A Woman Of Intelligence by Karin Tanabe

 

In post WWII New York, Katharina Edgeworth seems to have it all.  She is married to Tom Edgeworth who is a pediatric surgeon and the heir to a shipping fortune.  She lives in a large apartment right off Central Park.  She has two healthy boys that she is raising.  But she is bored, bored, bored.

Rina, as she is known, was a United Nations translator before her marriage.  She is fluent in multiple languages and her life was full of busy work in the days and tons of parties and affairs with men from all over the world at night.  Now her biggest intellectual challenge is deciding if today will be a zoo day or a museum day.  Her boys are holy terrors but she rarely if ever disciplines them.  Tom is gone most days until the family is asleep.  Rina is rarely if ever away from the boys since Tom doesn't believe in babysitters or nannies.

Rina feels her mind atrophying and her sense of self disappearing.  So when she is approached by an agent of the FBI, she is willing to listen.  The government is interested in the Communist party and its members in New York.  The head of the group is a former classmate and lover of Rina's and the FBI would like her to reestablish the friendship and get inside the group.  Desperate for stimulation, Rina agrees.

Not only does she now have to find ways to hide her mission from her family, Rina faces other challenges.  The main one is falling in love with her handler, one of the few African American men in the FBI.  Soon her routine work of transporting documents is transformed when a woman she gets close to in the party is found dead.  Can Rina continue to balance her two lives?

While the time period is interesting, I never connected to this novel.  Rina seems whiny, constantly bemoaning her fate yet doing nothing to try to improve it.  She doesn't discipline her children yet seems aghast that they are out of control.  She reminisces about her pre-marriage affairs and seems all too willing to break her marriage vows the minute another man enters her orbit but her husband seems devoted to her.  She is supposed to be an independent woman yet lets life and circumstances define her rather than her defining her own life.  The spy story seems secondary with not much sense of how it fits into the bigger issue of the government against the Communist party.  Yet the novel does outline the issues of women and their careers, the need for intellectual stimulation after marriage and the emerging issue of race relations post WW II.  This book is recommended for readers of women's fiction.