Chris Bohjalian’s Midwives is a captivating and thoughtful novel narrated by the daughter of Sibyl Danforth, a midwife brought to trial for performing an emergency homemade Caesarean section to save the child of a woman she believed was dead.
“Or how about just feeling the most incredible, awesome love for people – all people – just because they’re human and therefore amazingly magic? Ever felt that?”, Sibyl Danforth, accused of murder, asks her lawyer as they banter on her front porch.
Coming of Age During a Trial
Connie writes mostly about her mother Sibyl, but the novel is also Connie's coming-of-age story. She admits to eavesdropping and snooping, which – like the moral ambiguity in much of the novel – is difficult to satisfyingly reconcile as good or bad. Although the trial consumes most of the book, Connie’s reflections on her best friend Rollie and love interest Tom are candid and heartbreaking. But mostly Connie must face her mother’s, and her own, vulnerability: “I was fourteen years old, and I knew my mother’s worst fear.” Connie’s reflective and thoughtful prose – she is much older as she is relating the events – is also punctuated by quotes from Sibyl’s notebooks.
Pursuing the Truth
Bohjalian's book starts at the trial, with the narrator’s belief in a myth she overheard the attorney explain to her parents: that the way in which the jury looks or refuses to look at the defendant as they enter the courtroom reveals their decision. This myth becomes real, then fact, then gospel, much as facts and judgments change and evolve in the trial’s, the character’s, and the novel’s elusive pursuit of the truth.
Beyond the Trial
Although much of Midwives centers on the debate of home birthing – a practice that is effectively on trial alongside Sibyl Danforth – Bohjalian mostly avoids moralizing and lessons and instead illustrates the depth of complexity involved in the sacrifices people make for love and for life. Connie faces her own split-second judgment call towards the end of the book, which she, like her mother, must spend her life reconciling. And unlike a trial, which must end, sometimes one’s internal debates and self-doubt can never reach a black and white verdict.
The book’s clear prose deftly captures the horrifying blankness of irrationality and injustice, evocative of Kafka’s The Trial. Ultimately, however, Bohjalian succeeds in showing that life, like birth, is messy, difficult, terrifying, and unfair, but even with its unanswerable questions, it is amazing, and sometimes even magic.
- Vintage November 8, 1998 0375706771
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