Enormous Wings | Laurie Frankel | Henry Holt and Co. (304 pages)
I am apparently a person who will drop everything for a story set in a retirement community where something has gone very wrong.
It started with Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club, which I picked up skeptically and finished in one sitting. Four retirees in a English village community meet weekly to review cold cases; then a live one lands in their laps. Then came A Man on the Inside on Netflix in which a recently widowed retired professor goes undercover in a San Francisco retirement community to help a private investigator find a stolen necklace. Both sound slight, they aren’t.
And now Laurie Frankel’s Enormous Wings, which is where the genre, if we’re calling it that, gets serious legal teeth. A cozy mystery now meets a constitutional crisis.
Pepper Mills is 77, sharp-tongued, newly relocated to a Texas retirement community, newly in love with a charming British man named Moth, and newly, impossibly pregnant. Absurd, right?
Not the most absurd part. The most absurd part is what the law does to her once she’s pregnant.
It’s genuinely hard to know, at this particular moment, where fiction ends and Texas begins. After the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade, Texas saw roughly 4,400 abortions a month drop to five. Some months, zero. A 99.89% decline; “a sheer cliff face on a line graph,” as Eleanor Klibanoff reported in the Texas Tribune. Pepper Mills, at 77, carrying an impossible pregnancy in a state that has made abortion nearly impossible, is not a satirical exaggeration. It’s genuinely hard to know, at this particular moment, where fiction ends and Texas begins.
This is the particular genius of Enormous Wings: it takes a premise that sounds like magical realism and runs it through the machinery of American law until it starts to look less like fantasy and more like procedure. And I am so here for it.
Laurie Frankel’s Enormous Wings is a fable in the tradition of García Márquez; magical, internally logical, and more honest about the real world than realism tends to be. The title nods directly to “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” Márquez’s short story (subtitled, with some irony, “A Tale for Children”) about a decrepit angel who washes up in a family’s courtyard during a rainstorm and becomes a spectacle, a commodity, a cause. The village descends. Everyone wants a piece of him. Nobody asks what he needs.
Frankel’s Pepper is that angel. The press arrives, then the activists, then the medical researchers, then the protesters. Each comes with an agenda; Pepper’s pregnancy is the occasion for an ideological turf battle, and what Pepper herself needs is, to everyone descending on Vista View, largely beside the point. The pregnancy is not the point. It is the pretext.
A fairy tale, governed by statute
But unlike Márquez’s angel, Pepper has a lawyer for a daughter. And the law has opinions. What follows is not just a fable but something far more surprising: a legal thriller built on impossible facts and entirely real stakes. I wanted to know how it would play out; not in theory, but in court, in doctor’s offices, in hospitals, on the side of the road. Frankel never lets the novel drift into abstraction. The question is always the same: what happens next?
There are some minor plot details discussed below; only to show how well Frankel worked in the legal framework.
Frankel (only a novelist with a lawyer in the acknowledgments credited for “fictional legal advice” could pull this off) does the legal exposition the right way: through Alice, Pepper’s daughter. No matter the situation, cross-examination is Alice’s favorite part. She is one of the more fully realized attorney characters I’ve encountered in fiction; fierce, precise, and never reduced to a plot device. Frankel keeps two things in productive tension throughout: Alice the lawyer and Alice the daughter. They are not the same person, and the novel knows it.
In the key scene, Alice cross-examines the medical team about Pepper’s options (which is to say, her lack of them). The laws that were supposed to contain a “life of the mother” exception have in practice trapped both patient and doctor in a vise. Texas doctors themselves have said as much.
“You sometimes feel like you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” one Houston OB-GYN told the Texas Tribune. The Texas Supreme Court has ruled that doctors can act before a patient’s death is imminent; but 88 of the 90 abortions performed in Texas in the 18 months after Dobbs happened under emergency conditions.
The gap between what the law says and what doctors feel safe doing is where women live and sometimes die. Pepper lives there too. A pro-choice activist who descends on Vista View puts it plainly, gesturing at Pepper’s enormous middle:
“Look at you. You’re an ideal illustration. The lie that is ‘life of the mother.’ They’re always throwing that one around, aren’t they? They want to present themselves as sane and measured. Obviously, the mother’s life is paramount. Naturally, they’d do anything to save her. But anyone could see that isn’t true just by looking at you. Whose life looks more precarious than yours?”
Frankel doesn’t need to editorialize. She simply lets the law proceed to its natural conclusion.
Pepper herself has the best line on her own situation. She notes, with characteristic dark humor, that at her age all sorts of things can kill you: “Catching a cold. Forgetting to turn the toaster off. Yoga. But pregnancy? Pregnancy kills young, healthy women.”
Not an isolated case
The novel’s second legal strand involves Pepper’s teenage granddaughter Lola, who is also pregnant. It’s a bit of a narrative reach. But it works thematically, because Lola’s situation is the Dobbs reality for everyone who isn’t 77 and making international news: no Plan B, no clinic in state, a drive to New Mexico and the fraught question of who knew and who could be prosecuted for helping. More than 35,000 Texans crossed state lines for abortions in 2023, the most recent year for which data is available. Several small Texas towns have passed ordinances (enforced through private civil lawsuits) trying to prevent residents from using local roads to transport anyone out of state. The isolation the law creates is total. As Pepper explains to Lola:
“Because helping me this way is illegal. As soon as it stopped being a secret, I couldn’t let your mom or your aunt and uncle or Moth or my doctor help me. As soon as it stopped being a secret, I was right back where I started.”
When Pepper and Lola get pulled over two miles into Texas on the way back from New Mexico, “abortion trafficking” is the charge. Alice’s first words, relayed through Pepper’s narration, are “mother” and “fuckers.”
It is very funny. It is also accurate. The ordinances are legally dubious; their purpose is to make the process expensive and terrifying enough that people stop trying. The law doesn’t need to win in court to win. And Alice, right on every point, still cannot prevent what happens next: “You can only be prosecuted for aiding someone else’s abortion. Which you did. And because you look like you do, the protesters at the clinic yesterday morning knew exactly who you were.”
Enormous Wing’s Jurisdiction: Vista View
Vista View retirement community is rendered with genuine warmth and texture; it never descends into the cartoonish portrayals of older adults we’ve grown used to. The friendships are real. The late-life romance between Pepper and Moth is funny and tender and never condescending. And the novel is (it needs to be said, because it could so easily have gone wrong) not preachy.
Alice does get the last word. After everything, she files a HIPAA complaint against the doctor who leaked Pepper’s condition, and pursues the medical board and the state AG’s office for good measure:
“I’m confident they will pursue vigorous and successful legal action. Though additionally” — her smile got wider and wider — “I’ll be seeking significant compensatory damages as well. Just to be sure.” “Sure that what?” I said. “Sure that he learned his lesson.”
Near the end, Pepper gets to speak for herself, outside the noise of the spectacle. So, I will leave her with the last word: “Our agenda is not forcing my body into someone else’s service, not reducing me to the potential of my flesh, and not treating me like someone who can’t make her own decisions. That’s our agenda.”
Thanks to Henry Holt and NetGalley for the ARC. A version of this post was originally published at https://judicialjunkie.com.