Our Kind

by Kate Walbert

A thought-provoking novel that opens a window into the world of a generation and class of women caught in a cultural limbo.

From the award-winning author of The Gardens of Kyoto comes this witty and incisive novel about the lives and attitudes of a group of women -- once country-club housewives; today divorced, independent, and breaking the rules.

In Our Kind, Kate Walbert masterfully conveys the dreams and reality of a group of women who came into the quick rush of adulthood, marriage, and child-bearing during the 1950s. Narrating from the heart of ten companions, Walbert subtly depicts all the anger, disappointment, vulnerability, and pride of her characters: "Years ago we were led down the primrose lane, then abandoned somewhere near the carp pond."

Now alone, with their own daughters grown, they are finally free -- and ready to take charge: from staging an intervention for the town deity to protesting the slaughter of the country club's fairway geese, to dialing former lovers in the dead of night.

Walbert's writing is quick-witted and wry, just like her characters, but also, in its cumulative effect, moving and sad. Our Kind is a brilliant, thought-provoking novel that opens a window into the world of a generation and class of women caught in a cultural limbo.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literary Fiction, Book Club, Contemporary, Unfinished

208 pages, Paperback

First published March 23, 2004

About the author

Kate Walbert was born in New York City and raised in Georgia, Texas, Japan and Pennsylvania, among other places.

She is the author of A Short History of Women, chosen by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2009 and a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize; Our Kind, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction in 2004; The Gardens of Kyoto, winner of the 2002 Connecticut Book Award in Fiction in 2002; and Where She Went, a collection of linked stories and New York Times notable book.

She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fiction fellowship, a Connecticut Commission on the Arts fiction fellowship, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library.

Her short fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize stories.

From 1990 to 2005, she lectured in fiction writing at Yale University. She currently lives in New York City with her family.

Reviews

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

With its unusal plural narrator ("we"), Walbert made an excellent choice of the group of women who would be narrating this novel: post-divorce women in the late 1950s, held together by their mutual social restrictions. Walbert pinpoints the moment in history that is the cusp of the feminist movement and personifies it in these women: the yearning for more than is their lot in life.


One of Walbert’s most impressive achievements with this book is the way that it both pillories these women of privilege while at the same time showing sympathy for the ties that bind them into their comfortable, suffocating lives. They are not women who want for material things, and they have all been to university, but the promise of an intellectual life is just out of reach: Viv’s story, ‘The Beginning of the End,’ about turning down a graduate scholarship because her husband proposed, is the set piece in this regard. She doesn’t ever really feel that she has a choice: “He had given her the ring just last week, and she’d said yes, of course; the question one that seemed, just by the asking, to demand the affirmative. She was going to be married…That she would graduate on Saturday seemed beside the point.”

[Connie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not really sure what I thought of this novel. It's the story of several aging women who socialize with one another, being "of a certain age," but they carefully avoid any kind of meaningful intimacy. I think the distance that the author places between her characters and the readers is part of that lack. Also, if you are careful, you can trace each of the women's vulnerability through her path of disappointment, carefully masked behind cocktails and motherhood. I would like very much to discuss this book with other readers, because I think there's more there than I'm getting.

[Angela · Rating 2 out of 5]

Our Kind tells the story of a group of women, either divorced or widowed, in their post-marriage lives. They share their histories, their memories of marriage and children, and we witness what it is they are doing with their lives now—which, they feel, isn't much of anything at all.

I wasn't overly impressed with it, to be honest. I admire Walbert's writing style—I suspect that's the reason it was a National Book Award finalist (I have high expectations of this award). But the story itself didn't impress me. There was a lot of nothing going on, and a lot of smoking, and one too many references to things that hadn't quite happened yet. Plus, the number of times the phrase, "et cetera, et cetera" appeared started to irk me.

I think if it were actually presented as a short story collection, rather than a full-length novel, it would have worked better. As it stands, it's somewhere in the middle. The stories don't really relate to one another, jumping between past and future, but there was still some sort of attempt to connect them. It didn't work for me.

At least it was a short read. I don't know if I would have been able to stand reading it for another long train ride.

