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Annie Cardi’s Red (Union Square, 2024)

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Annie Cardi may be just another abortion activist trying to influence teens through fiction to accept abortion (which harms and often kills women, always kills unborn babies, and alienates fathers), but she has given birth to a wonderfully hopeful and therefore pro-life novel.

Finally, a pro-abortion novel which shows that even the most abortion-minded teen can become a Dr. @AbbyJohnson…someday.

Of course, Cardi meets the criteria of a typical pro-abortion author (how else can anyone get published in the New York abortion literary establishment?).  When she writes in the “Author’s Note”, “I grew up Catholic, and the Church is clear about its negative view of reproductive rights.  That, along with other official Church views, didn’t sit right with me” (246), her pro-abortion credentials begin because being a fallen-away Catholic is a definite plus in said abortion literary establishment.

Moreover, Cardi uses the language of abortion (including, of course, woke) zealots consistently.  Her main character mentions twice that she is a staunch abortion activist not merely by “volunteering” for, presumably, a non-profit, but also aiding and abetting the abortion business Planned Parenthood, which passes itself off as a non-profit organization.  “I’m spending the summer volunteering at the Wolfwood women’s center and phone banking for Planned Parenthood” (240) is reinforced by a second reference to “volunteering with the women’s center and Planned Parenthood” (243).

Similarly, when she writes about the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, Cardi’s acceptance of unscientific woke language on gender may jar the reader, but is a seal of approval to the New York abortion literary establishment: “Now, in many states, pregnant people are at risk of being denied health care options” (246).  Pregnant “people”?  Cardi must think that men can become pregnant.

Finally, Cardi’s credentials with the New York abortion literary establishment are secure when she lists only pro-abortion entities on the “Resources” page (248).  This feature of fiction designed to steer teen readers into abortion businesses is the twenty-first century abortion zealot’s version of “Irish need not apply” or, in this case, “Birthright, Live Action, National Right to Life, and (for the post-abortion woman) Rachel’s Vineyard (@RVHealing) need not apply”.

These surface details are more interesting than the plot itself, which tries to instill more substance in what is a typical teen abortion novel by alluding to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the premiere pro-life novel of world literature.  One key difference between Hawthorne’s and Cardi’s novels, of course, is that Hester Prynne did not kill the unborn child whom she conceived with Rev. Dimmesdale, while Cardi’s Tess Pine aborts the child fathered by her church’s youth minister, Alden.

Granted, the few allusions to Hawthorne’s life-affirming novel can be fun to perceive, satisfying the first essential future of literature to generate pleasure in the reader.  Although it becomes obvious that Alden was the father of the aborted child because he is relieved that Tess, like Hester, refuses to disclose his paternity (97-8), some pleasure derives from reading “When I do fall asleep, I dream about a giant comet streaking across the sky, turning everything orange and purple and red, waiting for it to fall to earth and destroy everything” (195), which matches the meteor incident in the twelfth chapter of The Scarlet Letter.

And yet, however much it strives to become an updated, twenty-first century version of Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century masterpiece, Cardi’s teen abortion novel is not a literary epic; it’s merely another teen abortion novel.

Since Tess’ abortion is mentioned on the first page of this 244-page attempt to mirror Hawthorne’s masterpiece, making whatever follows a slow, tedious slide to a presumably anti-life denouement, there are, however, many lines which pro-life readers can use to understand aborted women.  For example, Tess’ ambivalence about the word “abortion” is manifested on the first page: ‘That’s what we call it, though—‘the procedure.’  We don’t call it what it is.  It’s like we’re afraid to say the word, like it’s a curse.  Maybe it is” (1).

Likewise, Tess’ post-abortion syndrome manifests itself just as early in the novel: “I feel a strange kind of grief, a ghost ship sailing by.  Someone I’ll never know standing on deck, and me watching them disappear forever” (7).  This metaphor appears towards novel’s end, which demonstrates that the loss of either her innocent youth or the aborted child is subconscious throughout the novel: “Even if I wouldn’t change my decision, I remember that feeling I had after the procedure, of a ghost ship sailing past, and I think it’s something that will stay with me forever” (188).

It is incredibly sad, therefore, that Tess doesn’t yet realize that her abortion did not move her on a calculus of “last weekend, I went from being pregnant to being not-pregnant” (26), but from being the mother of an unborn child to the mother of a dead one.  Just as sad is the sense of hopelessness that mothers, especially teen mothers, must feel when they think their only choice is to kill the unborn child, as when Tess concludes that aborting the child “felt like the only way to get my life back to something resembling normal” (42).

Fortunately, for the fictional Tess as for all women who collaborated in the aborting of unborn babies, there is great hope.  Tess the fictional character mirrors real aborted mothers who still want to pray, join a community of believers, and have a relationship with God.  Tess often states, “I liked the idea that something bigger was watching over us, even while we were mini golfing, and that we were all connected because of it” (22).  Over a hundred pages later, Tess reiterates that, when she prays, “I felt connected to something larger and more powerful and mysterious, and all of that feels gone now.  I don’t know if I left it behind or if it left me, but it’s a loneliness that feels like a growing empty space in the middle of my chest” (138); a page later, “it’s part of me, deep down, and I feel ashamed to even want it, to know that God is still there and would listen to me, even now, but I do” (139).  Towards novel’s end, Tess’ prayers become deeper as when she says, “I miss you, I add to the end of my prayer, not even knowing what that means exactly, but maybe whoever’s listening does” (155; italics in original).  Although there are more instances of spontaneous prayer, here’s a final time where the idea of a faith community offers her connectedness despite the abortion: “I want to reconnect with a faith I had, to talk to God again and be a part of something larger than myself.  And I don’t know if what I did was right or wrong, exactly.  But that doesn’t mean I would go back and make a different decision” (173).

The novel’s denouement is ambiguous, appropriate for a pro-abortion character who has not yet found her place as a pro-life activist: “And maybe someday, I’ll decide it’s the right time to be a mother, and I will give my whole heart to that new person” (244).  Although her assertion of future possibilities would make abortion zealots foam at the mouth since it affirms heterosexual normativity, the competent reader can see in Tess’ problematic language (one-sided since there is no mention in creating a child with a husband in a covenant relationship called marriage), this life-affirming credo makes me hope that Tess and, most likely Cardi herself (if this novel is autobiographical) can become as pro-life as Dr. Abby Johnson.

