Going to Bend by Diane Hammond

As a novel, Going to Bend would be a pretty good Lifetime movie-of-the-week. Diane Hammond’s debut novel about two working-class women living in small-town America has all the trappings characteristic of the mainstream, middle-budget, high-hyped “female friendship” films that used to pop out of Hollywood every year. That is, until some low-level studio head-wannabe determined that such films “just didn’t make enough money.” So to the Lifetime network this novel shall be forwarded.

Lest anyone think what they just read is meant as an insult to Hammond’s work, this most assuredly is not its intended purpose. Predicting this novel’s cinematic future is merely an exercise to cast the novel to the lofty status of other similar tales that seek to honestly portray the lives of mature, life-addled women. Tales like Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate and, of course, the epitome of the modern-day women’s novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café by Fannie Flagg. These novels left an indelible imprint in the minds of female readers the world over, and then moved on to captivate female film goers just as readily. Hammond’s debut contains all the necessary elements to be considered on the same literary and cinematic level.

Going to Bend opens on the small coastal town of Hubbard, a town hugging the coastline of Oregon, “where you could still have your choice of oceanfront trailers — old rusting aqua and silver tunafish-cans with moisture problems.” It is a place that survives on the bounty of the sea and the wallets of its tourists.

Domesticity, and all its defining and confining properties, is the reigning occupation for women throughout Hubbard, where a recent contest involving the crowning of ‘”est soup” is the most exciting activity. This contest is the entry point for introducing Hammond’s main characters and centering the evolving plot lines that quickly become entangled with each other.

Best friends Rose Bundy and Petie Coolbaugh have lived their whole lives in this coastal town. They have gone through everything together, and now as they approach their 31st year, it seems that their paths will continue on together uninterrupted, unchallenged, unexciting. Proof of this lies in their production of batch after batch after batch of soup, a task awarded to Petie for winning the aforementioned soup contest.

Of the two, Petie is the no-frills, feisty and suspicious character typical of most partner-driven tales. She barely exists in a stale marriage with two young sons and carries her caustic attitude like a merit badge for “hardest life lived.” Rose is the softer, more emotionally comfortable of the pair, toiling as a single mother to her adolescent daughter. It is the friendship between these two women that composes the emotional heart of Hammond’s story.

Playing off this friendship are Nadine and Gordon, twins transplanted from Los Angeles who operate Souperior’s, the café that sponsored the soup contest. Gordon is suffering from AIDS, and both brother and sister fled to Hubbard in an endearing albeit misguided attempt to take control of a situation that is completely out of their control.

Rose and Gordon strike up an endearing friendship that leads to the development of a cookbook based on the soups served at the café. Rose writes the recipes, and she convinces Petie to contribute the drawings. Their involvement with this project opens up new possibilities and old wounds, both avenues of which slowly bubble their way to highly emotional revelations and disturbing confrontations.

Hammond’s writing really takes off when she focuses on the developing relationship between Petie and the local manager of a Pepsi Distributorship, Eddie Schiff. Eddie spends a lot of energy trying to seduce Petie, including aiding her husband’s job search by offering him a position with his company, but soon discovers his seduction is more emotional than physical in nature.

Going to Bend drops into contrived territory as it constantly searches for a happy ending to all the story lines. Hammond’s micro-focus on the complexities she weaves into the early stories in order to set up the climax feels awash once the reader realizes that she has no intention of allowing these stories to naturally unfurl.

To Hammond’s great credit, she seems fully aware of the archetypes she has to work with and focuses plenty of attention on rendering relationship pathos beyond the clichéd characterizations. She sends her characters spiraling into moments of self-awareness and emotional turmoil that are at once painful yet hopeful. There are moments when the characters bounce off the page with endless energy and intensity, despite the troubles and tribulations constructed to block their movement.

But even the most skilled and insightful author eventually it impossible to wholly navigate around all the pitfalls intrinsic to the selected genre. Hammond is no exception as her descriptions fall into the trappings of a debut author eager to be descriptive and lagging too generously in the land of description overkill at the unlikeliest of plot points.

Still, one cannot fault Hammond too much for this overzealousness, this overachieving sentimentality. She knows well the environment of which she writes and strives distinctively to ensure that even the finest of details is fully layered and exploited for literary resonance.