Children of Men (1991) by Jeanne Schinto

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Children of Men (1991)

by Jeanne Schinto

Southeast, Washington DC

Washington DC: 12/12

    That's a wrap for Washington DC!  Children of Men, not to be confused with the PD James dystopian-future novel that was made into a very good movie, this book is about a member of the white economic underclass- the daughter of a father who moved out of the Appalachian region for work after World War II. Cathy "Bird Legs" Ashwell has the deck stacked against her from day one.  She lives in a run-down rental in a bad part of town.  Her dad is a flag-operator on construction sites who drinks himself to sleep every day after work.  Her mom left.  Her younger brother is a drug-addict after returning from Vietnam, her sister is a whore-in-the-making.  Cathy makes one decision for herself in this book- to pursue a young African American guy from her neighborhood, which, of course, works out poorly for her.  She talks her way into joining her paramour and her drug-addict brother on a criminal enterprise that ends with her brother dead, her paramour in jail in Virginia and herself gang raped.   She gets back home, finds out she is pregnant, has the kid, gets another boyfriend, has two more kids before she is 21 under what can only be described as horrific circumstances and spends the rest of the book trying to get her act together.

  Children of Men is so dark it actually warrants comparison to the PD James novel- the presence of any kind of light in this novel is so dim that one wonders why write it at all.   This was the first and only novel by Jeanne Schinto, who was born in Greenwich Connecticut but graduated from George Washington and the Johns Hopkins creative writing program.  Presumably, Cathy Ashwell is based on someone she met while doing some kind of social work in the District.  Kudos to editor Susan Straight for giving some attention to this book, which otherwise has disappeared from the public consciousness.