In Britain the two world wars still loom very large indeed – as I write this review, my coat is hanging in the hall with a newly bought poppy pinned to it.  From our sense of ourselves as a nation which steps in to right wrongs, to our attitudes towards food (with many of us either remembering rationing or having been raised by those who do), these two colossal events have to a great degree defined us.

On the contrary, it had always seemed to me as if for America (Pearl Harbour aside), WW2 was just a short interlude during which they got to appear heroic on the world stage and GIs got to charm English women with stockings and chewing gum. Such has been my impression from the literature I’ve previously read concerning this era in American history. Next To Love put paid to this idea swiftly and dramatically.

The book tells the story of a small town during and after WW2.  It is told to us through the eyes of three women – Babe, Grace and Millie – who have been friends since their first day at nursery and have remained friends although they are very different from one another. Through Babe’s experiences we see how the war was emancipating for women in a similar way that is was here (as recounted excellently in Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch) as she gets a job working for Western Union transcribing telegrams from the war department. One particular day, Babe transcribes a telegram that has devastating consequences for herself and her friends.

Each of the women has married her first sweetheart and yet events far away, which they never thought would impact on them, are to mean that none of them will have the future they envisaged with their husbands. Even the men that come back from the front are changed and those that don’t leave holes forever. Some elements of this story are familiar to me from reading novels depicting this era in Britain, but whilst in Britain widows’ suffering was in tune with the sense of a nation in mourning, there is a feeling in the novel that these women and their grief are out of time in a country that is all about progress and success. As the country moves on, they and the men who have returned, feel unable to do so:

“After the war, they wrote and promised and prayed. After the war we’ll do this or that other thing. After the war we’ll be together. After the war we’ll be happy. After the war we’ll be safe. In all their dreaming of after the war, they never dreamed there is no after to war. “

Feldman writes beautifully about the women’s progress from the darkest of times towards new lives. The small town is depicted as being claustrophobic but even it is not immune to the changing winds that the Civil Rights Movement, the sexual revolution and the coming Vietnam War will bring and the women deal with these changes in different ways. Her characters are vivid and believable – their lives at the same time small and hugely meaningful.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book that says so much about changing times in such an understated way and throws light on those who stayed behind from war, but were no less heroic.

Bookmark to