By Julie Sara Porter
Bookworm Reviews
Spoilers: Susan E. Sage’s novel, Dancing in the Ring, tells the fictionalized account of her great uncle and aunt, Bob and Catherine McIntosh Sage with honesty, beauty, humor, tragedy, and thankfully without rose tinted nostalgia. She brings her ancestors to life recalling both the good and the bad of their passionate, eventful, and sometimes troubled marriage.
Catherine McIntosh is a bright ambitious law student in 1920’s Detroit ready to become a lawyer even though there are very few women attorneys. In 1922, she met Bob “The Battling Barrister” Sage, a fellow law student and professional boxer. Bob is smitten at first sight by the feisty and brainy Irish-American beauty. She does not reciprocate at first but ultimately is won over. The two formed a relationship despite conflicts within their family and pressures at school and work.
Most of the book is set after their marriage in 1925 and recounts their good and bad times.
This is a thorough meticulous book with two full, rich, engaging, and captivating characters. Catherine is an independent career woman who in the 1920’s wasn't interested in marriage or starting a family. She saw stifling often violent marriages with her parents and sisters and has good reason to withdraw from the role that her family expects her to play.
Catherine has a developed sense of fairness and justice such as when she defends her friend Grace, an African-American lawyer after she is faced with discrimination. During her legal career, she helps impoverished women and unwed mothers.
Bob is interested in his legal practice but also has other interests that take up his time. He failed the bar three times before finally passing. For a time, he is more interested in the battles in the boxing ring than in the courtroom. His boxing career is successful until he starts aging out and he instead focuses on the law. Either way, he is a fighter and learned from personal experience.
Like Catherine, he is shaped by his environment. His father and some siblings, including his twin brother, died so he is used to being on his own. That fighting spirit is an asset in his life and career as he helps his clients and bonds with troubled youths, particularly his nephew.
With two people that are both independent, bad tempered, and possess fighting spirits, there are bound to be troubles within their marriage. Sage does not shy away from describing her great aunt and uncle's darker natures. Their marriage has many positive moments. They work together to create their own law practice, Sage & Sage. They attend dances, speakeasies, and social gatherings. They go to romantic spots and dance to standard music. Even though they don't have children, they have a wide circle of friends and family and are surrogate parents to Bob’s nephew, Bobby Gene. The book splashes with details about their lives in the 20’s and 30’s.
Unfortunately, for every pleasant moment, there are just as many unhappy ones. It would be tempting for Sage to be nostalgic and gloss over Bob and Catherine’s problems. It can be hard to write a family history and acknowledge the bad parts within a family and to see relatives as real people and those long ago times with a more critical view. Sage, however, faces these darker dimensions head on and does it in a way that is both beautiful and tragic.
The elder Sage's marriage was rocked by infidelity, alcoholism, miscarriages, and at times abuse. Their fights are harrowing as they use their words and sometimes hands and objects to make their points. The Great Depression takes a huge toll as their law firm closes. Catherine is denied employment because she is a woman and Bob’s boxing career ends just as his law one does. The stress of outside events and their own mercurial natures turn on them in frightening ways that results in separation.
There is a sense of fatalism that resonates throughout the book mostly revealed through dreams and visions. Since Bob and Catherine come from Irish-American families, they are attuned to the Irish beliefs in the mystical, second sight, and extra sensory perception. Catherine's grandmother and Bob’s mother make predictions that are later found to be true. Some of the more frightening passages occur when Bob and Catherine have dreams. Catherine dreams that she is surrounded by fire and Bob sees visions of himself standing over three men that he might have killed.
The dreams are constant threads that carry throughout the book and build to a climax that suggests that the Sage's fates were sealed long ago. Their lives had both triumph and tragedy, laughter and tears, joyful and angry moments. They might have avoided those endings that they saw by not meeting, getting married, or living their lives the way that they did. However after getting to know Bob and Catherine Sage, the Reader knows not only that they couldn't have but that they wouldn't want to. They lived their lives with passion, commitment, independence, strength, and honesty. They wouldn't have had it any other way.
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