After all, if Abby could be an employee of the abortion business Planned Parenthood, have two abortions herself, and become one of the nation’s major pro-life activists, encouraging abortion “clinic” (that is, business) workers to abandon working for abortion companies, then there’s hope for pro-abortion authors like Annie Cardi, fictional characters like Tess Pine, and, most importantly, women who think that abortion is their only choice to “get their lives back to something resembling normal”.

Abby, you’ll have a new convert soon.

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Book reviews

Colombe Schneck’s Swimming in Paris: A Life in Three Stories (Penguin, 2024)

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Kudos to Colombe Schneck, who has discovered a new way for secular women to abandon their robotic devotion to abortion: swim!

Schneck’s autobiographical fiction could be merely another typical pro-abortion read.  The main character, Colombe, is pregnant at seventeen, immediately wants an abortion, has the child killed, and lives the next thirty years in the blissful ignorance of a warped sense of sexuality and a gender-free ideology.

While the collection of three stories which constitute this “novel” is typical of fiction about abortion written by aging leftists, contemporary pro-life readers can come to several key insights about how sad the lives of those who support abortion can be and, hopefully, can learn how not to become as leftist or woke as those pro-abortion sad sacks.

For example, one insight is that pro-abortion “feminists” are needlessly angry at a basic fact of reality: gender.  Having been taught a gender-free distortion of human life by her leftist parents can thus account for Colombe’s idea that her teenaged woman’s body has betrayed her:

“When I was seventeen years old, I found out I was pregnant.  I couldn’t believe it.  I was furious: my body had let me down.  This wasn’t what I’d been taught, I hadn’t been warned about this.  I’d grown up in the 1970s and ’80s, in Paris, part of the intellectual bourgeoisie, where there was no difference between boys and girls, and pow! I had a girl’s body, a uterus.” (viii; italics in original)

A second insight from reading Schneck’s autobiographical fiction is that it can take decades for a woman to realize that appreciating her body can lead to her fulfillment as a gendered human being.  This is the case with Colombe, who, in ripe middle age, comes to appreciate her body only when it is free to float and swim: “I was completely inhabiting my body, it was an entirely unfamiliar freedom, bodily freedom, rapture, a sensuality that I alone was responsible for” (221).

Unfortunately, Colombe doesn’t make the connection between becoming more herself while she swims and the unborn child, who experiences his or her humanity swimming in amniotic fluid.  The novel ends one page later, and it would take many more pages for Colombe’s extreme self-centeredness to be purged from her.

A final insight is that Colombe’s account of her seemingly last fornication with a man who just wanted her for sex is typical of women’s writing: it’s tedious reading.

Conclusion: don’t spend too much time reading or making notes on this autobiographical novel.  If you want to spend some time relaxing with fiction, read some classic works.  If you want to use your time efficiently for intellectual stimulation, then much more interesting are Giorgia Meloni’s life-affirming speeches or studies on the rise of conservatism to correct the disasters brought about by European leftists who raised pro-abortion girls fearful of their bodies (like Colombe Schneck).

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Book reviews

Claire Coughlan’s Where They Lie (Harper Perennial, 2024)

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Cataloged as a novel concerned with abortion, Claire Coughlan’s Where They Lie serves the functions of being a good historical and crime fiction read and a thought-provoking condemnation of men who use women for their sexual pleasure.

The plot of this novel is relatively simple.  Nicoletta Sarto, a journalist, discovers that her mother was a disgraced midwife and an abortionist.  The development of this simple plot, however, is complicated by a byzantine collection of characters (I recommend developing a flowchart to understand the connections between the characters since there are so many names to juggle), long passages of questions from Nicoletta the journalist and answers from the people whom she interviews, and hints which are explained many pages later.

There is some enduring value in what is essentially a casual read.  Since Coughlan’s work is not an abortion apologia or mere pro-abortion propaganda like some contemporary fiction (one thinks, for example, of the ultimate in current preachy abortion novels, Deb Caletti’s Plan A [Labyrinth Road, 2023]), readers will appreciate the situations of women used by men as mere sexual toys, becoming pregnant, and not knowing how to care for themselves and the unborn children whom they carry.  The novel is set in Ireland in 1968, the year in which Birthright had just been organized in Canada, so contemporary readers must assume that, unlike today, the options for care of both the mother and unborn child may have been limited in Ireland besides the exemplary facilities sponsored by the Catholic Church.

Moreover, instead of advocating for changes in abortion laws to allow for the killing of the unborn or some other disastrous anti-life feminist notion, the various abortion-related references should make contemporary readers turn on the men who abandoned the women whom they used merely for sexual pleasure.

For example, Nicoletta, who became pregnant by a former lover, gave birth to the child; although the baby died, the anguish which she must have felt is compounded by the falsehood that the family created to prevent her shame (Nicoletta’s mother led everyone to believe that the child was her own and not her daughter’s).

Similarly, Nicoletta’s father abused several women for his own sexual gratification, including Gloria Fitzgerald, Nicoletta’s real mother.  The despair which these abused women felt over their unplanned pregnancies should bring shame to him and not the mothers themselves.

Even Nicoletta’s shame on engaging in an adulterous romance with another journalist on her newspaper’s staff is obscured by her own unplanned pregnancy by that lover.  Nicoletta goes from seeking an abortionist, to discarding the abortifacient pills he gave her, to thinking that maybe she could carry the baby to term and raise him or her, and eventually to feeling anguish at miscarrying the child, and this range of activities and emotions demonstrates that even a young woman who is devoid of religious faith feels the abandonment and despair of every mother when she is not supported by the father of the child, the man who should most support her in her time of need.

No doubt pro-abortion zealots would read this novel and argue a non sequitur claim like “See!  This is why abortion laws should have been relaxed in Catholic Ireland years ago—and should be legal throughout the world for all time!  Irish men can’t be trusted.  Women must have the power and the right to kill!”

Ordinary readers, who just want to curl up with a detective novel between donating to pro-life pregnancy groups and engaging in right-to-life political action, will appreciate the novel as a young woman’s adventure into discovering that her mother was a criminal abortionist and a murderer.  The girls among us will enjoy the novel as a bit of a romance: Nicoletta eventually becomes engaged with the father of her miscarried child, a man who loves her.

The boys among us will also appreciate the novel as an opportunity for catharsis, because beating the shit out of men who ignore their responsibility to care for not only the women whom they make pregnant, but also the unborn children who could be generated by their sexual activity is neither legal nor polite.

But real men, pro-life ones, already know that.

