When Jane Barlow Schwartz and I were 25 years old, we finalized our Connecticut divorces. We had, each of us, married too soon. We never knew our boyfriends-fiancés-husbands-ex-husbands until it was far too late. We didn't know ourselves, either, and so the marriages ended. We needed to grow up.Here the similarities between me and the protagonist of The Evolution of Jane come to an end, or at least I hope they do. Jane Barlow Schwartz is self-involved, often to the point of blindness. She is tedious, and overly impressed with her own half-baked philosophies. She also suffers from a strange preoccupation: instead of grieving the very real and recent loss of her marriage, Jane's waking thoughts center almost exclusively on her troubled relationship with Martha, her estranged cousin and former best friend.tThe entire story takes place in the past. The narrative ranges from Jane’s Galapagos cruise (presumably not too long ago) to Darwin’s voyage to the same archipelago in 1831. Author Cathleen Schine transitions adeptly from era to era and from generation to generation, always in the past tense, but always clearly.tJane Barlow Schwartz is fond of figures of speech, and she employs them indiscriminately: I sometimes think of shopping as a metaphor for life; that is, one tries so hard, picking and choosing, getting as much as one possibly can within one’s budget, and then most of it goes in the closet, out of style or too tight in the waist. Then I remind myself that it’s the shopping itself that really matters, not the purchases. (p. 6)Jane believes herself to be sensitive and profound, and it’s unclear if Schine agrees with her. The book’s more pragmatic characters remind Jane—sometimes gently, sometimes less so—that she is not the center of the universe. Jane doesn’t really believe them.tDarwin’s theories, along with those of his contemporaries and his academic descendants, make up the majority of Jane’s metaphors, and as such become easily accessible to the reader. She discusses primogeniture, adaptation, and speciation as analogues for her family’s mysterious feud and her own failed friendship with Martha.tThe goals of the novel are unclear. The title promises an evolution, but the Jane Barlow Schwartz who returns home to her parents seems little changed. Her insights are fleeting; her theories go nowhere. By the last page, Jane has just begun to accept the mysterious demise of her friendship with Martha: t‘I’m the whales thumb. I was so arrogant and self-centered that I thought it must be Martha, but really it’s me! I’m the vestigial organ.’tI pointed at myself, poking myself in the chest.t‘Me,’ I said. ‘Me, me!’ (p. 206)tAside from Jane, Jane, Jane, and Martha, Martha, Martha, the book’s themes are a diverse and impressive bunch. Schine neatly sprinkles the plot with recurring references to gossip, indulgence, chaos, inheritance, isolation, sailing, incest, and coincidental names, though she rarely dips more than a toe in any one concept. Had the book been heavier on the chaos, or isolation, or even sailing, she might have kept me interested.tJane exemplifies the stereotype of the foolish and entitled young adult. Whether or not this makes her sympathetic is, I suppose, in the eyes of the reader.
THE EVOLUTION OF JANE AS VADE MECUM Schine bases her didactic and entertaining novel THE EVOLUTION OF JANE on the precious and fruitful conceit, that the contours of friendship and differentiation of young girls follow Darwin's theory of evolution. Or is it the other way around, that Darwin's observations of flora and fauna on the Galapagos can be understood in terms of young friendship? That the novel is successful means that the metaphor cuts both ways. The story of Jane's engagement with and estrangement from her cousin Martha unfolds when by chance Jane's mother sends her on a cruise of the Galapagos that happens to be led by Martha. As the narrator Jane uncomfortably ruminates below on possible reasons why Martha dropped her when they were young teenagers, we learn, via Jane's experiences with Darwin's theories and observations of speciation in the Galapagos, that young friendship stems from homology, how twin-like the two girls are, and peradventure, that they were brought together initially by chance circumstances. Speciation occurs along borders, which is why the equatorial Galapagos islands, and the synecdochal cruise ship Huxley, are chock-full of evolutionary oddities.Although Schine can be merely entertaining with precocious New York wit, her youthful narrative manner suits the matter of friendship among the very young and reconciliation among the slightly mature. This is fiction. My own Galapagos tour probably will not enable me to understand my emotional history; but if I mine THE EVOLUTION OF JANE for its reading list my own cannot tour cannot fail to be instructive and fun.
