It’s a clever idea for a novel, using the connections between women as hinge points. Andrea goes on to become Muriel’s assistant, although their relationship never appears on the page. In the background is the imprisoned South Korean poet Kim Chi-ha. Morell campaigns for his release and discovers a connection between him and Phyllis’s daughter-in-law, June, which enables Ward to bring the stories of Phyllis and Morell together in the somewhat brilliant but also chaotically rushed finale.

The tripartite structure generates problems that Ward must solve. The shifting viewpoints mean that individual sections can sometimes be an unsatisfying take on annual get-togethers with friends, rather than the intimacy of shared everyday life, especially as the years go by and we end up in 1975. It becomes difficult to care about Andrea in particular, as she publishes book after book, fighting for revolution. It is also the challenge of bringing together real and imagined people. Ward does an admirable job of making Andrea Dworkin talk, and getting her to talk, but when she writes her thoughts as stark, declarative sentences, I find them strangely inauthentic in ways I might not get with a made-up character. “I thought, ‘This is it. This is my time. I’m alive and I have work to do. I have to start now.’

What gains from this structure is the sense of a world unfolding in parallel across continents, as these women grapple with the shared dilemma of how to rise to the challenge of tolerance and fellowship. The real triumph of the book is Phyllis: a generous but deeply suspicious housewife, who stands out in the war, and now shares her bedroom with a chicken named Dolly. When Phyllis’s husband Boyd dies through sacrifice on June’s behalf, Phyllis realizes “rage like a stone in your stomach,” making it difficult to forgive June.

Phyllis’s breakthrough is finally seeing her cornfield in rural Illinois through June’s eyes, realizing that June gazes at that field with such intensity because she misses the landscape of her home. This is conveyed poignantly by Ward, showing Phyllis finally shaking off her stone, and realizing that her daughter-in-law is as bright, free-spirited, and donquietically determined as she is. It is Susie, Phyllis’s granddaughter, who brings them together, and who will take on the mantle of both women in the next generation. And the generosity required to sit back and let the next generation do it better is evident in Muriel’s story as well, as she accepts that she may let the world down and the world may let her down, but the work will get done regardless.

There is no greater hope for justice in the wider world in this novel than there is in our own world now, and Ward seems quite consciously writing from one world to another. Andrea Dworkin here learns from Foucault and Chomsky in between that justice is always an instrument of power. Have Dworkin, Rukeyser, and their circles succeeded in making the world a little more just and a little freer, by putting more power in the right hands? Ward seems to amplify her ambivalence about whether we should rage against the loss of revolutionary activity and try to revive it, or accept that loss and focus on justice in our personal lives. The echoes of the revolution are certainly felt by Phyllis, as she sees “how her life was part of these lives, that she was there in all these moments,” and learns to be stronger and more just. As much as revealing the power of empathic engagement is what fiction has always done best, Ward poignantly demonstrates the need to use this to continue liberating ourselves, day after day.