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Book reviews

Deb Caletti’s Plan A (Labyrinth Road, 2023)

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While she may have insulted women who get abortions by making her teen protagonist so stupid, Deb Caletti masterfully depicts how abortion zealots can indeed be STOOPID.

Granted, the novel is a tedious read.  Even the author herself (speaking through the narrator, of course) notes that the novel is “long.  Very long.  Four hundred and two pages long.  Thirty-nine chapters” (401; italics in original).  Many more interesting things began occurring in the world when I started to plow through this work: the massive election win of President Trump, the beginning of the overthrow of the useless and anti-American Democratic Party, the elimination of racist programs like DEI in the federal government, etc.  However, read it I did, if I want to be faithful to my duty as a pro-life English professor.

The plot is a standard, tired abortion story, a pattern used by Hemingway a century ago and Faulkner and Brautigan decades after him.  Sixteen-year-old Ivy DeVries becomes pregnant, is helped in her quest to kill the unborn child by a boyfriend, accomplishes the killing, and thinks she’s freed from the “burden” of being pregnant (when, as everyone knows, she is, post-abortion, merely the mother of a dead unborn baby).

Caletti’s contribution to this standard abortion plot, however, has two nuances.  Ivy becomes pregnant not by means of regular sex, but because another teen “stuck his penis near enough my vagina for sperm to make their unwanted journey to my egg” (253).  That’s about the only raw, if not salacious, sexual element in the novel, Ivy’s first episode of sex with her boyfriend being a typical encounter that perhaps was meant to arouse teens but which adults in a marital covenant would find ridiculous.

The second nuance which Caletti makes to the standard abortion template is much more important: Ivy is a first-class idiot.  I mean, the girl be dumb.  Stupid, as in stoopid.  If her first sexual episode with her boyfriend is laughable, then the stupidity which Ivy manifests throughout the novel would move the reader from chuckling at her ignorance as mere teenaged innocence, to scornful eye-rolls at her ignorant distortions of life-affirming feminist principles, to guffaws at her STOOPIDITY, especially when she illustrates how her pro-abortion distortion of feminist thinking blinds her to the logical fallacies and ironies of her own words.

Thus, this calculus makes the novel not only a joy to read, but also a literary tool which can be eminently useful for pro-life activists in their effort to study the myopic thinking of abortion zealots.  The morally blind pro-abortion characters may even help pro-life activists dissuade women from the practice of abortion (which harms them, kills unborn babies, and alienates fathers) because nobody would want to be so ignorant in life as the main character.

For example, Ivy’s innocence, the first step in the calculus, would make any reader smile or laugh lightly as when she illustrates her incredible ignorance about how she became pregnant: “I don’t even really understand how I’m here [in the state of thinking about being pregnant]” (8; italics in original) or “I didn’t even know you could get pregnant that way” (60).  Ivy’s naiveté continues to manifest itself hundreds of pages later when she stupidly asks her aunt, “You’re saying people have just been getting abortions forever?” (281).

For all her supposed smarts, being in advanced English courses and all, Ivy is as stupid at novel’s end as she was at the beginning.  Poor thing.

The reader reaches the second stage of scornful eye-rolls at her ignorant distortions of life-affirming feminist principles when Ivy’s preachiness about women’s rights, and oppression of women, and choice, and control of women’s bodies, and choice again, and blah blah blah overtakes the narrative.

For example, Ivy’s mother’s friend, who is presumably Catholic, discloses that she had an abortion and repeats the word “choice” intrusively in a few lines: “I might want to tell you this, but it’s your choice if you want to hear it.  We should have all the choices, every possible choice, when so much hasn’t been our choice” (155).  The author must have been self-conscious about the overuse of the word “choice” because she has the narrator offer this apologia for its repetition: “She says that word again and again, choice.  It’s a billboard, it’s a headline, it’s in neon lights.  It’s quiet, firm, dignified, self-respecting, a shout suppressed.  And, hey, ignored enough that it can seem like a gift instead of a right” (156; italics in original).

The reader’s possible guffawing reaction, the last step in the calculus, to Ivy’s stupidity occurs throughout the novel, especially when she illustrates how her pro-abortion distortion of feminist thinking blinds her to the logical fallacies and ironies of her own words.

On this point, the examples are legion.  Ivy uses the standard dehumanizing language of an abortion zealot in talking about or referring to the unborn child, ranging from calling him or her “‘a bundle of cells’ (according to some sites online) inside me”, the balance of the paragraph comparing the unborn child qua “bundle of cells” to her mother’s cancer cells (29); to an odd metaphor for the unborn child as “the grain of rice inside me, and […] the cells multiplying by the minute” (59); to Ivy using the demonstrative pronoun “this” to refer to the unborn child (255, repeated on 307); to the dehumanizing term with the longest grammatical history, “it” (308).

The ironies which the reader sees in Ivy’s stupidity ineluctably lead to guffaws, and these, likewise, are legion.  Ivy sees herself as a victim like Hester Prynne (87), completely unaware that, while the comparison does apply in that both Hester and Ivy are targets of adultery in the one case, fornication in the other, Hester gave birth to the child while Ivy will abort him or her.

Similarly, Ivy displays a lack of self-awareness when she asserts the following: “It’s sneaky, but when you get out of your own mind for a while and actually see other people and what they might need, too, you can feel, even for a minute, like maybe things will be all right after all” (90; italics in original).  That she cannot see what the unborn child might need or feel is either a blind spot on the author’s part or, most likely, more evidence of Ivy’s stupidity.

Ivy again compares her travels to kill the unborn child to a scene in the movie The Land Before Time: “young dinosaurs running from danger, fighting the odds, and struggling to get to the Great Valley—a tale of survival and teamwork and love, pretty much like this road trip” (201).  Here again Ivy is utterly oblivious that her abortion road trip does not end in survival of the unborn child and that the team collaborating in the killing does not love him or her—in fact, refuses to recognize him or her as a fellow human being running from danger, fighting the odds, and struggling to get to…birth.

Perhaps the weirdest irony occurs in Ivy’s statement about her “opinions”: “Another opinion I have is that appliances can hear, especially cars” (241).  Apparently, the AP English teenager is utterly bereft of basic contemporary fetological knowledge of the unborn child’s bodily functions such as movement in the womb or reactions to auditory and other stimuli.  Cars have feelings, but an unborn child burned to death in a saline abortion or dismembered in a D&E abortion feels nothing?

Stoo.  Pid.

