This Woman’s Work: Kate Veitch’s Trust Tackles Modern Issues

Elliott Bay Books (1521 10th Ave.) will host Kate Veitch on Monday, July 19th, at 7:00 p.m. Ms. Veitch is promoting her second novel, Trust, published by Plume Books. Without a Backward Glance, Veitch’s first novel, was a Library Journal Best Books 2008 selection.

Soap operas are the most popular form of television drama in the world. Nearly every country on the planet produces soaps, and programming is exported across cultures in a lightly regulated, media free-for-all that makes most industries green with envy. Step into any corner convenience store in Seattle and the odds are excellent that a television set behind the counter will be playing a serial, whether from Southeast Asia, Latin America, or the U.S.

There is now an all-soap T.V. network; soap magazines are one of the few periodicals that are not experiencing declining readership; hundreds of thousands of websites are devoted to the genre as a whole, to particular types of soaps, and individual programs have multiple fan sites where viewers can follow the doings of characters, actors, and producers. A keyword search on “soap opera” will produce over six million hits. Serial dramas contain some of the world’s longest-running programs and are the single most successful advertising vehicle ever created.

It should be no surprise, then, that the soap opera formula has crept into novels. Called domestic fiction, women’s literature, or chick-lit, these novels owe more to Guiding Light than they do to Pride and Prejudice. The formula incorporates weddings, funerals, infidelity, natural disaster, mistaken identity, comas, soft-core sex, rivalries (personal, professional, political, familial…take your pick), and a handful of other tropes that even those who don’t watch soaps can easily name.

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Trust includes all of the above and meshes them into a light, entertaining novel that owes much of its interest to minor characters. The novel opens on the heroine, Susanna Greenfield–wife, mother, art teacher, and doormat–playing doubles tennis with her husband, Gerry Visser, and another married couple. Susanna is overmatched and knows it: “As they played on Susanna managed several decent, practical serves,…but she felt besieged. Joe and Wendy were not just stronger but also more strategic players than her….” Susanna nonetheless soldiers on.

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Susanna’s husband, an architect, is less than supportive, to put it mildly. Aggressive in play, as well as work, Gerry dishes out criticism in the guise of honesty, punctuating his frequently self-serving and manipulative barbs with “I shouldn’t say this, but…” an approach that is called out later in the story by the couples counselor that the two eventually consult. Nonetheless, Susanna defers to Gerry and seeks his approval for more than half of the novel, until Gerry’s philandering and self-aggrandizement prove too odious to stomach.

Susanna’s children are more sympathetic, both as characters and to their mother. Seb and Stella-Jean are a little too Perky and Quirky McPerfect-kids to be believable teenagers, but their affectionate name-calling (“face-ache” may be an Australian thing, but “fuckhead” is universal) and cheerful squabbling is amusing. Otherwise, the siblings are too smart, talented, attractive, and polite for credibility.

Fortunately, Susanna’s sister, Angie, and Angie’s young son Finn are damaged enough to provide interesting foils to the Visser offspring. Finn, especially, is a troubled and compelling character. Emotionally damaged, Finn is prone to violent outbursts and periods of withdrawal reminiscent of autistic children. His problems make him a target for other children, and for adults both well-meaning and sinister. When Angie, a former heroin addict turned born-again Christian, takes in Gabriel, an evangelical musician, the question of who can be trusted treads the familiar ground of child abuse. Gabriel himself is stock-villain creepy, and Angie is almost absurdly oblivious, but Finn rings true.

Until the 1970s, soap operas focused almost exclusively on the domestic sphere. Women were, and still are, the primary viewers of soaps, and the industry caters to female concerns. As women entered the workforce in greater numbers (today women are almost 60 percent of the U.S. workforce), networks launched soaps that ran in the late afternoon and evening, to accommodate a working audience, and female characters were also allowed to have jobs, even professions.

This factoid is remarkably pertinent to Trust. Susanna works as an art teacher, although Veitch doesn’t dwell on her teaching career more than necessary to establish that she has one, and that Susanna is a good, if slightly obtuse, instructor. Instead, Veitch uses the fact of Susanna’s career to illustrate how many more choices women have today than they did before the 1970s, in countries like the U.S. and Australia.

In one scene, Jean, Susanna and Angie’s mother, points out that, “In 1967, women in Australia had to resign from the public service when they got married…. Women couldn’t get loans on their own, not without a male guarantor, not even to buy a fridge, let alone to buy a house or start a business.” Later, Jean says, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to lecture,” but Veitch most definitely does, and the point is made several times in the novel.

Eventually, Susanna’s career path becomes the central issue of Trust. Her art opens her eyes to the suffering of others, allows her to come to terms with her own tragedies, and reveals the flaws in her marriage. The need to produce work, and a room of her own to do it in, forces Susanna to peel herself off the porch and quit being a doormat.

It’s not an original story, and Veitch doesn’t bring anything especially new or exciting to the telling of it, but her writing is solid, her story moves, and her characters are usually engaging, and sometimes quite witty. Trust is primarily set in the Melbourne area, but only in the broadest possible sense–there is no real sense of place as a character in the book–so U.S. readers shouldn’t have any problem with connecting with the primarily suburban ambiance.

It is common and easy to deride soap operas and domestic fiction as somehow lesser, or not as serious, as other genres. Although women make up the majority of the workforce and are the primary purchasers of almost everything in America, the things that women purchase the most of, like the jobs that women are the primary holders of, aren’t valued by the Western cultural zeitgeist. This makes it difficult to review work by women critically without feeding into social bias, a point that Veitch herself makes in and with Trust. One hopes that she will continue to write, and to explore issues of sexism and class in her novels.

Read an excerpt here.