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Novelhistorian

~ What's new and old in historical fiction

Novelhistorian

Monthly Archives: May 2015

Brotherhood of the Wild: Into the Savage Country

28 Thursday May 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1820s, camaraderie, fathers and sons, fur trade, historical fiction, loyalty, nineteenth century, Northwest Territory, Shannon Burke, St. Louis

Review: Into the Savage Country, by Shannon Burke
Pantheon, 2015. 248 pp. $25

“Since I was a boy,” says William Wyeth, the trapper who narrates this novel, “I’d known I was made of different stuff from my brothers. They were born to the plow and pew while I craved the forest and woods and the vast, wild spaces. For better or for worse, I was fated to test my mettle in the west.”

George Caleb Bingham, Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, 1845 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Public domain, US)

George Caleb Bingham, Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, 1845 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Public domain, US)

It’s the late 1820s, and the fur trade is petering out. To join a trapping brigade in St. Louis and venture northwest into unmapped territory seldom brings a man more than a pittance for his hard labor; it’s more likely he’ll die than make his fortune. But Wyeth goes anyway, and not just because he must prove himself, though he doesn’t understand all the reasons yet.

There’s a woman, of course, a pretty, independent-minded widow named Alene, and Wyeth wants to be somebody so that he may court her. But women are an afterthought in the wild and in this novel; the real story is the bond among men who daily risk their lives for one another. As a neophyte, Wyeth learns that the easiest way to earn trust is to admit that he doesn’t know everything and to laugh at his own mistakes.

Most frontier tales I’ve read seem populated by knuckleheads who equate infallibility with manhood and mistake vulnerability for weakness. Wyeth knows better and grows because of it. Into the Savage Country depicts the knuckleheads to the extent that back in St. Louis, pride runs high, and perceived insults require a forceful response. It’s a settlement, after all, with its pecking orders and privileges. But in the wilderness, there’s less room for preening or posturing, because life’s demanding and dangerous enough without that distraction.


 

I felt as if the enormity of the land were squeezing me and that I was dissolving into the utter silence and implacability of that immense, monochromatic, edgeless place. This oppressive heaviness and strangeness washed over me bit by bit until I understood what I was feeling: I was afraid. Afraid that I would not measure up to the others, and that I would fail in the tests that inevitably lay ahead. Afraid, too, that I would be slain in some lonely place with no one to mourn me, as my father had predicted.


 

So it’s very intriguing that the closest bonds Wyeth forms are with two other men whose fathers have declared they’ll never amount to anything. There’s Ferris, who initially strikes Wyeth as a callow showoff but whose perceptive observations about nature, Native American customs, and how to get along with difficult people reveal a depth Wyeth appreciates. That’s one of Wyeth’s best qualities, the willingness to revise an opinion. However, Layton, a dandy who’s done some truly despicable things, seems intent on testing Wyeth’s good nature, along with everybody else’s. Layton may be the most complex character in the novel, a contradiction of bravado, posing, showmanship, charisma, generosity, and rare political gifts, capable of drawing and repelling from moment to moment.

How these friendships play out within the larger tale of fortune-seeking, diplomacy, fear, prejudice, and wonder makes a stirring story. And as Wyeth remarks about the vanishing game, you sense that he represents a dying breed himself, and that he knows it.

Into the Savage Country does end a little neatly, but I think few readers will object.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Texas Three-Step: The Promise

25 Monday May 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1900, adultery, Ann Weisgarber, characterization, Galveston, historical fiction, inner lives, literary fiction, love triangle, marriage, romance, twentieth century

Review: The Promise, by Ann Weisgarber
Skyhorse, 2014. $25

The Promise is one of the best novels I’ve read in years, a brave, exacting, often painful work, the type that takes a premise elegant in its simplicity and explores its depths.

Catherine Wainwright was brought up to appreciate and expect the finer things, including the music by which she makes her meager living. However, in this year of 1900, an independent woman’s place is precarious, to say the least, and Catherine has made a costly blunder. An affair with her cousin’s husband has made her hometown of Dayton, Ohio, too hot for her to live in. Polite society cuts her dead, parents cancel their children’s piano lessons with her, and her nascent concert career vanishes. Owing back rent she can’t pay and cut off from the man she loves, she realizes marriage is the only answer.