[Donna Girouard · Rating 2 out of 5]

The message here would appear to be that a woman has (had?) two choices: she can either work on herself / her education and end up alone OR she can marry and have children, meanwhile becoming shallow and "fuzzy-minded." The final twenty or so pages rather sums this up.
Are we supposed to like these women?? They are total wastes of space, with their pools and their booze and their cigarettes (that they crush under their heels and leave for - who? the pool boy, perhaps? - to pick up).
And their daughters will be dysfunctional (one, of course, committing suicide). Did Barbara (I think it was)REALLY stick candles in a half head of lettuce for her overweight daughter's birthday??
No wonder they're all divorced. My favorite is Esther who perhaps realizes just what a waste of space she is and ends it all by drinking poison in front of the others "et cetera, et cetera."

[Freesiab BookishReview · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a great surprise! I just picked up this book randomly at the library. It may be a 4.5. My only issue is that the flashbacks/characters were sometimes confusing. This is a subtle work of feminism. A story of a group of women "of a certain age" all married in the 1950s (ish) then divorced etc. looking back on their lives, friendships and children. While it's not hard hitting and doesn't tackle things head on its a beautiful glimpse of women. Each chapter is a tiny piece of one of the the women in the group, referred to as "we". I found it very moving and impactful. Some things come in small and quiet packages.

[Alisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's not that this book was bad, it just wasn't my kind of book. I knew that when I started it, but for some reason that didn't stop me. Maybe because it was short? Maybe because I wanted to make sure what I thought my tastes are, actually are my tastes? Actually, the one in the middle about the women in the hospice reading Virginia Woolf was good. What is it about the terminally ill that just won't let them stay on-topic? I think this is the only book I've read in the first-person plural. Because, no, I haven't read that other book that's getting all the hoo-ha lately. And don't plan to.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a story of women who married and had children in the '50's and now divorced were again trying to have control of their lives and destinies. The story is told in a series of reflections on the past and how they came to where they are now. It is also told through present day events and the boldness they feel given the past to act on their feelings. A nice story but not a grabber.

[Diane Ramirez · Rating 2 out of 5]

The inner lives of suburbia women can, in the hands of some authors, be so dark, so evocative/disturbing, so hearbreaking -- all good! I have little patience for art that doesn't give me pain and/or humor and/or inspiration and/or love. This book fits into the Anne Tyler BORING category. I hung in there hoping it would pay off but -- nope. Sometimes escaping into others' lives can be such a drag.

[Holly · Rating 2 out of 5]

2009 #25: This book was just... not very good. It provides snapshots of women's lives post-divorce in suburban America. The problem was that I just didn't care about any of the characters, so I didn't care about what happened to them. If you are thinking of reading this, I would say don't bother.

[Cordelia · Rating 1 out of 5]

The stories in the book jumped around in time and place the way my brain roves at 3am--not something I would think of inflicting on others. There seemed to be no need to keep the charachters straight, which made it hard to feel any connection to their story. I had trouble convincing myself to keep reading, and probably would not have done so if the book hadn't been so short.

[Meredith · Rating 1 out of 5]

Did not work for me at all. Stopped after 80 pages. Too scattered and vague for my taste.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not crazy about this book or its structure -- series of anecdotes with recurring themes and characters. Not enough character development. I would give it 2.5 stars if I could.

[Kelly Wagner · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is another item from the "Voice" section of /More Book Lust./ By voice, MBL means unusual points of view. In this case, the unusual point of view is first person plural. The story jumps back and forth in time, a chapter by chapter. At the end of the book it suddenly slips into standard third person omniscient, to tell the earliest and the latest episodes. To me, the first person plural seemed like a novelty, used mainly to disguise the fact that the story is thin and outdated. There have been better novels about the meaninglessness of women's lives back when it was thought that having a husband and children was the only meaning a woman's life should have. Just in case you are unable to draw any parallels to /Mrs. Dalloway/ yourself, Walbert prompts you by having a book club discuss it, in a chapter in the middle. All in all, an interesting PoV wasted on an outdated plot that has been better fleshed out elsewhere.

[Dianelw · Rating 4 out of 5]

From my mother's bookshelf.... She kept talking about Kate Walbert and I had only read her other books. But I can see why my Mom loved Walbert's wry take on life and sardonic eye, like her own at times. This is a book about baby boom white suburban Moms. It's a little hard to follow, in part because it's written in a concise way. She's a really amazing writer. Plus, it brought back the odd details of an era. Remember rick-rack, wraparound skirts, and Pappagallo shoes (that none of us could afford!)

