Mark Dunn (Ella Minnow Pea) delivers another high-concept, wildly inventive novel that tells a timeless story. We Five traces the tragic consequences of five sheltered young women responding to the amorous overtures of five young men with less than honorable intent.
The novel combines five versions of this basic story, moving around from Manchester, England, in 1859, to San Francisco, Calif., just before the earthquake of 1906; Sinclair Lewis's fictional town of Zenith, Winnemac, in 1923; London in 1940, during the Blitz; and small-town northern Mississippi in 1997. Jane, Maggie, Carrie, Ruth and Molly are the five women who populate each story. "Sisters of the heart," they gradually become aware of their would-be suitors' deceit and begin to resist. Their efforts are abetted and sometimes complicated by their web of relationships with their families and each other, through a series of increasingly disastrous events. All five versions collide in one apocalyptic climax, which gives way to a startling and triumphant conclusion.
Dunn's pyrotechnic storytelling has mixed effects, sometimes eclipsing the emotional heart of the story. And the nightmarish apex, with its glorious epilogue, is a hairpin turn, but it provides a satisfying conclusion and transforms We Five into something much more complex and interesting than another harrowing story about the injustice and hurt that men inflict on women. Ultimately, We Five is an exuberantly clever if uneven story with a fresh take on gender dynamics, female friendship and the universal search for love. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer