The Widening

a novel by Carol Maldow

"At the crucial moment she said yes." So begins The Widening, a poetic novel written in self-contained, cut-to-the-quick vignettes that coalesce to form an intimate, intricate, and haunting portrait of a girl on the cusp of womanhood in the 1970s. With that initiating yes the unnamed protagonist begins a sexual journey that is chronicled with relentless and probing honesty in prose sharp and resonant. Even as her parents taboo sexual exploration, especially for their daughter, she is eager-with that strange combination of passivity and wildness peculiar to girls-to embrace it, accumulating encounters that range from the comic to the horrific, the disappointingly mundane to the sublime-all of which she records in her journal, never expecting it to be read by anyone, certainly not her mother. Written from her perspective, The Widening follows the changing consciousness of this near-anonymous girl with emotional precision and nuance as she travels from boarding school to Spain to college. By turns edgily erotic, darkly comedic, alienated, and melancholy, this lyric narrative of a girl on the way to self-awakening is, like Marguerite Duras' The Lover, literary, succinct, accessible. Whether read as a coming-of-age tale, a cautionary tale, or a picaresque, The Widening unfolds a story that women who grew up in the 60s and 70s, as well as their grown daughters today, will recognize as their own.

"I dare say that women readers of Carol Moldaw's The Widening will be thrilled at the recognition of self that art can bring - the shared experience given articulate voice. For male readers, the thrill is just as great, as Moldaw brilliantly fulfills the other promise of art - empathic intimacy with the life and sensibility of people who you cannot otherwise entirely know.This is an extraordinary debut novel by an important new writer."

-Robert Olen Butler

Carol Moldaw is the author of four books of poetry: The Lightning Field, winner of the FIELD Poetry Prize, Chalkmarks on Stone,Through the Window, and Taken from the River. A recipient of a Lannan Foundation Marfa Writer's Residency, a Pushcart Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, Moldaw's work has most recently appeared in AGNI,Provincetown Arts, and FIELD. She lives in Pojoaque, New Mexico, with her husband and daughter, and teaches at Stonecoast, the University of Southern Maine's low-residency M.F.A. program.

paperback / 114 pages / ISBN: 978-0-9745995-9-5 / $14.95
publication date: April 2008