[Julie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked that this was a compilation of related stories; however, the stories never really moved a plot forward. This made me a little sad because the women basically are all closet alcoholics or worse. They are just all cynical, depressed women.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly original, witty, assuredly masterfully & elegantly written. National Book Award winner.

[Kathy · Rating 2 out of 5]

It actually has 195 pages.

[Ethan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved half of this book, the other half was a bit pretentious imo

[Katie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Did not finish. I made it through about 30 pages. Disjointed random stories made it feel like I was missing pages of the story.

[Suzy · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

[Kerfe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't like this book at first. And I never got all the characters sorted out. But Walbert's writing pulls and remains in the mind. Each story could stand on its own, but the impact accumulates as each new telling reveals more.

These are women, I think, of my mother's generation, or maybe a bit younger, of a time when marriage and family were givens for a woman's life, brides of the 1950's. And yet...they seemed to be distorted versions of the women and families I knew, perhaps because their lives seemed so directionless and without financial worry. Never really connected to their husbands, who leave them eventually for younger women; spending their days, even then, at the country club or in groups in their interchangeable homes; they smoke, drink, and fill the boredom of their hours with meaningless trivia. They both smother and ignore their children, who get away and stay away. They are alone together. The one exception, the childless artist widow who adored her husband, is accepted but always somewhat incomprehensible to the others, an aberration.

So much accumulated emptiness. "But what kind are we? Yellowing pearls on a taut string; valued once but now too fussy. Grit when crushed, we could tell them, we were fakes all along." It's a depressing picture. I hope it's not a reflection of the actual life of Walbert's mother, to whom the book is dedicated.

This was not my experience in that time and place...women may have self-identified as wives and mothers, but they also had jobs and did things that had meaning to them, their families, their communities. And there were no country clubs in my world, or lack of money worries. But despite a kind of factual separation, Walbert's women connected with me in a visceral way. And her writing, as always, has much to discover and enjoy.

[Brianna Grantham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kate Walbert's 2004 novel, Our Kind, is unusual in every sense. It's not long—a comfortable 195 pages, but it is complex and deep, tackling a topic we often neglect to address: What happened to the country club wives of the 1950's when the world outgrew them?

The narrative is told as a collective first person, we, and sometimes addresses the reader directly: "Know that we are a close-knit community."

The narrator is the women of a small New England town. "We were married in 1953. Divorced in 1976. Our grown daughters pity us; our grown sons forget us." And this is the crux of Walbert's novel: the fate of women who married in an era when marriage was the only socially acceptable profession for women after that era ended.

When magazines no longer reminded women never to let their husbands see them without their faces on, always to greet him at the door with a kiss, dinner ready, the house clean, and children ready to be kissed and put to bed. Walbert follows a small group of women as they navigate new and old divorces, repressed sexual identity, widowhood, grandmotherhood, aging, and the search for a purpose.

At times hilarious, at others absolutely heart-breaking, readers recognize each of the women in turn as someone in their own lives. Each scene is fascinating, regardless of whether the women are plotting an intervention for the town's handsome alcoholic real estate agent, coping with a friend's slow decline from cancer, or taking on the local country club to save some geese. Our Kind is a portrait of ourselves, our mothers, our grandmothers, and their stories are rich and complicated—even relevant.

[Philtrum · Rating 2 out of 5]

This slim volume (195pp) is a “novel in stories” which means it’s ten (related) stories about a group of rich, American, east coast, widows/divorcees who are now, in their 60s/70s, looking back (rather selfishly) at the (rather self-centred) lives they led in the 1950s and 1960s (when their children were young and they spent their days around at each others’ houses, smoking and drinking), and also ruminating on the empty lives they lead now (husbands dead or divorced, daughters grown into the modern day equivalents of what they once were and now leading selfish lives of their own).

Admittedly, as a British male in his early 50s, I must be fairly far removed from the intended readership. The writing was a little too clever for my liking. Clipped sentences. Grammar; odd. Et cetera Et cetera.

It was difficult to drum up much sympathy for the main characters. They mainly seemed to be looking back wistfully at their fairly useless lives, while continuing to smoke and drink themselves into oblivion, and while moaning about the general state of play.

