Caroline Leavitt's 'Days of Wonder' Explores a Mother's Choice After Incarceration

I never met Caroline Leavitt, but I consider her a comrade: a sister soldier in the army of American writers facing down an increasingly ruthless publishing industry. Some authors take an “every man for himself” approach in competing for deals, visibility, and book sales. Others, including Leavitt, make relatives of their competitors. Leavitt's social media promotions about other writers' deals, publication dates, and events ring with the kind of enthusiasm most authors reserve for her own work. When the pandemic canceled book tours, Leavitt co-founded A Mighty Blaze, “an organization of 35 professional creative volunteers. connecting writers with readers online,” supporting not only books but also independent bookstores where authors typically meet their audiences.

In addition to being a stellar literary citizen, Leavitt is also a versatile and talented writer. A widely published book critic, she was named a New York Foundation for the Arts fellow for her fiction and won a National Magazine Award for her personal essay. She was a finalist for the Nickelodeon Screenwriting Awards and the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. Her blog, “She Runs in the Family,” appears monthly in Psychology Today..

With “Days of Wonder,” her thirteenth novel, Leavitt shows that she hasn't been too busy loving other authors or writing essays to continue honing her primary craft. Her gift for creating complex, unpredictable but self-aware protagonists is on full display with Ella Fitchburg, the star of “Days of Wonder,” who becomes pregnant and, lacking access to abortion, gives the baby up for adoption and then he regrets. .

As is his style, Leavitt infuses a much-told story with contemporary social issues that make the work fresh, provocative and profound. She guides us, with a firm hand, from the fiery first cross-class love between Ella, daughter of an unmarried Jewish seamstress, and Jude, son of a prominent and wealthy judge, to Ella's 24-year imprisonment for attempting to murder the furious Jude. . father. She discovers her pregnancy after Jude was erased from her life and the prison doors slammed behind her.

“'You can't raise a baby here,' the director said. 'You can't live from visit to visit.'”

Ella's mother, Helen, asks, “What do you think will happen when you go out and [your daughter] Do you have your own life, your own apartment?'”

The few children Ella had seen in the prison visiting area “seemed shy and wrinkled. Maybe Helen was right.”

In chapters that alternate between the points of view of Ella, Helen, and Jude (moving, sometimes confusingly, between time frames), Leavitt makes us feel the resulting pain. “Helen's pain mocked her. Every time she saw a dark cap with curls that reminded her of her daughter's, she froze with pain. She…she felt that she was slowly going crazy.”

During Ella's sixth year in prison, a journalist proves that judicial corruption sent her there and she is unexpectedly released. At 22, she is a changed woman, thrown into a changed world. She, a convicted felon, lacks the means or the will to begin the legal fight that would free her from that label. Instead, she is driven by a single obsession: finding her daughter. Truth be told (and Ella rarely tells herself or the reader the whole truth), she doesn't just want to track down Ella's daughter. She wants to get it back.

She spends the rest of the novel doing whatever it takes (legal and illegal, moral and immoral, intelligent and self-destructive) to make that happen. She moves to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where her daughter's adoptive parents have been raising her. “She came back the next day and the next, and every time she saw them, she learned something new. …The truth was that she didn't know how she could raise her own child. …This gave a new purpose to her observation: she would take cues from Carla's parents to solve it.” She stalks them. She knows them. She ingratiates herself with them. “She kept hearing that lawyer's voice. … They will never give you your son back.. But her longing tugged at her like an elastic band, constantly stretched to the point of breaking. She had to meet her daughter. Somehow she had to be close to the only beautiful thing she had created in her life.”

From this point on, Leavitt asks his readers many things. To become attached to Ella and support the success of Her mission, the reader must immediately realize the self-centeredness of Ella's great deception and also forgive it. We must invest in Ella's goal, while knowing that it is not best for Ella's daughter, who already has a wonderful mother. It's a tribute to Leavitt's seasoned skills that as the plot thickens, the characters evolve, and the pages fly, the reader's commitment to a misguided outcome deepens along with Ella's.

As we hurtle toward an ending that somehow surprises despite its inevitability, Leavitt urges us to consider the tangle of social issues her story uncovers: class, religion, America's corrupt legal and prison systems, domestic abuse, pregnancy teenager and the unreliable morality of the heart.

Meredith Maran, author of “The New Old Me” and other books, lives in a Silver Lake bungalow that is even older than she is.