What do You think about The Evolution Of Jane (1999)?
The perfect fall day in Texas: a spinach and onion soup with lots of cheese mixed in, coffee gone cold, Huckleberry Sage in my Scentsy Warmer, all the windows open because it’s so nice outside, Tethered by Sleeping at Last playing softly on repeat, and The Evolution of Jane in front of me.In a week of epiphanies, nostalgia, cold fronts, random spurts of rain, and recuperation after sheer emotional exhaustion, Schine’s novel is perfect and lovely. Soft and defined at the same time. A little more perfect than I expected.It’s supposed to be a comedy… “A cerebral comedy of manners,” the Boston Globe calls it. I find that in itself humorous, as I haven’t laughed since the first page. Instead, it feels (oddly) exactly like life. It’s a mish-mash of inappropriate feelings, unexplained drama, stress where there should be none, and complete nostalgia...Read the rest of the review here: http://anakalianwhims.wordpress.com/2...
—A.K. Klemm
Het verhaalJane Barlow is halverwege de 20 als zij door haar echtgenoot verlaten wordt. Om daaroverheen te komen, krijgt ze van haar ouders een reisje aangeboden naar de Galapagos-eilanden. Ja, die van Darwin. Daar aankomen is de reisleidster tot haar verbazing haar nichtje, buurmeisje en hartsvriendin van vroeger, Martha, die een jaar of 10 geleden ineens de banden met Jane heeft verbroken.Tijdens de reis langs de verschillende eilanden probeert Jane er de hand van de theorieen van Darwin en zijn tijdgenoten achter te komen wat toch de aanleiding is geweest van die breuk: was het iets dat zij gedaan heeft, of juist verzuimd? Was het onvermijdelijk, de voortzetting van de aloude familievete tussen de tak van de familie waarin Jane geboren werd en die waarin Martha geboren werd?Op zich een interessant gegeven. En het boek is heel mooi uitgegeven, gedrukt op van dat ruw gesneden dikke papier. Maar o o o, wat slecht uitgewerkt. Kromme zinnen, eindeloze herhalingen van de verzuchtingen van Jane, slecht uitgewerkte, ehrm, niet uitgewerkte karakters. Bah. Echt niet meer dan 1 ster waard. Een wonder dat ik dit überhaupt heb uitgelezen! Dat kwam vooral doordat ik in de trein zat en niets anders bij me had...
—Elsje
This book is a mess. The main character, Jane Barlow Schwartz, is meant to be eccentric and charming, but she comes off as an annoying whiner. The Galapagos Island setting and endless musing on Charles Darwin's revolutionary insights on species and evolution are meant to add depth to the characters and interest for the reader but are often irritating and sometimes tedious. I had decided to leave this novel unfinished after the first four chapters until I saw that the fifth chapter flashed back to the crux of the plot: the girlhood best-friendship of Jane and her distant cousin Martha, who in the first of several utterly unbelievable coincidences, turns out to be Jane's guide on her cruise through the Galapagos. Jane is on the cruise to take her mind off her recent divorce and the appearance of Martha as her guide sparks her interminable whine throughout the novel: Why did Martha stop being her friend? Turns out the question is a MacGuffin of the worst sort, one with an answer so simple and so obvious that the reader feels cheated and ill-used by the revelation. Q. Why did Martha stop being Jane's friend? A. Because her family moved away from the town where Jane continued to live. Now I know why people actually throw books across the room, which is where this one would have ended up had it not been a library borrow. I picked up this book because I thought Schine did a decent job in a contemporary retelling of Austen's "Sense and Sensibility" with her 2010 novel, "The Three Weissmanns of Westport," but I'll be giving the rest of her oeuvre a pass.
—Elizabeth Quinn
