The Dollmaker

"She’s not, and so I was really excited to see that Penguin UK is reissuing The Dollmaker this month. The cover is gorgeous – it’s an overview of the Detroit grid and it just looks so cool. Arnow was a Kentuckian – from the same part of Kentucky as I’m from, the eastern Kentucky mountains – and her book hasn’t really got the credit and the study it deserves. It’s not easy to read, a lot of it’s written in dialect. But it’s gorgeous. “Gertie Nevels has a hard life and, for lack of a better term, she is a badass, to an extreme degree” It’s about a woman named Gertie Nevels who is from south eastern Kentucky and she’s pretty typical for her time and place. She runs a farm, she’s married, she has a large, large family, she feels a deep connection to the land and to the seasons, she grows her own food…. She has a typical agrarian life and it’s one she’s fairly happy with. And the aspect of her life that gives her the most joy – and she never describes it as artistry, she just describes it as something that she loves to do – is whittling. She has a pocketknife that she carries with her all the time and she’s always looking for the perfect piece of hickory or cherrywood to just sit down and carve something. She almost treats it as a secret release. She makes dolls for her children and sometimes she makes little curios for her friends and family, but really it’s something – a sweet, secret something – that she loves to do. Once you call it art you set the stakes and the stakes are really high. And the thing about Gertie’s life is that she is forced to be a pragmatist – she works from morning to night trying to feed her family. In the first chapter one of her sons is incredibly ill and she’s forced to hive him an emergency tracheotomy and – oh – it’s so hard to read. She has a hard life and, for lack of a better term, Gertie Nevels is a badass, to an extreme degree. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter So it’s interesting to see how this drive to make something is with her even when she’s tending to her family and doing chores. The story’s big turn is when she’s pretty much dragged to Detroit by her husband because he’s got a factory job out there during the Second World War. And so it’s the story of the Appalachian migration – in the US we call it the Hillbilly Highway – when folks from Kentucky and West Virginia and Tennessee, whose farming lives were very difficult and often not very profitable – and coal jobs were drying up, too – would go to industrial cities to find jobs in the factories. This is a move that Gertie hates, but when she’s working and going through the paces of her life, she is fingering her pocketknife in her coat pocket and longing to get back to that piece of cherrywood. At the centre of the story is this piece of cherrywood that she’s working on, and she doesn’t know yet what it’s going to be, whether it’s going to be Jesus or Judas – she’s waiting for the face to occur to her. It’s the only concession that her husband makes in the marriage – because in all other respects it’s like Gertie’s husband barely sees her. It’s a difficult moment because, in one way, it could be taken as a kind of olive branch to her, to her need to do something for herself; but really, yes, it’s for money and he totally misses the point, doesn’t he? Yes, that’s a heart-breaking scene. Right, and that speaks to the great thrill about making anything – the thrill of feeling almost as if you’re simultaneously at the mercy of and in partnership with something that’s bigger than you; you’re doggedly working and you’re not quite sure of the direction this thing that you’re making will take. That’s part of the excitement, part of the sense of – without wanting to sound too clichéd – wonder that is attached to making anything."