Jan. 26--As college students around the country debate whether to continue the tradition and stage a Valentine's Day performance of Eve Ensler's "The Vagina Monologues" or cancel it for good, I found myself wondering: "What would Florence Gordon think?"
Florence is the central figure of the eponymous novel "Florence Gordon." She is an impatient 75-year-old, known to the public as a provocative feminist icon, who guards her independence and is not all that wild about her own family members. Here's how Brian Morton introduced 75-year-old Florence:
Florence Gordon was trying to write a memoir, but she had two strikes against her; she was old and she was an intellectual. And who on earth, she sometimes wondered, would want to read a book about an old intellectual.
Maybe it was three strikes, because not only was she an intellectual, she was a feminist. Which meant that if she ever managed to finish this book, reviewers would inevitably dismiss it as "strident" and "shrill."
If you're an old feminist, anything you say, by definition, is strident and shrill.
While typical grandparents eagerly await visits from their offspring, Florence is less than thrilled by the arrival of her dull son and fawning daughter-in-law. They grate on her nerves. (Florence, though, does hold out hope for their daughter -- her granddaughter -- who seems to possess a bit of spunk.) Her new book has received an unanticipated rave review, but being happy just isn't in her temperament. Then there's her mope of an ex-husband, who is miffed by her literary success. Finally, she has developed some odd symptoms: Her left foot is flapping, and her fingers seem frantic.
Florence provides the centrifugal force for this novel, and Brian Morton has created a complex set of characters in her orbit whom we come to understand through their relationships with her. Admirers of Elizabeth Strout's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "Olive Kitteridge" will see traces of Olive in Florence, yet the settings -- small-town Maine in "Kitteridge" and New York's liberal Upper West Side here -- are entirely different. Morton has artfully constructed the novel in scenes with perspectives shifting among characters.
In the end, Florence prevails; her ideas and passion are what matter. In the 1970s, she had made the case that the phrase "women's friendship" was redundant "because only women really knew what friendship was." And I think she would have found a way for friends to adapt "The Vagina Monologues" to fit with the times.
"Florence Gordon"
By Brian Morton, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 320 pages, $25