Map of Galveston, Texas, 1885, Augustus Koch (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain in the US).

Map of Galveston, Texas, 1885, Augustus Koch (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain in the US).

Accordingly, she resumes her correspondence with a Dayton man who has moved to Galveston, Texas, and become a dairy farmer. When they were at school together, Oscar Williams always liked her, and he intrigued her too, in his way. And as it happens, when Catherine writes Oscar again, he’s recently widowed and has a five-year-old boy to think of. After a few more letters pass back and forth, Oscar proposes marriage, and Catherine accepts–without telling him about her disastrous affair.

In Galveston, she finds a different level of heat from Dayton, and not just from the stifling, insect-ridden climate. She shares a bed with a man she doesn’t love, worries that his Dayton relatives will have told him about her, feels deeply hurt by her former lover’s treatment of her, and doesn’t know how to approach her stepson, Andre. Then there’s Nan Ogden, a young woman who keeps house for Oscar and looks after Andre. Nan resents the new Mrs. Williams and fancies Oscar for herself, but she doesn’t let herself think about it, which makes her character all the more fascinating. The two women narrate the novel in their very different voices. What they see (or don’t) in themselves or their adversary turns their already fraught triangle into high drama, even when the action concerns sweeping the floor or making coffee.

The Promise therefore delivers what I’ve come to believe is the key to good literary fiction. Like the musical Catherine communing with Beethoven, Weisgarber plays every note. She lingers over emotional transitions, finding many that lesser writers would miss or skim over, unpacking the compressed moments into their intriguing parts rather than summing them up in shorthand. Yet the narrative moves at a crackling pace, because the author knows storytelling and her characters’ inner lives.

This all begins with Catherine’s flaws. At the start, she’s self-absorbed, entitled, and superior, disbelieving that her comedown should happen to her. She’s terrified of her new surroundings and the scrutiny she’s under:


 

I felt Nan Ogden watching from the house as I fumbled with the latch on the barnyard gate. The soft soil in the yard was churned with hoof prints, and flies buzzed around a pile of dung. Water streamed from the chin of the cow that stood at the trough, her unblinking eyes taking note of my every move . . . . I’d never been so close to a cow, and her size was alarming. So, too, was her udder. It resembled a balloon but one that was lined with swollen blood vessels. I hurried past her.


 

Prompted by necessity and Oscar’s patient insistence, Catherine unbends enough to discover hidden sides to him, Andre, and herself. She also reflects on how she must appear to others. Consequently, she grows within a short time, as does Oscar in her view, which further deepens the novel.

My only quarrel is the manner in which, fairly early, she admits her mistakes to herself and realizes her illicit lover wasn’t the man she thought he was. Her shame feels completely real–I connected with her right away over that–but don’t see what prompted these revelations at that moment.

Otherwise, The Promise is absolutely splendid.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

All Husbands Are Boring: Daughter of Fortune

21 Thursday May 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1845, authorial voice, California gold rush, characterization, Chile, fate, feminism, historical fiction, Isabel Allende, nineteenth century, obsessive love

Review: Daughter of Fortune, by Isabel Allende

Harper/Perennial, 2000. 399 pp. $15

“Any man, as miserable a man as he may be, can do whatever he wants with you.” But Eliza Sommers, a vivacious sixteen-year-old, doesn’t believe this dire prediction, which means, of course, that she’ll have to live it out to learn in her own way.

Since this is the late 1840s in Valparaíso, Chile, and Eliza’s a foundling child to English guardians, her stubborn belief in romantic passion pits her against a strict Victorian code. If her adoptive parents have anything to say about it, Eliza will be safely married off to a respectable, established, older man, the most she can hope for, especially given her shameful origins. Not that her foster mother, Rose, has much to say for marriage, having never tried it herself. “All husbands are boring,” she says. “No woman with an ounce of sense gets married to be entertained, she marries to be maintained.”

An 1849 advertisement for passage to the gold fields. (Courtesy Shmoop; public domain).

An 1849 advertisement for passage to the gold fields. (Courtesy Shmoop; public domain).