Even other characters’ statements are ironic disasters if this novel is meant to highlight a pro-abortion perspective.  The irony of Ivy’s mother saying, “I want to respect your decisions around this, but it’s killing me” (119) would not be lost on an educated reader, whether a teen, young adult, or adult reader.  Ivy’s mother is blind to the fact that her own grandchild will be killed in Ivy’s abortion.

While it is not necessary to buy the book, I recommend that every teen, young adult, and adult pro-life activist borrow Caletti’s novel from a local library (libraries being the bastion of fiction like this which seem to be pro-abortion but advance the pro-life cause) if only to take a break from the serious matters of life: raising our families, voting pro-life, or donating to pregnancy support centers so that no mother would ever become as ignorant as Ivy, a fictional abortion zealot supreme.

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Ashley Wurzbacher’s How to Care for a Human Girl (Atria Books, 2023)

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An engaging novel to illustrate the negativity of an abortion-minded woman who is, apparently, utterly ignorant about the biology and purpose of her female body.

Combining the perspectives of two sisters, Jada and Maddy, faced with untimely pregnancies, Wurzbacher’s novel is more fascinating as a study of how a woman who purports to be educated (Jada) could be so stupid in her life choices.

Jada, an academic (which may account for her stupidity, since academia swallowed the pro-abortion and woke nonsense decades ago), thinks her marriage with Blake is not a covenant, an exchange of bodies for the satisfaction of a man’s and woman’s bodily and spiritual needs, but a mere satisfaction of options, which may account for the disdain which she shows the poor guy.  She aborts simply because she is “unexpectedly pregnant” [1] and because she merely asserts that “she would not have this child” (9).

Moreover, Jada suffers from a pronounced hatred of her body; only a massive dose of St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body can help her understand two essential matters of women in a covenant relationship called marriage: first, that a woman’s body should rejoice in sexual activity with a man who bears the title of “husband”; second, if that sexual activity produces a child, then she has the great opportunity to nurture another human life with her husband.

Jada, intelligent as she thinks she is, citing research work here and study there, doesn’t understand these aspects of the feminine.  Consider, for example, Jada’s sexual disasters with her husband Blake: “What he did know, what they both knew, was that her desire was dead.  When he reached for her, she rolled away.  When he touched her, she flinched, floundered, too slippy [slippery?] to be held.  The sex that had led to conception had been a chore” (4-5).

What a contrast, then, is Maddy’s view of her body:

“The fact was she liked her body, or at least she liked beholding it from the outside the way someone else would.  She liked knowing how others saw her.  There was power in this knowledge, or at least there could be if she could figure out how to use it, how to reconcile the body she admired with the body she inhabited” (151).

Now that’s a view of the female body that every feminist should have, at least pro-life feminists, since anti-life (violently pro-abortion) “feminists” disdain their reproductive capabilities to the point that they would rather kill unborn children (half of whom are their sisters) instead of nurture them to birth.

Of course, anti-life “feminists” would probably want Wurzbacher’s novel banned for the choice that Maddy makes regarding her untimely pregnancy:

“She was going to keep her baby, this sleeping boy’s half sibling, because she knew in her heart of hearts, in her secretest secret place, that though there might be someone out there who could give her child more than she could—more money, more material comfort, more opportunity of a certain kind—there was no one who could give it more love” (321).

Much more could be said about Wurzbacher’s novel.  For example, students could generate a substantial literary analysis paper on Jada’s use of the usual pro-abortion euphemisms (“the cluster of cells that had attached itself to her uterine wall” [2] or referring to her aborted child as “the clot” [261] or “the cell cluster that had clumped in her uterus” [264]) or Jada’s laughable reductionist view of the joy of sexual activity for husbands and wives to animal instincts and chemicals (“Jada was versed in the science of love, knew it as a pulse in the reptilian core of the brain, a hot spot of light in the ventral tegmental area, a squirt of dopamine” [132]).

Similarly, students could elaborate Maddy’s or Jada’s philosophical speculations into many essays for their ridiculous woke community college professors, such as two examples from Maddy: “No, she didn’t want a baby.  But she didn’t not want one, either.  She wanted only not to be in the situation she was in.  She wanted not to have to choose” (16) or “Please don’t say ‘baby’.  What a curse that you couldn’t refuse a thing without also acknowledging it, could not say ‘Don’t say “baby”’ without saying “baby”’” (49).

Likewise, consider these examples from Jada: when she speculates that her feminist philosophy may not be sufficient to account for her decision to abort the child because one’s conscience is the “voices in your head yelling at you at a volume no single voice outside of it could reach” (113); or the Kamalaesque word salad of Jada’s having “wanted to have wanted the child she didn’t want” (120).

Unfortunately delving into the merits of Wurzbacher’s novel isn’t as interesting as President Trump’s landslide victory and the activities of the next four, eight, twelve, and beyond years of pro-life presidents.  (Reading the few instances of Trump Derangement Syndrome spoken by anti-life characters is, at the very least, comical and quaint in the novel’s datedness.)  Suffice it to say that, on a snowy night when there is no more pro-life activity to accomplish, reading a few pages of Wurzbacher’s dive into the mind of a woman who aborted can entertain and educate one well.

 

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Book reviews

Mamoru Aoi’s My Girlfriend’s Child (Kodansha, 2022)

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Although it has some moral flaws, Aoi’s novel is a quick read, depicting an ordinary Japanese teen experiencing the doubts and joys of being pregnant with her teen lover.

This graphic novel, written in Japanese manga style, can appeal to American teens who often do not read words but may be adept at “reading” the emotional power of images in cartoons, online games, or other material.

Two moral objections to the book should be discussed.  The first concerns one character who says, “There’s no right or wrong here” (60), which may say more about the character’s amorality than a recognition that abortion harms women, kills unborn babies, and alienates fathers—truths which, since they are based on natural law, apply not only to Jews and Christians in the West, but also to Japanese presumably steeped in Shinto and Buddhist traditions.

Similarly, the main character’s litany of questions about the source for moral authority [“What are the criteria for what we should do?  Is it how the people around us feel?  Common sense?  Popular opinion?” (83; italics in original)] could be a string of questions formed not so much by the character’s amorality, but by any teen faced with an untimely pregnancy.

These questions could also generate great discussion among teen students, thus serving not only a rhetorical function, but a didactic one to encourage any teen contemplating abortion to determine the reasons why abortion is always morally wrong, let alone not reproductive or somehow beneficial.

