Review of Next to Love by Ellen Feldman

Next to Love is big in scope while everyday in focus and beautiful in its entirety. It spans the American years from December 1941 to August 1965 (from WWII to the Gulf of Tonkin). The novel has multiple narrative points of view and its topic, the effects of war, is that eternally huge one that human history never manages to escape. That’s big, although at 320 pages, I don’t mean that it is a long book.

And yet, rather than the epic and larger-than-life action that war novels often involve, Next to Love portrays the world of the women left behind, then returned to (or not), and the lives they and their children build under the influence of the ever-present, but rarely-discussed war, an influence that does not disappear even as new wars take over the headlines. In an interview posted on her website, Ellen Feldman put it this way, “I am interested in the monumental events of history, but in human terms.  By writing fiction, I can explore how individuals influence history and how history shapes personal lives.”

This domestic focus and lack of a grand canvas of action could be boring, but in Feldman’s hands it never is. We’re tugged ever forward by the skill of her character building, the emotional honesty and depth, the engagement we feel with each of these women, Babe, Millie and Grace, and their loved ones. One other note about writerly skill. Although the main movement of the book is chronological, Feldman also manages to move us more fluidly back and forth, so that, for example, we see a scene through one of the children’s eyes and then the story carries on without our realizing that we’ve moved back in time until we reach that same moment again, only through another pair of eyes. I was never confused at all, only noted with admiration how smoothly the author brought us back to a particular moment and thus gave the reader an epiphany arising from the contrasting understandings. To pull off without a hitch such a subtle and complex use of the timeline seems to me masterful. As a writer I’m envious of such talent.

Feldman is particularly adept at portraying the complexities of marriage. The darkest struggles that ought to sink a relationship are sometimes survived and turn into the richest bonds. The outward perfection can reveal an empty core that gradually destroys its participants. Children’s unthinking cruelties are tossed upon their parents as we all know they can be, and at the same time those same children clearly love and need their parents.

The momentous events of the years after the war—the Civil Rights movement, for example—show up not as marches on Washington or bus strikes but as tensions between maids and employers, between children determined to reject the places assigned to them and the parents who are terrified of the consequences of such rebellion, and also as a quiet understanding between a man and a wife along with a new job. That’s the kind of deep, dug-in reality that the book achieves—not loud and public, but exactly as so many men and women must have experienced these years, day by day.

And I hated putting it down. Its intimacy will grab you.