However, Eliza begins a clandestine affair with Joaquín, a dirt-poor young man of electric presence, who bolts for California when news of the gold strike of 1849 reaches Valparaíso. Be it known that Joaquín isn’t worth two minutes of Eliza’s time. Writer of floridly passionate letters, he’s disappointing in person, lecturing her about revolution and redistribution of wealth–when he bothers to talk, that is. Mostly, he uses her for sex, not bothering to wonder whether she has needs or desires, leaving her more hurt and frustrated than she realizes. But since Eliza’s fated to be trapped, she lets herself get swept up. Or so Allende asks us to believe.

I’m not sure I do, entirely. Eliza has wanted freedom all her life, but that’s not what Joaquín represents, despite his political soapboxing, a wonderful irony that utterly escapes her–and keeps escaping her well past any credible sell-by date.


 

In the Sommers’ home she had lived shut up within four walls, in a stagnant atmosphere where time moved in circles and where she could barely glimpse the horizon through distorted windowpanes. She had grown up clad in the impenetrable armor of good manners and conventions, trained from girlhood to please and serve, bound by corset, routines, social norms, and fear.


 

But this is a novel, and the requisite wise woman has said that Eliza is doomed to suffer. So the girl bends her considerable resourcefulness and courage to follow Joaquín to California, managing to stow away through the aid of Tao Ch’ien, a Chinese doctor, who becomes her friend and mentor.

In California, he tries to protect Eliza from herself, with intermittent success. I liked this part of Daughter of Fortune the best, starting with the descriptions of the hard life, frontier justice, and greed, but also what the gold rush offers, the chance to be free and make something of oneself. Eliza embraces it wholeheartedly, thanks in part to the passing parade of larger-than-life characters, who prompt her to live larger herself. Along the way, Allende makes excellent observations about what love means for powerless women, and how pride, male and female, gets in the way of intimacy.

I dislike her habit of explaining motivations at length, however beautifully she writes (as with the quote above). More annoying is how she reveals secrets out of the blue, as if, by clapping her hands, she can avoid having to unfold them in her narrative. Whatever reversals of story or character they imply simply happen–poof. She does this twice, and each feels like a cheap conjuring trick, as if to tell the reader, Fooled you!

Nevertheless, Daughter of Fortune is a wild ride, entertaining, vivid, and colorful. I’m impressed at how Allende renders the gold rush in many, complex facets, and, except for Eliza’s obsession with Joaquín, how the author explores the many layers of love and attraction.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

The Other End of the Telescope: Mr. Mac and Me

18 Monday May 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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architecture, artists, coast, coming-of-age story, England, Esther Freud, First World War, historical fiction, spy mania, Suffolk, twentieth century, Walter Scott Prize

Review: Mr. Mac and Me, by Esther Freud
Bloomsbury, 2014. 296 pp. $26

Most novels about the First World War, even those of the home front, portray the emotional and physical carnage, which warp everything they touch. But Mr. Mac and Me takes a gentler approach, setting a coming-of-age story within an unusual friendship between a thirteen-year-old boy and the Scottish artist and architect, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and his wife, Margaret. The war still penetrates daily life, of course, but remains a thing outside, like a beast scratching at the door. The setup feels vaguely threatening, all to the good, yet misshapen in its odd proportions, which ultimately undermines the novel.

Dunwich seafront, 2007 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Dunwich seafront, 2007 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

The beginning plods, as Freud introduces the Maggs family, which runs a struggling pub in Dunwich, a fishing village on the Sussex coast. But eventually, the story gets going. It’s early summer 1914, and Thomas, the young teenager, has two older sisters and six dead brothers, whose loss he feels keenly. The dead are practically his only company, since his brute drunk of a father is best avoided, and his mother carries too many burdens to pay attention to Tom, unless to cuff him for his misdemeanors. Tom befriends his dead siblings by visiting their graves and adopting a family of starlings as though they represented his brothers alive once more, an example of the sensitive, warm touch that Freud shows throughout.

However, he soon has someone else to occupy his vivid imagination. Mackintosh and his wife have taken up residence, and Mac casts a strange figure, striding about the headland and beaches, turning a spyglass on the seascape. At first, Tom thinks Mac must be a detective, for he reminds the boy of Sherlock Holmes. It’s not clear who befriends whom, but the reclusive, troubled architect takes to Tom and encourages his love of drawing–ships, because Tom dreams of going to sea. Margaret, a gifted artist herself, encourages him too and feeds him, having sensed, without ever putting words to it, that he’s neglected. As surrogate parents, they’re a godsend.