I appreciated the opportunity to get some insight into the lives of such people (though looking at the jacket photograph of the author – looks younger than me – I’m not sure if her source material is second-hand, third-hand, or just imagined) but it was just a little too cold for me.

Cleverly (academically) written but not enough passion (for anything).

4/10

[Gauri Khanolkar · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a quick read and has some beautiful writing, and in many ways is reminiscent of Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, which I recently read, in that it is a collection of stories which jump back and forth in time about a group of people reflecting on their lives and themes of regret and disappointment as characters progress into old age are explored. However, this collection of stories is very disjointed while the characters are hardly ever fleshed out and all seem to merge into one another. The book paints a very bleak picture of the options available to a woman on how she could live her life i.e. developing herself intellectually or devoting herself to marriage and family as mutually exclusive scenarios. Granted that the characters are women who came of age in the post-WW II era and their circumstances are vastly different from the ones we find ourselves in today, the women in the book seem to be struggling with their identities even years after they are married/divorced/with grown children and this has the plot feel like it lacks substance and depth.

[Jane · Rating 3 out of 5]

A "library grab" that struck me as interesting, partly because it seemed to deal with women who were of my mother and mother-in-law's generation. I haven't read any of Kate Walbert's writing before this, but found her spare style to be fairly effective. The reader is left to infer much about the characters and action, but having something left to one's imagination isn't always a negative and, in fact, caused me (in the case of this series of short stories that nevertheless left an impression of a book) to perhaps become more engaged with the characters than I might otherwise have been. Walbert grapples with expectations faced by women who came of age during the 1950s--occupationally, as mothers and wives, as friends. She has a deft touch in weaving between the women's current selves and their past lives.

[MBenzz · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not a big fan of short stories as it is, but I love the era of the '40s and '50s. Seeing as how that's the era these women are from, I figured I really enjoy this. Well, I was wrong. The book focuses more on the women when their older...much older.

But that wasn't why I didn't like this book. What I didn't like was the writing style. Not AT ALL. It was extremely choppy, and I found it to be difficult to follow in many places. And the women themselves...I just didn't care for them. They were a very weird bunch, and I thought they were a bit eccentric for no apparent reason.

Overall, not a book I recommend. But as I said, I'm also not a big short story reader. I picked this up thinking I was in for some easy, light reading...but that wasn't the case.

[Becka · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's disappointing that so many people have marked this two stars or less - I know first person plural is not the easiest perspective to write or read in, but it is perfect for the story Walbert is telling. At times it wanders and waffles and there is basically no plot, I will say that, but that isn't a failing, because Walbert isn't hugely concerned with plot to begin with. Instead she paints a picture of a group of women burned out, potential squandered, abandoned by their children, trapped in a cycle of commercial holidays and craft socials - and still quite determined to have a good time in the few years they have left. It's simultaneously uplifting and tragic, and I'd really recommend it on the basis of the last chapter alone, which left me in tears.

[Cai · Rating 4 out of 5]

I admire Kate Walbert’s work for its clearly feminist perspective. In her novel in stories, OUR KIND, she writes in the collective voice (using the first person plural ‘we’) about a group of upper middle class divorced suburban women getting on in age. These women raised families in the fifties and sixties and, now alone, are testing new limits, getting feisty, refusing to play by the rules that have not served them well. We visit the pain of love and marriage gone wrong, of children who have not remained close, of encroaching disease and alcoholism. And while these women are not exactly intimate—theirs is the culture of the stiff upper lip—shared experience binds them. Walbert’s style is taut and spare, and she invokes the lives of these women with pain and beauty.

[Kit · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really liked Kate Walbert's "A Short History of Women" so was excited to find this one from 2004. Not quite as excellent. Well written and you can see her style emerging, but I had difficulty feeling sympathy or connection with the setting and the characters--a bunch of essentially aimless, helpless wives and mothers in the rich New York suburbs in the mid 20th century. Sad times for these pre-feminist women in so many ways--interesting exercise to try to write stories about them, but just isn't my cup of tea. Walbert's done much better since.

[LauraLu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Am I aging? Am I middle aged? Am I in store for the life the women of this book have led? Sure, I have led a life with boundaries beyond marriage and motherhood. But I am married... and who knows what's to come. In old age I hope I will have prepared myself for better uses of idle time than they did. I hope I will get there with a sense of worth and purpose more in tact that these women had. And most of all I hope I still have my best friends with me like they did.