The second moral objection to the book can be located in the “Sex and Pregnancy Q&A” section, where three items of bad advice are provided to teens about sexuality and abortion.  “The easiest methods for teens are condoms and the pill”, the advice suggests, ignoring the benefits of abstinence and respect for male and female sexuality which a couple enjoys in the covenant relationship called marriage.  Also, abortifacients are misnamed “emergency contraception”; sophisticated modern Japanese young people know that an abortifacient is not contraceptive, but the chemical means to perform an abortion, which is the killing of an unborn child.  Finally, the advice that “nobody should have a say in what you want to do with your body or mind” is not only ambiguous, but also illogical; Japanese and American teens cannot avoid knowing moral restraints on sexuality coming from natural law, a divine source, or from their parents or guardians, mature people who know more about sexuality than hormone-fevered teens.

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Aimee Wall’s We, Jane (Book*hug Press, 2021)

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Title this review: “A Case Study Proving That, Contrary to Prolife Feminist Principles, Anti-life Women / Pro-Abortion Zealots Are Not Comfortable in Their Bodies and Despise Biological Reality”.

Sometimes tedious to read since there is no major problem in the plot, Aimee Wall’s pro-abortion novel does provide a wonderful example of a young woman who chooses that destructive practice instead of caring for both the mother and unborn child because she despises her body.  Readers may therefore sympathize with a woman whose disgust over her female body leads her to [besides hints of lesbianism (35-6) and sadomasochism (141)] fornication, killing at least one unborn child, and alcoholism.

The three last-named activities are consistent with someone who merely glides through life with no purpose, no religious principles, no educational plan, no career objective, no ability to find a decent man who doesn’t just want to get into her panties, no this, and no that.

And Marthe, the main character, is what the Canadian author thinks is the best protagonist of her own “Great Canadian Abortion Novel” (9)?  Yikes!

The truth, though, is the opposite.  Marthe is just another sad sack of a drunken young woman who thinks promoting abortion is a necessary way to advance feminist goals.

Marthe is blissfully unaware that promoting abortion is the opposite of liberation for women.  In fact, at no point does Marthe consider any other choice for women experiencing unplanned pregnancies—this in the nation which in 1968 gave the world Birthright, the first prolife pregnancy support service so that mothers would not fall victim to thinking that their only choice was abortion.

Besides this primary blindness of the main character to life-affirming choices, the plot suffers because there is no crisis facing the women who think they must advance an underground abortion movement by becoming abortionist midwives.  In the novel’s milieu, abortion is still legal in both the United States and Canada’s Newfoundland province, and the work does not clarify what threats against “reproductive freedom” (that is, the so-called “right” of mothers to kill the unborn) would make it imperative for the women to become murdering midwives beyond the idea that there might be future provincial legislative action.

The lack of an essential problem in the plot, therefore, justifies Wall’s work as merely an academic effort, a “novel” which is more a postmodern exercise in writing fiction than a novel with a clear exposition, several crises, a climax, and a denouement.  Wall suggests this at many points when she writes that Marthe is more concerned not with action so much as she is writing a story: “She didn’t press Jane [her abortion co-conspirator] on the vague details, the gaps in the story.  She took the story as it was offered” (45); Marthe “tried to integrate this new information into the story” (126); Marthe speculates about “Jane losing control of their own story” (156); “This was the story Marthe told herself.  She was writing the story of Jane as they were still living it out” (196); and, finally, the repetition of the clause “Jane was a story” (five times no less in one paragraph) documents how the abortion controversy the author thought she was clarifying is all nonexistent, or implausible, or (worse) pro-abortion fearmongering nonsense (198; italics added in each quote).

Another flaw in the writing is not as fatal as the above and may merely be a mistake on the author’s part: “Within three months, she had gotten pregnant, he had accompanied her to the Morgentaler Clinic, and they had fallen in love” (15).

Huh?  Marthe first gets pregnant, then she aborts the child, and the next step is that she and her fornicating lover “fell in love”?  Isn’t the usual pattern in pro-abortion novels to fall in “love”, have sex, get pregnant, abort the unborn child, and then suffer PAS [which occurs soon after this tortured chronology: “Within another year and a half, Marthe had dropped out of her program and Karl had packed back up his single suitcase and moved home on a few days’ notice” (15)]?

Of course, while purchasing this novel is unnecessary (prolife readers should donate to pregnancy support groups which offer women with untimely pregnancies a choice consistent with their bodily integrity as women), the novel does have one merit: it illustrates how a so-called feminist (albeit an anti-life, pro-abortion one) blindly adheres to her hatred of her sexual ability to procreate because she despises her female body.

Readers who are comfortable with their maleness or femaleness may not understand Marthe’s intense disgust of her body in these statements: “It had been two years [since her abortion], but Marthe was still angry at the indignity of it all, at the insistence of the physical body” (19); “She felt that someone had done this to her.  The body.  Stuck her with it.  She felt, possibly belatedly, utterly betrayed by it” (21); or when Jane speculates about “people [who] become at home in their bodies” (38).

Think of it, reader: if you felt uncomfortable in your body, then you either had too much coffee or need to speak with an imam, minister, priest, rabbi, or psychiatrist.

Moreover, Marthe’s disgust of her female body could assist those who work with patients suffering from gender dysphoria, offering them a fictional account of the disastrous results of not recognizing that a human person is either male or female and should respect the abilities of both genders to engage in sexuality which is life-affirming and not life-destructive.  Students will find much more to write about, such as Marthe’s dehumanization of the unborn child (e.g. 10), why anti-life feminists view abortion as a matter of control (e.g. 43), or why those same anti-life feminists think that promoting abortion has almost a missionary or evangelical function (e.g. 45).

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Book reviews

Robert Hugh Benson’s Lord of the World (1907; republished by St. Augustine’s Press, 2011)

Image credit: Goodreads.com

Title this casual review: Brave New World Revisited Yet Again, or, How Could a Century-Old Novel Have Become a Frightening Prophecy of Life in the United States in 2023?

Several Catholic sources mentioned Benson’s novel as timely for contemporary life.  After reading it, one can concur.

Granted, some elements of this science fiction novel written 116 years ago miss the mark regarding technological advances that humanity would experience well beyond 1998 (the last future-identified year in the novel itself).  However, other elements hit the target directly, including the following.

In his preface to the novel, Ralph McInerny concludes that “Three-quarters of a century before John Paul II’s encyclical Evangelium Vitae, Robert Hugh Benson imagined a Culture of Death” (vii).  C. John McCloskey III identifies the most frightening example of the death-loving culture in his introduction to the novel when he states that “The Culture of Death is omnipresent in the novel, particularly the universal availability of euthanasia.  Chillingly in an early scene, the ‘ministers of Euthanasia’ descend upon the survivors of a ‘Volor’ crash in order to finish them off” (xvii; volor is a type of airplane).

