Helen Weinzweig’s Interior Feminist Espionage Novel

When I first read Helen Weinzweig’s Basic Black with Pearls several years ago, I emerged in the sort of daze that happens when a book seems to ferret out your most secret thoughts and hopes. Since then I’ve described the book to others as an “interior feminist espionage novel.” That is, of course, a reductive way to look at this work, which is so much more than that single phrase can express. And yet those four words, taken together, suggest the scope and the breadth, the daring and the audacity, the humor and the pathos contained in a work of less than a hundred fifty pages. It was a novel I did not know I was looking for, but finding it was a revelation.

The interior nature of is central to its unfolding. Shirley Kaszenbowski, regarded from the outside, is the embodiment of the invisible woman. She is in her early forties, long married, with two children. She wanders through Toronto in the titular basic black dress, a strand of pearls around her neck, cloaked by a tweed coat from Holt Renfrew—then and now the city’s most expensive, most fashionable, and snobbiest department store—designed to last for decades. “I fool no one,” Shirley understands. “I am regarded as a woman with no apparent purpose, offering no reason for my presence.” Regarded from inside, however, Shirley is anything but invisible. She is aglow. Her appearance, her age, her station are, “Her odyssey is erotic, but her appearance is prosaic.”