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'The Way Forward Is With A Broken Heart' by Alice Walker

Alice Walker's 'Way Forward' is a step backward

Sunday, December 10, 2000

By Sarah Billingsley, Post-Gazette Staff

	The Way Forward Is With A Broken Heart By Alice Walker Random House $23.95

In the short story “Kindred Spirits” in Alice Walker’s newest work of fiction, “The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart,” the protagonist treasures old hats, stroking their familiar brims, finding endless meanings in their stains, wearing them defiantly.

This character’s fixation is a fitting metaphor for Walker’s creation of this new book -- a highly personal work -- because Walker’s themes, characters and message surely are old hat to readers by now.

Walker secured her literary reputation and catapulted to bestseller fame with “The Color Purple” and “The Temple of My Familiar,” taking her place in the multiethnic canon as a writer with a unique voice and a surprising story to tell.

But in Walker’s new collection of interwoven tales -- her journey toward reconcilement with aging, love gone wrong and a failed interracial marriage -- she sounds like any resigned woman in a mid-life crisis with a tear-marked journal on her bedside table and a gaggle of divorced, huggy friends.

Walker begins the collection with a preface that dedicates the work to “all those who love, and who seek the path instinctively of that which leads us to love, requires us to become intimate with what is foreign, and helps us to grow.”

It’s a fanciful conceit that fades fast as the book wears on and the stories become steadily more self-indulgent and repetitious.

The middle-aged women who inhabit the book are all recovering from a relationship, regretting the mistakes made with their lives and demanding understanding. They’re all attractive, successful, wealthy and sexually satisfied, reminiscent of the flawless, flat heroines of Harlequin romances.

These different characters are based in Walker. In the preface she indicates that the stories all have “a definite thread of having come out of a singular life.”

“To My Young Husband” takes the form of a diary entry and explores events largely true to Walker’s own life: her marriage to a white man, their difficult life in segregated Mississippi, the birth of their child, their struggle in the civil rights movement.

In “Kindred Spirits” the protagonist is a writer whose family members resent her for selfishly appropriating their common memories.

The immediacy of first-person perspective and the inherent conflict of the time make “To My Young Husband” the strongest story of the book. The power of the civil rights movement, at-the-time unlawful (in Mississippi) love and youthful idealism give the characters intensity and the story purpose. It’s the first story in the book, which builds the expectation that the following tales will be as engaging, but “The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart” disappoints.

The remaining stories are slice-of-life portraits, a scene of a day as a woman dredges her past, makes peace with her present or babbles on in self-awareness to men who beg for it. Most of the stories are broken into subchapters that are loosely associated with one another. Rather than binding these collective images to advance a theme or give a general sense of something, the book reads as if Walker wrote some notes for scenes and characters that interested her and became too bored to connect them.

Most of the stories involve “getting in touch” with a thing from the past. In the story “There Was a River,” Big Sister and Little Sister search for a cabin where their servile Auntie Putt-Putt once lived, searching for the place they ran away from home to, searching for the site where their aunt was a slave to her husband, to glory in their own freedom. They find the cabin and then, in a celebration of their liberty, go for a swim in their underwear.

In “The Brotherhood of the Saved” -- a very wacky little tale -- a woman takes her elderly female relatives, all wearing giant, floppy Sunday hats, to see “Deep Throat.” They discuss orgasm and make future plans to watch bestial pornography together, connecting through their reactions to explicit sexual deviance and a local door-to-door cult.

Sometimes the plots of stories within the book are so excessive and ridiculous that it is hard to believe Walker allowed them to be published. In the extremely convoluted stories that make up “Growing Out,” a lesbian woman and a former male lover reconnect while eating magic mushrooms, discussing a lust for competent female mechanics while listening to jazz. Then, there’s a woman possessed with the spirit of her raped Grandma who gets high with the wife of a former lover and rhapsodizes about gurus and her current young lover, who she believes is the incarnation of the child she aborted 20 years before.

Sometimes the book is strangely domestic. “Orelia and John” is about two people who find peace together after all the mistakes of their lives. In the first substory, “Olive Oil,” Orelia takes to secretly rubbing olive oil into her extraordinarily dry skin and she glows for the effort. She and John rub it all over each other as a sign of their acceptance of one another.

In “Cuddling,” Orelia is infatuated with someone else and she needs the restorative power of cuddling to win back John. In “Charms,” in back and forth flashbacks, we learn the history of the lives of Orelia and John and that John has an affair while Orelia’s away. She comes home, she understands and so they go on.

With the exception of “To My Young Husband,” the content of Walker’s latest is superficial, melodramatic stuff. It’s a poorly written, insubstantial book, too obviously a platform for Walker’s baggage. Writing this book may have been therapy for Walker, but reading it was a chore.