The following are quotable quotes which students of literature will find worthy to study to determine how what was written in 1907 applies to life today (British spellings retained):

On the feebleness and decay of Protestant Christianity and the remnant of faithful (orthodox) Catholic Christianity:

“I think, that, humanly speaking, Catholicism will decrease rapidly now.  It is perfectly true that Protestantism is dead.  Men do recognize at last that a supernatural Religion involves an absolute authority, and that Private Judgment in matters of faith is nothing else than the beginning of disintegration.  And it is also true that since the Catholic Church is the only institution that even claims supernatural authority, with all its merciless logic, she has again the allegiance of practically all Christians who have any supernatural belief left” (8).

On Islam’s attacks on the West:

“the patient East proposed at last to proselytise by the modern equivalents of fire and sword those who had laid aside for the most part all religious beliefs except that in Humanity” (17).

On the barbarity of mobs, such as those of young people who think they are fighting “for Palestine” when they are promoting genocide of Jews:

“And then the rest of the world—the madness that had seized upon the nations; the amazing stories that had poured in that day of the men in Paris, who, raving like Bacchantes, had stripped themselves naked in the Place de Concorde, and stabbed themselves to the heart, crying out to thunders of applause that life was too enthralling to be endured; of the woman who sang himself mad last night in Spain, and fell laughing and foaming in the concert hall at Seville; of the crucifixion of the Catholics that morning in the Pyrenees, and the apostasy of three bishops in Germany….  And this…and this…and a thousand more horrors were permitted, and God made no sign and spoke no word….” (120).

On Antifa domestic terrorists and Hamas terrorists destroying Western civilization:

“but this was a cheap price to pay for the final and complete extermination of the Catholic past” (179).

On the current state of the world, described for the “new pope” in the novel:

“Christianity had smouldered away from Europe like a sunset on darkening peaks; Eternal Rome was a heap of ruins; in East and West alike a man had been set upon the throne of God, had been acclaimed as divine.  The world had leaped forward; social science was supreme; men had learned consistency; they had learned, too, the social lessons of Christianity apart from a Divine Teacher, or, rather, they said, in spite of Him” (194).

Since Amazon collaborates with cancel culture and woke zealots and bans conservative and pro-life books, buy this book directly from the publisher: https://www.staugustine.net/9781587314711/lord-of-the-world/.

Categories
Book reviews

T. M. Gaouette’s For Eden’s Sake (2019)

Image credit: https://tmgaouette.com/books/for-edens-sake/.

Unlike cheesy and ultra-pious “Christian” fiction, Gaouette’s novel depicts a young couple who, in a drunken stupor, banged each other in a one-night stand and whose resulting abortion decision is handled realistically.

I feared that this novel would be yet another “religious” work fictionalizing abortion with lots of “come to Jesus” moments and citations and transcriptions of Scripture galore.

Buzzer!  The author must have read Dana Gioia’s The Catholic Writer Today and Other Essays (Wiseblood Books, 2019), wherein he writes that “Catholic literature is rarely pious.  [….]  Catholic writing tends to be comic, rowdy, rude, and even violent” (20).  Whether the book is as naughty as the opening paragraph of this review, I leave to the reader; “Having just left her asleep in the crumpled bed I’d risen from” (4) is perhaps the naughtiest line in the entire work, and that ain’t saying much.

But, since this is not a college English class lecture and a book review meant for social media and not scholars (whom no one reads anyway), I digress…

Gaouette’s ability to render her characters realistically could lead the reader to miss some important polarities and deeper philosophical ideas which practitioners of old-fashioned literary criticism used in colleges and universities before the woke nonsense replaced solid literature analysis with Democratic Party political activism, such as pro-abortion agitprop and anti-Semitism.

For example, archetypal literary critics could spend some time examining why the main characters are named Isaac Prince (twenty-two years old) and Rebecca Stratham (nineteen) and why their child is named Eden, especially since the novel does not explain the religious significance.  (Remember: it isn’t a preachy religious tract.)

A deconstructionist literary critic might discuss the evident “polarities” represented by the characters to somehow “undermine” or “destabilize” the “meaning” of the “text” (such buzzwords to say that a decon critic wants to destroy what an author tries to communicate!).

For example, Isaac obviously lives his religious upbringing—he is not ashamed to confess his sin of fornication in the Sacrament of Reconciliation early in the novel (10ff)—while Rebecca seems to be bereft of any type of religious training.  Isaac comes from a functioning two-parent heterosexual family, while Rebecca’s family dynamics are unknown, the exception being a materialistic and emotionally cold father.

Even the friends of these two main characters function as polarities.  While rural boy Isaac relies on his childhood buddy and brother-in-faith Kevin to help him navigate the responsibilities of adulthood in the big city, Rebecca’s pal is the so-called pro-“choice” (that is, abortion-loving) and aggressive Tess.  That Tess’ abortion is disclosed only towards the end of the novel accounts somewhat for her intolerance of pro-life ideas and persons (hence her disgust and hatred of Isaac, whom she derides for his “patriarchal” care for both Rebecca and the unborn child), but she remains a flat and (worse) an unlikeable character.

A feminist literary critic could explore the evident patriarchal oppression of women and other now ridiculously outdated tenets of traditional political feminism by determining if Isaac is indeed oppressing Rebecca with the power of his phallus or otherwise dominating her with his heteropatriarchy or similar nonsense that most students merely laugh at behind their Women’s Studies professors’ backs.

A gay and lesbian literary critic might have some material to work with to justify a weird and utterly false interpretation of the novel.  Hmmm…Isaac and his best buddy Kevin share an apartment together?  Fishy.  They were boyhood “friends”?  Doubly fishy.  Similarly, Rebecca and her friend Tess also share an apartment?  Triply fishy.  Tess is more a domineering (over Rebecca) masculine type while Rebecca is ever so girly?  Quadruply fishy!  However, beyond these preliminary salacious suggestions, a gay and lesbian critic would be as effective in analyzing the novel as a deconstructionist critic would provide help to rabbinical scholars explicating the Babylonian Talmud to understand what God meant by the lex talionis.

Sidebar here, touching on masculinist literary criticism, designed for heterosexual men.  Chapter 11 (127ff) wherein Isaac and Kevin go shopping in a store for baby items is wonderful comic relief.  What likeable dumbasses!