But come the war, Mac’s behavior creates suspicion in the village. His tramps around the headland, his spyglass, that he’s an outsider, an artist–a “foreigner,” in other words–all count against him. The coastal folk naturally assume that their plot of earth is the first place the Germans would invade, a fear they embrace with the inflated desire to feel important. Is Mac signaling to enemy ships? Tom himself isn’t so sure, because he’s seen Mac and Margaret’s pamphlets describing exhibitions of their works at Vienna, and the German words he can’t read sound ominous. He soon sees his mistake, though, only nobody else does, and his father is among those most strident in slandering Mac.

Meanwhile, the more compelling story is about Tom’s growing up. Freud’s Suffolk coast is a place where old ways are dying out, and even Tom’s job with a rope maker may fall to progress. His naivete about certain subjects yields to knowledge, though Freud is careful not to let him see too much. I like the skill with which she handles this, as with the village atmosphere and small moments. The passage of soldiers, billeting in town before shipping to France, teaches Tom a little, and his sister Ann even more, unfortunately. Tom has his first love and catches a glimpse of what the war means, beyond uniforms and patriotic back-slapping.

But Mr. Mac and Me never takes flight, mostly because Mac has no voice of his own and never fully emerges. Since he’s not about to tell a thirteen-year-old why he’s depressed–money troubles, career frustrations–Tom has to find this out by steaming open his letters, a betrayal that, disturbingly, hardly registers with the boy. It’s a clumsy authorial device, as with the expository dialogue that Mac spews when he’s particularly angry at the wrongs he’s suffered. The village suspicions, though they have consequences, neither drive the narrative nor resolve it, and the last twenty pages summarize events that deserve a more careful unraveling. Finally, I understand that Freud wanted to focus on the village, but when news comes that a Suffolk regiment has been decimated in battle, the tragedy hardly penetrates, a startling lapse.

Mac and Me was nominated for the Walter Scott Prize in historical fiction. The short list includes three books I’ve covered already: The Lie, by Helen Dunmore (October 27, 2014); The Thousand Things, by John Spurling (March 16); and The Wolf’s Mouth, by Adam Foulds (March 12). I’d be happy if Dunmore or Spurling won, but I still think The Lie–my first review on this site–is better.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Keeping Focus: The Movement of Stars

14 Thursday May 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1845, Amy Brill, astronomy, characterization, feminism, historical fiction, Nantucket, navigation, nineteenth century, Quakers, whaling, women

Review: The Movement of Stars, by Amy Brill
Riverhead, 2013. 388 pp. $28

Hannah Price wants the moon, or, to be precise (and she values precision above all else), a comet. A Quaker woman living on Nantucket in 1845, Hannah scans the skies nightly, searching for a comet that no one else has catalogued. If she succeeds, she’ll win a prize from the king of Denmark, but Hannah’s not looking for fame (though the prize money would come in handy). Rather, she dreams of contributing to scientific knowledge.

On Nantucket, or anywhere in 1845, this isn’t the path women are supposed to follow, especially Quaker women. Hannah has a little leeway, because her father is an astronomer; they repair and adjust chronometers for the ships that come to port, the island’s economic lifeblood. Better yet, her former teacher, the influential Dr. Hall, has encouraged her brilliance at mathematics and science. However, men are always the ones to decide what she can do, and where. And since her mother died when she was very young, her only ally is her twin brother Edward, now away at sea.

U. S. Coast Survey chart including Nantucket, 1857 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

U. S. Coast Survey chart including Nantucket, 1857 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Into this delicate balance steps Isaac Martin, a whaling crew member to whom Hannah offers lessons in celestial navigation. Their friendship sets tongues wagging, especially since Isaac comes from the Azores and is dark-skinned. Unlike its Ohio counterpart in The Last Runaway (April 23), the Friends Meeting of Nantucket is firmly abolitionist, though hardly more tolerant. Hannah risks being kicked out of Meeting (and suffering her father’s discipline) by having social relations with a nonbeliever, proper though these relations are–for the moment.

