BOOK REVIEW : Misery, Madness and Fear of Incipient Revolt From Below

THE HOME GIRLS by Olga Masters W.W. Norton $18.95, 194 pages

Olga Masters is dead now, and safe; the people she bad-mouthed may stamp their feet and shout, but they can’t get to her.

Olga Masters got a late start writing fiction. She married at 21 and raised seven children. Not until her 50s did she find the time to write these scalding stories.

By that age, people tend to think of you as invisible (especially with all those kids).

It would be as if the dog you kicked for years and years suddenly came in through the doggy door with a press pass tucked in his collar, pulled a chair up to his computer, shook out his paws and began to tap out a story on the keys--a story of a lummox dog owner who not only kicked his dog, but had bad breath, a disgusting paunch, vile sexual habits and a dull personality.

You would be taken off guard if you were that dog’s owner. You might feel aggrieved. If you had known that dog would acquire both an IBM computer and a fine narrative style, then surely you would have treated the dog better--given him canned food to eat, and saved your brutish kicks for guinea pigs, who surely will never learn how to write.

But most of all, you’d feel sad, wouldn’t you? Because dogs are supposed to love you no matter what you do, and soon you would read that during all your years together, your furtive, frightened cur hated you with all his canine might.

And so women are supposed to love the men who beat them (or at least this was supposed to be true in the Great Depression years when most of these stories are set), and women are supposed to love the children who rob them of their youth. And children are supposed to love fathers who beat them (and forget to go to work, and lie), and children should love mothers whose only delight is to inflict misery on anyone weaker and sadder than they.

Olga Masters had 50 years of injustice, of poverty, of disrespect, of contempt in her life, and she finally responded with a hatred as cold and blinding as sleet.

There are 20 stories here, 18 set in rural Australia, about two-thirds of them placed in the Great Depression. The country is not important here; the poverty is. Reading these pieces brings back memories, or memories of other people’s stories, to the front of the brain.

Who, reading this review, can remember being so poor that not finishing dinner is a dreadful, dreadful sin? Or that using a match to light a cigarette--instead of bending over the stove to use the fire already there--is a serious diminishment of the family wealth? Who, reading this review, rushes to make beds as soon as the children are out of them, because good housekeeping is the pride, the only pride of the very poor? Who, now, irons sheets all day?

“The Home Girls” of the title story come from an orphanage, but everyone here is orphaned, miserable. The men have no work, or they work as hard as slaves. In half a dozen stories, wives go mad from the strain of their dreadful lives; they let the kitchen fires go out, they leave breakfast and dishes on the table for weeks at a time. They mount pitiful campaigns to keep their kids from being beaten.

Most of these stories are seen through the eyes of children--children so starved for love that just the use of a nickname--”Pinkie” or “Honey” or any careless endearment--melts their hearts.

It would take so little to make these children happy. But a mother on a train tells a stranger she’s going to kill her two children. And in “The Snake and Bad Tom,” a brood of brothers and sisters sell out their half-wit brother to their father’s wrath.

The father is a sadistic sociopath. Well, Olga Masters seems to say, aren’t they all? It’s poverty that does it--close quarters, no hope, too many children, no money at all.

Perhaps no one reading this review will remember or recognize these unspeakable circumstances. But they can read about them elsewhere, in the Metro section of this very paper.

And someday the survivors of all those crimes, misfortunes and disasters will sit down at a computer and remember. Those who abused them will be, no doubt, the astonished--and aggrieved.

Next: Lee Dembart reviews “Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the 21st Century” by Daniel B. Botkin (Oxford University Press).