A Marxist literary critic would revel in the clash of ideologies represented by the polarities of the life-affirming Isaac and the stridently anti-life so-called “feminist” Tess (“feminist” in quotation marks, since a genuine feminist would support the life of the unborn child and reject abortion, as the nineteenth century founders of the American feminist movement advocated).  Also, since Marxist literary criticism delves into financial aspects of literature, examining the power of money and other transactions that Isaac presents to Rebecca in order to save the child from being killed in abortion would constitute a wonderful literary analysis paper…for a pro-life English professor, that is.

Fortunately, students of literature and the general reading public can reject the above tired literary theories and realize the worth of Gaouette’s novel through the perspective of right-to-life literary criticism, for which I formulated five questions.

1.  Does the literary work support the perspective that human life is, in the philosophical sense, a good, some “thing” which is priceless?

Gaouette’s work illustrates the pricelessness of human life admirably and, in contrast to pro-abortion novels which read more as ideological essays than fiction, does so without hearkening to pro-life responses to anti-life diatribes against the first civil right to life.  The appreciation of human life as a good in itself is particularly manifested by Rebecca, who achieves a life-affirming position in a calculus of actions to be explored further below.

2.  Does the literary work respect the individual as a being with inherent rights, the paramount one being the right to life?

A surface reading of Gaouette’s novel would not answer this question affirmatively since it is not preachy.  The reader can, however, determine an answer by examining the reactions of those who devalue human life or aspects of our humanity which everybody should support.  Here, again, Tess is the obvious catalyst to help readers understand how an anti-life philosophy manifests itself; furthermore, by contrast, the reader can appreciate the human lives whom she degrades.

For example, Tess does not think highly of pro-lifers—a litotes if there ever was one!  She reduces Isaac to “this moron” whose intent in trying to save the child from abortion is “all about taking away our reproductive rights” (34).  The universe of pro-life persons she similarly reduces negatively as in the following falsity: “Typical pro-lifer.  Cares only about the fetus when it’s inside the woman.  Then they forget all about them when they’re born.  They let them suffer then, don’t they?” (82).

3.  If the literary work covers the actions of a family, does it do so respecting heterosexual normativity and the integrity of the family?

Sorry, not sorry, gay, lesbian, and transgender zealots who see the LGBTQ distortion of heterosexual normativity in every work of fiction.  Gaouette’s work doesn’t cater to such a warped sense of human sexuality as most publishers demand of their authors to be politically correct.  Isaac is a real man, “soft eyes, strong physique, and manly features” (105) whose sperm do their job on the first try.  Rebecca is stereotypically feminine and womanly, not pink haired, studded with nose and tongue rings, wearing amorphous gender-free clothing, or willing to kill unborn human life.

Moreover, while Rebecca suffers from a broken family structure (her mother died when she was apparently a little girl “all those years ago” [32]), Isaac can rely on both of his parents to support him in his efforts to, first, save the life of the unborn child whom he created with Rebecca from abortion and, second, to raise their daughter on his own after her birth.

Further, Isaac’s parents’ reactions to his paternity are realistic and not preachy as some ideology-driven, albeit pro-life, fiction might render them.  For example, the father’s reaction to the announcement that Isaac is a daddy—and (remember from the first paragraph of this review) became one by screwing a chick in a one-night stand in a drunken stupor—is utterly honest:

After what seemed like forever, he stood.  “I’m going to bed,” he said.  “And I think you should do the same.”  He lifted the jug and shuffled to the fridge.  After shutting the door, he turned to me.  “We can talk in the morning.”  He headed out of the room.  (41)

Wouldn’t a father react with such speechlessness and tiredness if the son he thought was such a “good boy” seemed to fuck up his life?

4.  Does the literary work comport with the view that unborn, newborn, and mature human life has an inherent right to exist?

The range of responses to this question moves from Isaac’s consistent support for the life of the unborn child despite the impact that caring for the child would have on his own life, Rebecca’s, or his parents’ lives to Tess’ equally consistent perception of the unborn child as, in the customary feminist distortion of life, a roadblock to Rebecca’s success or merely another opportunity for the exercise of male power over the life of yet another woman.

Most significantly, while her belief in the perspective that human life is a philosophical good, which has been hinted above, Rebecca’s affirming the life of the unborn child has been accomplished in a lengthy trajectory.  The calculus of life-affirming steps moves from her being a character assertive in her right that “fortunately, for me, it’s my body, Isaac.  You guys don’t get a choice” (22; italics in original), to someone who nonchalantly uses pro-abortion dehumanizing language to refer to the unborn child as when she calls her “the parasite that was growing within” (54), to one who becomes aware of the child’s humanity through ultrasound images, and eventually to one who provides a gift to the child after birth, knowing that Isaac has committed to raising their daughter himself (a gift given before the novel’s denouement, not to be spoiled here).

Thus, unlike the flat character Tess, Rebecca is eminently more of a round character than Isaac, having come to this heightened character status through acceptance of a series of life-affirming principles showing the “perspective that human life is, in the philosophical sense, a good, some ‘thing’ which is priceless”, which ineluctably leads Rebecca to accept “that unborn […] human life has an inherent right to exist”—an impossible task to accomplish in anti-life fiction.

Moreover, Isaac and Tess are not the only ones who hold firm positions on the value of unborn human life.  Many other minor characters are worth studying, such as the nurse operating the ultrasound who comments approvingly on the unborn child’s development, especially the heartbeat, or Isaac’s parents, who are committed to assist Isaac and the child once she is born, or Isaac’s birth mother.

5.  When they are faced with their mortality, do the characters come to a realization that there is a divine presence in the world which justifies a life-affirming perspective?

This last question of right-to-life literary theory cannot be answered definitively since the characters are still in their youth and their lives together as an integral family are not fulfilled chronologically.  The reader can conjecture, however, that at least one of the characters, Isaac, maintains the religious principles of his parents especially when he exults in the preciousness of his daughter’s life vis-à-vis God’s creation:

“Eden,” I whispered.  It just came to me and it was so fitting, because everything God created was perfect.  And hearing me speak her name sent another wash through me, the emotion leading to a tightness in my throat.  And I only managed to whisper, “It’s Daddy.”  (163)

In contrast, although she seems to acknowledge a religious foundation for life, as evidenced by her purchasing an overtly Catholic religious necklace for her daughter, Rebecca’s acknowledgement of the divine presence in the world is superficial at best.  After all, buying a religious item for someone else can hardly substantiate that the person him- or herself has recognized “a divine presence in the world which justifies a life-affirming perspective”; it may, at least, suggest her openness to such a philosophical foundation.

