Since the Supreme Court draft opinion was leaked at the beginning of May, showing the court is posed to overrule Roe v. Wade any day now, I can’t stop thinking about a book I originally read when it was published in 2018:
Red Clocks falls into the DYSTOPIA subgenre of fiction, and just to make sure we’re all on the same page, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (the one I tell my students to use), a DYSTOPIA is “an imaginary place or condition in which everything is as bad as possible.”
How imaginary is this place or condition now in 2022 with the bodily autonomy of half the population of our country at stake? It would only make sense I’d think about this book and revisit it.
Know that I started writing this review in February 2018, after I finished reading the novel the first time. This was before it was named a Best Book of 2018 by The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, and the New York Public Library.
This is also when people (men) were saying women were being hyperbolic about the consequences of elections, before the appointments of Kavanaugh and ACB to the Supreme Court. I second-guessed my feelings then, YET HERE WE ARE NOW.
But I digress and continue (without spoilers). Part of the summary from the publisher:
“In this ferociously imaginative novel, abortion is once again illegal in America, in-vitro fertilization is banned, and the Personhood Amendment grants rights of life, liberty, and property to every embryo.
Five women. One question. What is a woman for?
In a small Oregon fishing town, five very different women navigate these new barriers alongside age-old questions surrounding motherhood, identity, and freedom.”
Despite the number of protagonists, I think the novel is easy to follow. It has short chapters labeled for each of the characters (Biographer, Mender, Daughter, Wife). Of course, the women (and one teenage girl) live in the same town and are more than their generic labels. The reader gets to know each one’s interior life and how they overlap or connect to one another.
The book begins and ends with “The Biographer” or Roberta (Ro) who is a single high school history teacher in her early 40s desperately trying to have a child (via adoption or IVF) before new laws go into effect.
Ro is also in the middle of researching/writing a book about a fictional explorer and between every chapter, we get tiny sections of Eivør Minervudottir’s life beginning with her birth in 1841 and various points in her journey until she eventually gets onto a steamship and a polar expedition.
In addition to being in the past, these unlabeled explorer sections are also in a different font. Even though there are nice echoes between the ‘then and now’ of it all, I think it’s the only narrative that can be read as a stand-alone.
Known as a witch by the locals, “The Mender” lives in the forest and takes care of women who come to see her with tinctures and herbs. Most of those who seek out her help do so in secret, but then she is arrested and charged with among other things “medical malpractice.” There is a trial.
More than 8 weeks after her period is late, “The Daughter” takes a test and confirms she is pregnant. Mattie is a 10th grader who also happens to be in Ro’s history class and now she has a lot to consider especially without access to legal reproductive care. Who can she trust with her secret?
Finally, there is Susan, “The Wife” who appears to have everything a woman could possibly want—a husband and two children. Is it that easy? No. Her children are frustrating, and her marriage is falling apart. The monotony of her plight reminds me of Laura Brown in Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hours.
In addition to rereading Red Clocks, since the Supreme Court leak, I’ve also reread portions of The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. THEN I rewatched all four seasons of the television series, but I fast-forwarded through the truly horrible parts in the spirit of self-care.
I’m making the connection between the two here because they both deal with reproduction and bodily autonomy, but Red Clocks is not speculative or futuristic in any way.
The author understands the comparisons to Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, but in an NPR interview in 2018 she said, “I think our books are very different, …she's created such a spectacular and drastic world that does draw on elements of historical fact, but which is really so separate from our own world, whereas I think that the world of Red Clocks could frankly happen next week.”
Unlike the totalitarian government of Gilead, the circumstances in Red Clocks are so familiar it makes it even scarier. All of the new constraints such as fertilized eggs being given constitutional rights at the moment of conception, abortion being illegal (in all 50 states), providers being charged with second-degree murder, and abortion seekers with conspiracy to commit murder, were all passed via Congress.
You should definitely read Red Clocks. And after you do, make sure you are registered to VOTE and that you do so for every single election (even primaries).
Blog Post by Janet Dale
Although she claims Memphis as home, Janet Dale lives in Georgia where she teaches first-year writing at Georgia Southern University. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize (2020, 2021) and Best of the Net (2021), her work has appeared in The Boiler, Hobart, Pine Hills Review, Zone 3, and others.