The three women in Zane Kotker’s novella, “Goodnight, Ladies,” coming out Sept. 7 from Off the Common Books of Amherst, are all turning 70. Their husbands have died, their children are grown, and Chessa, Nikki and Pru are adjusting to life alone with humor, frustration, a little sorrow, but mostly gutsy resilience.
These are smart ladies you’d like to know, who recite Latin conjugations to calm themselves during chemo or a root canal, drink wine by a crackling fire and discuss Jared Diamond’s “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” in their book club — but still know how to crack a ribald joke when the moment calls for it. They live in a university town Kotker conveys with a few deft strokes, allowing the reader to fill in the details. I filled the geography in with western Massachusetts places, but Kotker, who moved from Manhattan to Northampton in 1978, says not necessarily; it could be anywhere.
The setting’s not as important as the characters, who jump to life within the first few lines of each of their sections. Built upon four short stories that Kotker published in journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review and Antioch Review, the novella is a series of short vignettes that manage to unfold quickly to convey larger worlds — both interior and exterior. Kotker is adept at conveying some of the dynamics of human interaction that, for better or worse, don’t change, regardless of how old we are.
All three women come up against the desire for love, sometimes in unexpected ways or with unexpected consequences. A lunch date Chessa has with a man she’s met through an online dating service is wickedly funny, as Chessa realizes early on that it’s just not going anywhere.
Pru has a more wistful experience, summoning up the courage to approach a man in a yoga class at the retirement condos she’s recently moved to, only to have a trimmer, fitter, more decisive woman, whom Pru dubs “Greybraid,” move in seconds before her.
Nikki takes off to Spain to teach at an Elders Horizon Camp and, when the plumbing breaks down and the session ends early, has an adventure in Granada that has her musing about whether it’s possible to fall in love with a young man in a motherly, or even a grandmotherly way?
For this, her sixth book, Kotker is trying out “the brave new world” of self-publishing through Off the Common Books, after publishing five novels with Knopf, Random House, Little Brown Vintage and Levellers Press in Amherst. A collection of poetry, “Old Ladies in the Locker Room and Pool,” was published by Finishing Line press in 2011.
Kotker says she wrote her first novel from 8 a.m. until noon on Tuesdays and Fridays, because that’s when a Juilliard student could come babysit for her two children, both younger than 2 and in diapers.
She describes that first book, “Bodies in Motion,” published by Knopf in 1972, as, “A very early feminist book, in a way. I mean, it was delicate. I don’t think of myself as someone who writes in primary colors.”
Poet Cynthia Ozick called the book “sardonic, pathetic, witty, beautifully comic,” adjectives that could be applied to Kotker’s most recent book as well.
Kotker will be reading from “Goodnight, Ladies” at Broadside Books, 247 Main St., Northampton, Wednesday, September 7, at 7 p.m.
Other readings of “Goodnight, Ladies” will be at the South County Senior Center in Deerfield at 11 a.m., Sunday, Sept. 21, at Easthhampton Lathrop on Friday, Oct. 7, and at the Northampton Senior Center at 1:30 p.m., Tuesday, Dec. 6.
She is also going to read at house parties friends are organizing.
Kotker says she received an email from an old friend who wrote, “You’ve done the whole spectrum from hilarious to almost unbearably sad. And that she had many sort of ‘zaps’ of recognition.”
And while older women reading the book might see themselves, Kotker points out, “It’s also about people’s mothers.”
Kotker said she doesn’t think of the book as being sad.
“I think of it as human comedy,” she says. “I think of it as reality.”
“There are so many good things about being older,” Kotker says. “I wrote some of this (book) in my sixties, trying to get ready.”
“Is it fair to ask how old you are now?”
“No,” Kotker says with a smile.
Order “Goodnight, Ladies” directly from Off the Common Books at www.offthecommonbooks.com or purchase it at World Eye in Grenfield, Collective Copies shops in Amherst. and Florence. Find out more about Zane Kotker at www.zanekotker.com