PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksDoherty is at her strongest when she attends to the richness of her subject’s epistolary intimacies. She writes strikingly about the relationship that unfolds between California-based Olsen, whose political organizing shaped her intellectual life, and Sexton, whose life as a well-to-do East Coast WASP provides an altogether different view of the world. Doherty uses their correspondence and diaries to paint a vivid and compelling portrait of mutual support and artistic innovation, in spite of their class differences, in the decades before modern feminism ... Though it is full of compelling and poignant moments, the coherence of The Equivalents’s narrative is not always apparent. We move roughly chronologically through the women’s lives, but their stories are interspersed without apparent logic. It is sometimes unclear why a character emerges and one story line is often truncated at the expense of another ... Doherty’s text thus serves as a welcome exploration of a distinct strand of artistic modernism that eschewed abstraction and embraced figuration, and indeed the domestic, during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism. Doherty shies away from explicitly making such claims ... stands as a testament to the seductions of the archive, and the powerful equivalences and deep attachments we often form with the objects of our own research.
