Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen
Published by Random House
Publication date: April 1, 1998
Genres: Book Clubs, Fiction, Social Issues
Bookshop
I’ve been trying hard to stick with reviewing more comforting reading, but I had a chance to delve into a favorite author’s backlist and took it. I’ve been an Anna Quindlen fan for years and recently decided to try her second novel. Published in 1998, Black and Blue is one woman’s story and the lengths they will go to for their children.
Fran is an ER nurse married to Bobby, a NYC police officer, and the mother of a 10-year-old son. She regularly sees women beaten by their husbands who won’t press charges and who make up excuses for them. The hospital even surreptitiously works with a wealthy woman who helps these victims escape abusive relationships. After Bobby breaks her nose Fran realizes she’s one of these women, turning to this advocate because Bobby has made it clear he’ll never let her or their son go.
From this beginning the novel moves into the realities of starting a new, hidden life. Fran takes Robert, their son, and with the help of this woman’s network disappears, starting a new life in a state far away. They’re both given new names, id papers, a small apartment to live in. Robert goes to a new school. Fran gets a cash-under-the-table job as a home visit nurse. But given that her husband is a police officer and has access to any number of databases designed to find people, she can never return to a legitimate job doing what she loves. She has to take whatever work they give her.
This is quintessential Quindlen, delving deeply into an ordinary life in extraordinary circumstances. You have a woman successful in her career earning a good income, living in a nice home with family nearby, and yet for the sake of her life and love of her child she has to give it all up. Not just temporarily, but for good. This gives Black and Blue the leaden feeling of always looking over your shoulder. This doesn’t even include her son’s feelings. He was aware of the abuse, but at 10 his father was able to explain it away. Now, he’s left everything behind and he has to be a new person and pretend his father is dead. These details just keep coming, skillfully related by Quindlen to make them feel mundane when they are anything but that.
This is a sad novel, but one of the things that struck me most was that it wasn’t shocking to me now the way it would have been if I read it in 1998 when it came out. At that time, it would have felt almost incomprehensible—a police detective allowed to abuse his wife and ultimately try and kill her? Maybe I was naïve or sheltered then, but now the extremes Fran goes to don’t surprise me. As protections for women’s rights get harder and harder to come by there’s much that will become less surprising at all and more tragic.
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This was the book that made me a fan of Quindlen! I was so amazed at the strength of her writing and how it could draw you into such a tragic happening.
Yes! I started reading her with her novel Every Last One and it was heartbreaking and un-putdownable. She is a go-to author for me.