Red Hen
Review by Walter Cummins
The inseparability of past and present permeates this novel through the lives of the four women friends whose stories alternate in the telling. It all culminates on one day, New York coping with a snow storm that complicates mobility and may affect the scheduled thirty-fifth reunion of Harrison prep school for girls. There the four focal characters met and cemented ongoing friendships that lasted for decades despite tensions among them. Now they are women in their early fifties, each facing a personal crisis at a turning point on this day.
These are the four. Val, a once significant pop singer, has been reduced to dog walking to survive and cover the cost of her rent-controlled walkup. Lauren, an official at the New York Historical Society, broods over the likely breakup with her same-sex wife, Amy, and distancing from her young daughter. Lauren, a scientist at Columbia University, unmarried and childless, enjoying a faculty apartment overlooking the Hudson River but dry of ideas, must give a talk that afternoon on the research funded by a major award she believes she didn’t deserve. She also is days away from breast cancer surgery. Cora, who had been a music executive, is dead, functioning as an ghost-like presence through the events of the day, observing the lives of the others, and sending psychic messages.
Her death is revealed in the novel’s opening sentence in which she announces that she is “so fucking sick of being dead,” an emotion typical of her aggression. Dying was the result of a New York accident, Cora, tipsy, running a red light on a Citibike and crashing into a taxi. At Harrison she was the leader of the four, tough and forceful, and continued to be. The surviving three remain shaken by her loss.
Chace makes each woman complex in her urgency, in good part because of the strength of the writing that penetrates to their core. Here’s a sample that conveys the complications of the women’s tensions, includes the overriding presence of Cora, and reminds the reader of an event that will be filled with uncertainty on this pressured day:
Because Cora died and Val wanted Sasha and Lauren to keep liking her despite all her fucked-up shit that drove Cora away. Pathetic. She couldn’t even handle one boring cocktail party because she was afraid of what her former classmates would think of her. She left those people in the dust thirty-five years ago and now she was the one with ashes in her mouth.
Newsflash, said Cora. Everybody’s got ashes in their mouth.
That cocktail party reunion of their Harrison class is being hosted by Sasha, an event both Val and Lauren would like to miss, while Sasha wishes she hadn’t committed herself to offering her home, considering all that is going on in her life.
Dramatizing that reunion party is a challenge for Chace, who not only has to fulfill the impact of its climax for all the dreads of the day but also has to introduce a whole new set of characters, the attending Harrison alumnae. She has had all of the novel’s previous sections to make Cora, Val, Lauren, and Sasha meaningful. Now she has to provide identities and significance to others in just a few paragraphs. She succeeds in accomplishing that, especially when the women take turns in an obligatory session of telling something about their present circumstances.
The others verify that the group of four central characters had dominated their class at Harrison, intimidating, especially Cora. As the others reveal their present lives, they are all interesting, even those who don’t believe they are. Several of them even offer medical and psychological advice that has an effect on the others.
With only Val, Lauren, and Sasha remaining in Sasha’s apartment, just as they had hoped the evening would end, they have confronted their demons and unknowingly fulfilled Cora’s lesson of St. Francis calming a terrorizing wolf by feeding its hungers, replacing the ashes in its mouth.
