The Divorcees

By Rowan Beaird
Fiction/Manilla Press/Paperback/256 pages/$25.77/Amazon SG (amzn.to/3W0Z2XM)
4 stars

In post-Great Depression United States, when divorces were taboo and most states had lengthy procedures for marital break-up, Nevada was one exception where six weeks spent in a divorce ranch could guarantee a new start for women.

Debut novelist Rowan Beaird sets her compelling The Divorcees in the fascinating world of women hoping to escape their unbearable marriages by staying six weeks at the Golden Yarrow, a divorce ranch in Reno, Nevada, where Mrs Lois Saunders hopes to leave her husband Lawrence to become Ms Lois Gorski.

Lois lies to her fellow ranch mates that her divorce was on the grounds of her husband’s impotence. To her lawyer, she states that her grounds for divorce is the broadly worded “extreme cruelty” – a boon for women in her situation, which she does not think is as desperate as the other girls’ at the Golden Yarrow.

It was neither abuse nor desertion, but “there isn’t a word to explain how Lawrence talked to her, almost as if she were his secretary, or how his constant questions about how she spent her time spurred her to conjure luncheons or hours of bridge”.

In short, she was unhappy and wanted the freedom of singlehood.

This, too, creates a seemingly irreparable rift between her and her counterparts, until a mysterious woman appears.

In prose that is austere but precise, Beaird conjures the period with a cinematic eye – rendering in detail the contradictions of the ranch’s indoors with large printed cotton curtains juxtaposed against dark walnut colonial chairs, the atmospheric hold of the harsh desert sunlight, and the litany of activities the women go through like horseback rides and rowdy visits to drinking establishments.

The world of the divorce ranch is not rendered in naive utopian language, as Beaird astutely captures the shifting power dynamics of the ranch as a throwback to the dynamics of school.

Tropes like Rita the principal, Dorothy the flirt, June the valedictorian and Mary Elizabeth the sweetheart emerge to create a world of fierce rivalry and jealousy, but also alliances and even passionate friendship.

Beaird is a keen observer of how women act without men, dressing and behaving differently in this liminal world of possible freedoms: “It’s not like they act like men, but like girls when no men are present.”

When the enigmatic and glamorous Greer Lang arrives one night, Lois is caught in a passionate frenzy of obsession – “struck like a tuning fork” – with a woman so unlike the other conventional women in the ranch, who lives by her own schedule and rules.

In Greer and Lois’ intense and fraught relationship, Beaird proves that she is a powerful plotter of a slow-burn thriller.

The mysterious and shape-shifting Greer – whom Lois can only watch in the way she watches Marlene Dietrich, “trying to decide what sort of character she’ll be and whether or not to trust her” – proves to be a beguiling if magnetic presence.

A wholly transporting historical novel that renders its women’s lives in cumulative detail and patient revelation, The Divorcees is a powerful debut from a writer who has a knack for convincing the reader to inhabit, and gamble for hope in, its faded world.

If you like this, read: The Price Of Salt by Patricia Highsmith (Dover Publications, 2015, $24, Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/3UaktVd). The lesbian cult classic novel, made into hit movie Carol (2015) by American director Todd Haynes, transports readers back to mid-century US, where a lonely Carol going through a divorce responds to a Christmas card by a young woman.