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Books and Cooks Ithaca -- April 2000

Midwives

Our rating: 3.4 cups of tea!
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 Midwives by Chris Bohjalian

Discussion date: April 19, 2000

Discussion place: Steve's place.

Menu: Pasta with marinara or pesto, bread, wine, salad.

Xeney's book forum has also discussed Midwives. It might be interesting to see what they have had to say about it. It was there Lyn found the following two links:

Real-life midwife inspired Bohjalian novel

Random House's website for Midwives, including a reading guide, excerpt and discussion forum.

Amazon.com
Oprah Book ClubŪ Selection, October 1998: On a violent, stormy winter night, a home birth goes disastrously wrong. The phone lines are down, the roads slick with ice. The midwife, unable to get her patient to a hospital, works frantically to save both mother and child while her inexperienced assistant and the woman's terrified husband look on. The mother dies but the baby is saved thanks to an emergency C-section. And then the nightmare begins: the assistant suggests that maybe the woman wasn't really dead when the midwife operated:

Did she perform at least eight or nine cycles as my mother said, or four or five as Asa recalled? That is the sort of detail that was disputable. But at some point within minutes of what my mother believed had been a stroke, after my mother concluded the cardiopulmonary resuscitation had failed to generate a pulse or a breath, she screamed for Asa and Anne to find her the sharpest knife in the house.
In Midwives, Chris Bohjalian chronicles the events leading up to the trial of Sibyl Danforth, a respected midwife in the small Vermont town of Reddington, on charges of manslaughter. It quickly becomes evident, however, that Sibyl is not the only one on trial--the prosecuting attorney and the state's medical community are all anxious to use this tragedy as ammunition against midwifery in general; this particular midwife, after all, an ex-hippie who still evokes the best of the flower-power generation, is something of an anachronism in 1981. Through it all, Sibyl, her husband, Rand, and their teenage daughter, Connie, attempt to keep their family intact, but the stress of the trial--and Sibyl's growing closeness to her lawyer--puts pressure on both marriage and family. Bohjalian takes readers through the intricacies of childbirth and the law, and by the end of Sibyl Danforth's trial, it's difficult to decide which was more harrowing--the tragic delivery or its legal aftermath.

Narrated by a now adult Connie, Midwives moves back and forth in time, fitting vital pieces of information about what happened that night like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle into its complicated plot. As Connie looks back on her mother's trial, she is still trying to understand what happened--not on the night of the disaster--but in the months and years that followed

The New York Times Book Review:
...What happens when a person discovers that she may have accidentally killed someone? Regardless of the legal consequences, how does one make sense of -- or peace with -- a fatal mistake? Can one ever admit to such a mistake? Mr. Bohjalian raises these disquieting questions as Sibyl's case develops but never quite addresses them, which is a shame because they must haunt every medical practitioner. They certainly haunt all medical practitioners' patients.

That Sibyl is a lay midwife, without formal medical training, pushes the stakes even higher. Did she act responsibly in going ahead with a backwoods home birth when the mother was anemic and an ice storm was predicted? In a world increasingly intolerant of risk, how much risk is safe to take? This last question is a fascinating one, and Sibyl is the perfect character to explore it. Yet, though each chapter opens with extracts from her ''notebooks,'' a journal kept before, during and after her trial, Sibyl's perspective isn't truly explored. ...

The Books and Cooks Midwives Informal Reading Guide
(member-generated questions in no particular order)

  • What is more important, whether Charlotte Bedford was alive, or whether Sybil thought she was alive? 

  • The book seems to hint at the beginning that Sybil will be found guilty. Was the verdict at the end all that different? 

  • Were you satisfied with the character development?

  • How old did Connie strike you?

  • Is the author male? If so, is it surprising that the book was written from a male perspective? If not, do you think it could be written from a male perspective?

  • In what way, if any, was your reaction to this book colored by your knowledge that the author was a man?

  • Did you think she was guilty? Did you think Charlotte was alive? Did your opinion change during the book? When? 

  • Was Sybil's character fully fleshed out? Are you satisfied with the end of the story and her motivations relating thereto? 

This Page Last Revised: November 21, 2000.