Abstract
I open to the Prologue of At the Center: “The boy had no idea he was about to die.” I close the book. Perhaps I should begin with Death Uncharted? Another small boy, cowering in fear in the corner of a strange room as his terrible fate moves closer and closer.
Had I not agreed to review both books, I might have stopped right there: My sentiments about mystery novels expressed succinctly in the title of a 1945 essay in the New Yorker by Edmund Wilson, “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” Why, then, was I reading these? Because I was intrigued by the idea of a social worker who turned to writing fiction in later life. How glad I am that I soldiered on!
I promptly fell in love with Sylvia Jensen, the protagonist of both books. In At the Center, she is a social work supervisor at a child welfare agency. Death Unchartered is published later but actually refers to an earlier period of Sylvia’s life, her first job (after college and before graduate school) when she was a teacher in the Southeast Bronx.
The plight of children in need—be they African American in New York City or Native American in the Midwest—is her passion. The missteps, duplicity, and arrogance that exist in many agencies that society has set up to serve them are her target. But it is the personality of Sylvia—a recovering alcoholic, a woman so guilty of her white privilege that she lives below her means and has an online identity as a person of color, a woman fearless in speaking truth to power—that captured my interest and held it rapt throughout.
Reading these books, I was reminded of the feminist literary scholar Carolyn Heilbrun, her best selling mysteries published under the pen name of Amanda Cross who created a detective in her own image: the fictional Kate Fansler, who was holding the light up to the real inequities of a misogynistic society. I see Sylvia as Kate’s soul sister—admittedly flawed but rising each day to do her best at the profession she has chosen as her life’s work.
Yes, there are twists and turns of plot. Yes, there is a young male sidekick whose personality forms a nice counterpoint to hers. Yes, there is enough suspense and horror to keep you breathless until the end.
But my greater pleasure came from the context of each book.
Starting with the characters—a varied cast of people you’re sure to recognize. The dedicated teachers and social workers conflicted between the desire to do the right thing and the desire to keep their jobs. The worker (familiar to anyone who has supervised in a public agency) whose carelessness caused a child to be placed in the home where he would meet his death. “Secure in her 40 years of seniority, the complicated maze of bureaucratic procedures and union protections, and a deep-seated administrative fear of lawsuits, Inez clearly thought she could do whatever she wanted to do these days.” Van Soest represents faithfully the pride and strengths of communities of color who are forced to trade a measure of autonomy for each measure of help they receive.
And then—the settings. I knew a bit about the 1968 Teacher’s Strike in New York City and nothing about the Indian Child Welfare Act, which is currently under attack in federal court. I ended more knowledgeable about both, particularly those aspects that rarely make the news—the ripple effect of well-intentioned policies and procedures as they are experienced by generations of clients.
Both books finished, I lift them from the pile on my desk and go to place them in the bookcase. Where should they go? It takes but a minute to decide against Fiction. They look quite at home on the long Social Work shelf—in the good company of those fine writers who every day fuel my pride in belonging to a profession whose mission exemplifies the best of humanity.