Adventures in Lesbian Fiction:

Lucky In The Corner

by Carol Anshaw

Review byThe Plaid Adder
Comments:plaidder@mindspring.com

Disclaimer: Some of these reviews will contain spoilers. All were generated after discussing the books in a lesbian book group to which I belong. However, the opinions represented below are my own, and nobody else connected with the group should be held responsible for them.

Having already done Carol Anshaw's second novel Seven Moves, which I highly recommend, I went into this with high expectations, which were basically not fulfilled. It's not a bad book. It's fine. It's enjoyable and it has plenty of redeeming features. It just is not as good as Seven Moves, and it's not gonna be memorable over the long haul.

Anshaw lives in Chicago, and both Seven Moves and Lucky In The Corner are set there. Lucky is organized mainly around the difficult but evolving relationship between Nora, who divorced her husband and came out about 10 years before the book starts, and Fern, Nora's 21-year-old daughter. Nora has been living with her partner Jeanne for about 8 years, and they have to all intents and purposes been Fern's parents through her adolescence; Fern sees her father regularly, but he's remarried (to a heinous fundamentalist harpy named Louise) and is starting to lose interest. Sharing the house with Fern, Nora, and Jeanne is Lucky, the badly behaved yet endearing chocolate lab who has been Fern's pet since she was a tiny child, and is now arthritic and clearly slowing down. As the book starts, Nora fires up an affair with a hot butch building contractor named Pam; meanwhile, Fern's best friend Tracy is having some difficulty adjusting to life as a single mother. These two plotlines provide most of the driving force for the story, with occasional childhood flashbacks and side trips (Fern's cross-dressing uncle Harold, her new bike-messenger boyfriend, her job as a telephone psychic for one of those 1-900 lines).

With a setup like this you can predict a lot of what's going to happen. It does not take a psychic to forsee that Lucky will not get out of this novel alive; nor am I really giving anything away when I say that Nora is ultimately faced with a choice between her life with Jeanne and her passion for Pam. What saves it from being a total soap opera is the point of view characters, Nora and Fern, whose relationship is very believable and ends up being sort of warm and hopeful without that nasty made-for-TV sweetness. What prevents it from being a really good book is the fact that Anshaw, at least in my humble opinion, is cutting corners on a lot of the other characters. Jeanne is kind, trusting, loving, patient, and universally liked; but we never find out who she is, and you don't get much of a sense that Nora really cares. She doesn't seem to care too much about plumbing the depths of her red-hot blue-collar lover, either. IMHO, Anshaw deliberately left Jeanne blank because if we identified with her we'd hate Nora too much, and Pam is the way she is because Anshaw just has a thing for dangerous working-class women (it comes up in Seven Moves too). Arguing with the other book groupies about this I realized that this all seems to matter to me a lot more than it does to most readers. They were like, "Hey, what do I care about Jeanne and Pam, I can always watch Nora and Fern." I, on the other hand, really do think it's an ethical problem to fail to realize your characters. I mean, you can't realize *everyone*-- there's always gonna be walk-ons--but come on. If you're gonna put poor Jeanne through all that you at least gotta make her suffering real.

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