At 180 pages, Gaouette’s novel is a quick and enjoyable read.  Since Amazon collaborates with cancel culture and woke zealots and bans conservative and pro-life books, buy this book directly from the publisher: https://tmgaouette.com/book-store/.

Categories
Book reviews

Rajasree Variyar’s The Daughters of Madurai (Union Square, 2023)

Image credit: Goodreads.com

Abortion zealots who also support the killing of newborn girls (infanticide) will censor this novel for its life-affirming message, so read it now.

Variyar has written a well-developed narrative of an Indian mother’s effort to save her newborn daughter from being killed for the “crime” of being born a female.  While the pro-life world knew about female infanticide in India for decades, this novel may shock ignorant American readers (I know, I know…that’s a redundancy) and should help feminists (the genuine ones, that is, which means pro-life feminists) advocate for the lives of their newborn sisters as much as they fight for the lives of their unborn sisters in danger of being killed by abortion.

The structure of Variyar’s novel is especially interesting for its inclusion of fetological facts preceding key chapters, which function not only as guides for the development of the infanticide narrative, but also as teaching tools for readers who are ignorant of the development of an unborn child.  This is especially important in today’s culture when high school and college students are indoctrinated by leftist and woke ideas about unborn life instead of being taught subjects they should know, like grammar or Chemistry.

The combined fetological notations are, thus, an education in the life of an unborn child:

Chapter 6: “The first month / Now her mouth, lower jaw, blood cells, and circulation develop. / She is the size of a grain of rice” [61].

Chapter 7: “The second month / Now her heart has formed.  Fingers and toes webbed like a frog’s. / The sketch of features—eyes, ears, mouth, nose. / She is the size of a gooseberry” [76].

Chapter 9: “The third month / Now her tail has disappeared. / Her fingers and toes have lost their webbing and gained their nails. / She is plum-size” [106].

Chapter 11: “The fourth month / Now her face moves, smiles, frowns. / She hears the sound of her mother’s heartbeat” [133].

Chapter 12: “The end of the fourth month / There are nails on her tiny fingers and toes. / Her teeth and bones are strengthening. / She is the size of a mango” [152].

Chapter 13: “The fifth month / The skin on her fingertips swirl into prints. / She begins to move her limbs.  Her mother feels her flutter” [166].

Chapter 15: “The sixth month / Now she hears the lullaby her mother sings to her sister. / It soothes her.  She has hair and lashes of white. / Her skin is flushed pomegranate-red” [198].

Chapter 16: “The seventh month / Now she twists and turns in her mother’s womb. / Her tiny fists open and close at the sound of her mother’s voice. / Her heartbeat calms” [215].

Chapter 17: “The eighth month / Now her eyes can focus.  Her wrinkles are smoothing over her baby fat. / She is the size of a cabbage” [225].

Chapter 19: “The end of the ninth month / Now she is chubby with fat, and her bones have hardened. / Her home is too small for her, holding her close and warm. / She reaches for the world’s embrace” [248].

For committing the crime of humanizing the unborn child, Variyar’s novel will certainly be condemned by abortion zealots and their fellow gang members, those who support infanticide, the killing of newborns.  It behooves the rest of us who are civil rights activists and pro-life readers (same thing) to enjoy her work.

Of course, the novel is more than a transcription of fetological facts about an unborn child’s development.  It is a frightening study of the depths which humans reach when they devalue the lives of fellow human beings.

Pro-lifers, of course, know that the devaluation of human life occurs, first, linguistically when any stage of human life is reduced to animal or non-human imagery.  Thus, a pro-life reader would know that the grandmother who calls Janani’s newborn girl “The useless thing” (5) and, later, urges her to “‘get rid of it’” (113) practices standard dehumanization before a human life is killed.

Since there is such a thing as post-abortion syndrome (PAS), the novel includes several passages which illustrate what could be labeled post-infanticide syndrome (PIS, an unfortunate acronym which could distract from the seriousness of the matter).  For example, Janani speculates that “In this quietness, she felt as though she could feel spirits lingering, hear little feet on the hard dirt” [19] and that, of her two daughters who were killed, “What would the other two look like now, if they had been allowed to live?” (21).  Her post-infanticide speculation is not merely a one-time event, for it continues throughout the novel.  Janani imagines “two other little bodies beside this one”, her living daughter’s body (62).  Janani reflects that “Her second girl, Lavanika’s first little sister, would be about the same age” (70).

Besides anti-life language used to dehumanize the unborn and newborn child, the novel illustrates the dehumanizing effect of the absence of heterosexual marriage, especially as understood in the Jewish and Christian West (remember that the setting for the novel is Hindu India).  Janani’s husband, for example, does not respect either himself or his wife when he has sex with a whore.

The distortion of the heterosexual union by a life-denying philosophy affects more than the husband and wife, of course.  It is shameful that Janani’s mother-in-law speaks thus about the Indian government’s effort to save newborn baby girls from infanticide by offering “baby cradles” (comparable to safe-baby schemes in the United States) for the peasants: “Can you imagine the shame?  Not being able to decide the fate of your own child?  Giving it up, just like that.  They won’t be able to hold their heads up” (75).  This character certainly does not fit the stereotypical grandmother, a loving older woman, ready to bake cookies for her grandbabies when they visit Grandma.  She’s a killer.  Only in a culture which thinks infanticide is the norm would an effort to save newborn babies from being abandoned or killed be shameful.

If only India would someday convert to Christianity en masse not only to protect unborn and newborn lives, but also to secure the self-respect which should obtain between men and women.

Some final reductionist paragraphs from the main character may be a sufficient first step in India’s move from a life-denying philosophy to a life-affirming one.  Nila interjects a couple of paragraphs about “the millions of girls who are missing from India’s population.  Girls smothered and poisoned and drowned and buried alive.  Girls that never emerge from their mother’s wombs” (323-4).

One flaw in the narrative is the inclusion of an unnecessary lesbian relationship.  While one may presume that the lesbianism was forced on the author because that’s what publishers expect under the politically incorrect regime of the LGBTQ distortion of sexuality, there is truly no need for the narrator Nila to develop a lesbian relationship with a woman named Iphigenia.  It would be interesting to speculate that the lesbian relationship that the narrator values is a direct effect of the distortion of how a heterosexual marriage should be lived, but studying or justifying the intrusion of an LGBTQ element must be relegated to future research by an enterprising young student of literature for a woke professor’s literature class.