Mary Morgan reviews Marian Birch's The Age of Reason

The Age of Reason

A review by Mary Morgan

The Age of Reason, Marian Birch’s fascinating new novel, is set in rural Connecticut during the early 1950s. The Brynn family lives in a rambling farmhouse dating back centuries. Edith Brynn, age 8, is the oldest child of atheist, intellectual parents. Her father Arthur, a passionate communist, teaches at a local college. He lives in fear of being fired or arrested for his political affiliations and beliefs. Her mother Kitt, also a college instructor, is the daughter of once aristocratic Russian immigrants who live in Manhattan. Kitt translates the poems of Anna Ahkmatova, and loathes her motherly role, complaining at one point:

 “All I’m good for is word-craft, and my life now is consumed by children who can barely speak.”

There are also the times when Kitt loses herself in joy while reading Alice in Wonderland or Peter Pan to her children, or when she makes a lovely stew for Edith and her father when they bring home the Christmas tree. 

Marian Birch . . . leads the reader skillfully, through joy and heartbreak and with a few touches of magical realism . . .

Edith, a young gifted child with a very active imaginative life, is often called upon to care for her younger brother, Marcus, and subsequently her infant brother, Joey, named for Josef Stalin. But at every possible moment Edith escapes to her room where her “magic box” lives under her bed. She never knows when she opens it what she will see.

“She slid her magic box out from beneath her bed. No one knew about the box, not even Daniel. She’d never told anyone about the little worlds—castles, houses, streets, trees, brooks, ponies, cows and people—that dwelt inside. Today a circus was coming to town. A great line of tiny brightly painted wagons with throngs of gaily dressed acrobats, jugglers, and clowns paraded down the wide avenue that ran the length of the box, into and then out of the village center.”

Edith’s other escape is to her best friend, Daniel DeMelo’s house. His large Catholic family provides a view into a home where Grace DeMelo easily handles her five children, providing three meals a day “with every hair in place.” Edith often goes to Mass with the DeMelo’s, allowing her own parents to sleep in on Sundays. Her enchantment with the Catholic Church and its lovely robes, altars, and music, leads her to steal a missal and secretly perform a baptism for her new baby brother.

In The Age of Reason, Birch creates a story of intricate physical and emotional detail where Edith’s childhood is contained within a complex world of passionate, idealistic, promiscuous, and often careless adults. Her father Arthur, who grew up locally with “salt of the earth” parents, embraces family holidays with gusto. The extended family gathers at his parents’, Granny and Pop’s, nearby home.

“Arthur drove the Buick, with the turkey on the passenger seat, and various side dishes on the back seat . . . He triumphantly bore the steaming golden turkey into the kitchen and ostentatiously honed the big knife before he began to carve.”

But the stresses of a young family with three young children and two shaky careers creates scenes of passionate anger and frustration, frequent infidelities, and difficult emotions bordering on mental illness.

Marian Birch has a background as a psychologist specializing in early childhood. She leads the reader skillfully, through joy and heartbreak and with a few touches of magical realism, as Edith puzzles over, then begins to grasp some very hard truths. Her story kept me eagerly turning pages from beginning to end.

Mary Morgan is a happily retired teacher who lives in the Olympic foothills near the Dungeness River on traditional lands of the S’Klallam people.  Her poems, essays and book reviews have occasionally appeared in Rainshadow Journal, Lived Experience, the Madrona Project, the Port Townsend Leader and Voice of the Wild Olympics. 

The Age of Reason,
by Marian Birch

 ISBN 978-1-63988-441-4

Atmosphere Press, Austin, Texas
https://atmospherepress.com/?s=Marian+Birch

 2022, paper, 244 pages, $17.00