Hearts and Hardship in a Bygone Small-Town America

With every year that goes by, fewer Americans live on family farms. Nor have very many of us spent time in the small towns that once dotted the rural landscape. Yet the terrain seems oddly familiar, so much has it become a part of our national mythology.

The farm town of Harvester, Minn., in 1952 is the setting of Faith Sullivan’s sixth novel, “What a Woman Must Do.” Fifty-nine-year-old Kate Drew lives in town, still missing the farm that she and her late husband, Martin, lost years ago during the Great Depression. Kate has endured a considerable amount of loss in her lifetime. When her sister and brother-in-law died of influenza in 1917, Kate and Martin adopted their orphaned infant niece, Celia. Having no children of their own, they both grew to love the little girl: “What a magical child Celia had been. . . . Born to be a teacher, Kate had always said. When she was only 3, Celia had begged to wipe dishes! With infinite delicacy, she had held a saucer, caressing it with the towel until it was dry, then laying it on the seat of a kitchen chair. Think of it.” Alas, on reaching young womanhood, the lovable Celia has the misfortune to fall in love with one Archer Canby, a handsome, wild, hard-drinking, no-goodnik who blows into town from Oklahoma.

Around the same time that Celia moves out to marry Archer, another young woman, Harriet McCaffery, Kate’s distant cousin, fresh from business college, joins their household. Intelligent, modest, hard-working and plain, Harriet rises to a responsible position at the local water and power company, but seems destined to be one of life’s spinsters. On the other hand, she may be better off than Celia, whose husband, Archer, far from being redeemed by her love for him, continues on his abusive and alcoholic course.

In 1942, double tragedy strikes: Kate’s beloved husband dies, and a few months later, Celia and Archer are killed in a car crash that very clearly is Archer’s fault. It is left to Kate and Harriet to raise the Canbys’ 7-year-old daughter Bess, whom they come to love very dearly. Ten years later, the little family composed of three generations of women faces another turning point: Harriet has attracted the attentions of a widowed farmer, while Bess finds herself irresistibly drawn to a married man.

Unlike her gentle mother but like her troublesome father, Bess is headstrong. She’s warmly affectionate, but at the slightest hint of disaffection or disloyalty, she withdraws from a relationship. To avoid being left, she is always the one to leave first. The possibility that her kindly cousin Harriet might become wife to some “stupid clodhopper” and stepmother to his “moronic” children infuriates Bess.

Harriet, meanwhile, fears that Bess, like her poor mother before her, may lose her heart to the wrong man. Kate worries about both of them, and it takes all of her attentiveness, wisdom and forbearance to ensure that her younger relatives don’t make mistakes they will regret the rest of their lives.

Moving back and forth among the three women’s viewpoints, Sullivan’s pleasantly low-keyed, third-person narrative takes us back to a simpler, more innocent-seeming time and place, which--like most times and places--turns out to be full of complicated human beings facing the time-honored question of how to live their lives.

Sullivan’s writing is most effective at evoking the steady pace of small-town life: breakfast at the local cafe, a dance at the hotel, a band concert, Saturday nights on Main Street. When she veers off in the direction of spiritualism, however, her strained effusions become a bit cloying. Still, this novel has a kind of gentle gravity and sweetness that will please those who are nostalgic for the “good old days” and perhaps even beguile some of those who are not.