She shrugs off the label ”woman`s writer,” objecting that serious male novelists rarely are referred to as a ”man`s writers.” Nevertheless, most of Lynne Sharon Schwartz`s novels have been the kinds of books you want to pass along to your mother or your sister or your best friend: stories of women honing their senses of self against the whetstones of family, work, sexuality and societal expectation.
Her first novel, ”Rough Strife,” was written in the late 1970s, ”at a time when women were leaving their husbands in droves,” recalled New York-native Schwartz, in Chicago recently to promote her newest book. ”And many novels were being written about `How I Left My Husband or Family and Found a Better Life.` ”
Schwartz, who was interested in the Women`s Movement, thought many of these books dealt only superficially with the idea of a woman`s freedom to pursue her destiny. So she decided to write about a woman who experienced all the conflicting pulls of career, children, periodic boredom of marriage, and attraction to other men, yet remained married.
”Because it really doesn`t make a lot of difference in the end how you do it,” Schwartz says. ”It`s your life one way or another, and you never escape from it.”
In ”Disturbances in the Field,” Schwartz again created a central female character who pieced a fulfilling life together from the elements of marriage, children, friends and her work as a concert pianist. But this time Schwartz wondered what would happen if a life so carefully crafted were smashed by a tragedy beyond her character`s control.
”I wanted to find out whether she could keep going, whether she would still have an identity,” Schwartz says. ”And I found out that she could, that what kept her going was the continuity of her own inner voice, which kept reassessing and understanding her own life.”
Her newest novel, ”Leaving Brooklyn,” is a coming-of-age story set in the time and place of Schwartz`s own adolescence. Brooklyn in the late 1940s was, according to Schwartz, ”one of the most provincial places you could be, a cocooned, safe, swaddled place where security was the highest value, where adventure was what you did not want to have-or what you did not want your children to have.”
For 15-year-old Audrey, desperate to discover the more exotic destiny she knows awaits her, the sexual advances of her 37-year-old eye doctor seem to hold the key. Sensational as it sounds, their affair, Schwartz says, ”is not as much about sex as about knowledge and power. A first sexual experience is a way of finding out about things.”
What Schwartz`s female protagonists find out about life is generally reassuring, though the author isn`t sure why. ”I`ve always thought I was fairly pessimistic,” she says. ”I don`t think of my novels as being negative or positive or pessimistic, but rather as seeing reality exactly as it is.”
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