The Movement of Stars is worth reading for its protagonist. Hannah is a very difficult person, for whom the only ready emotion is anger, and who sees slights everywhere. That she’s often correct doesn’t obscure how socially inept she is, even cruel. She’s more than dimly aware that her inability to make chitchat or contribute to the necessary social grease has cost her. Brill has done superbly here, creating sympathy for an unpleasant outcast, no mean feat. That Hannah also learns to see more clearly, extending her search for the truth of the heavens to those of human interaction, is another masterstroke. Yet she never gives up her anger at being thwarted or manipulated by men, even those she loves, and I admire her unwillingness to compromise what she believes. Against her will and love of precision, toward the end, she reluctantly concludes that “two competing Truths could in fact coexist in one mind.” (By the way, F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that this ability was the test of a first-rate intelligence. It’s one of my favorite quotes.)

Unfortunately, the rest of The Movement of Stars doesn’t live up to its heroine. None of the other characters seem full to me; I’m disappointed in Dr. Hall and Hannah’s father, Nathaniel, who feel like straw men, at times. Brill tries to suggest more, and I like Hannah’s confusion about their motives, but I’m confused too. Most importantly, I can’t grasp Isaac, who reads like a stock character–the taciturn, down-to-earth sailor whose homespun wisdom turns Hannah’s life around. I believe her attraction for him, all right, for what he represents, and the internal struggle she has over the pull he exerts seems real and significant. But Isaac assumes that any hesitations she has about him must be due to race or class prejudice alone, which makes him the only man in the novel who gets away with ignoring the barriers she faces as a woman.

There’s one other way in which The Movement of Stars loses focus, and that’s the prose. The last few chapters stray from the nineteenth century in tone and manner, as when Nathaniel says, “Thy travels have certainly impacted thee.” Whoops. To be sure, it’s a first novel, and an accomplished one. But it’s fair to ask how Brill, skilled at observing interactions, would tell, tell, tell: “When she was near him, Hannah felt both exhilarated and free at the same time, the way she felt when she was observing. The idea of parting from him was excruciating.” That reads like shorthand, not characterization.

That said, I still recommend The Movement of Stars. Not only is Hannah a fascinating character, I liked reading about the whaling and Quaker communities (highly intertwined) of Nantucket.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

This Side of Purgatory: West of Sunset

11 Monday May 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1930s, 1940s, alcoholism, F. Scott Fitzgerald, gossip, historical fiction, Hollywood, redemption, Stewart O'Nan, writing, Zelda Fitzgerald

Review: West of Sunset, by Stewart O’Nan
Penguin, 2015. 289 pp. $28.
I’ve never been able to read about addictions. I have thin tolerance for masochism, an issue that cuts to the bone with me, without having to find it in the bottle, the racetrack, or various crystalline powders. I have zero tolerance for addicts who beat up their spouses, friends, or anyone else, let alone themselves, so presenting them as sympathetic fictional characters is a tough sell. Recently, I put aside The Temporary Gentleman (nominated for the Sir Walter Scott Prize), by the splendid writer Sebastian Barry, because I couldn’t imagine how anyone would waste time on the protagonist, a violent, irresponsible drunk.

Arthur Bryant's sketch of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1921 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States).

Arthur Bryant’s sketch of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1921 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States).

However, West of Sunset calls my bluff. It’s about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last years, spent in Hollywood, where he tries to pay back his debts, stay ahead of his crippling expenses, and restore his self-respect. Even if you don’t know the story, you can guess that Hollywood is the last place to find redemption, especially for a writer who considers himself an artist. Double that if said writer destroys himself with pills washed down with alcohol.

A familiar story this is. Yet I can’t resist Fitzgerald, whom I put above any American writer of his generation. For depth, for psychological acuity, for prose–which, at its effortless best, feels like breathing–I think he has no equal from that prolific era in American letters. But it’s not that West of Sunset is a fan letter; anything but. True, O’Nan has captured Scott’s perceptions, ways of thought, and voice, and at times you can sense Amory Blaine or Nick Carraway or Dick Diver lurking just beyond the pages. But the literary frisson is only an overlay to the pain beneath, of a man who had talent to burn and, sadly, did just that with it. Where Scott once thought himself on top of the world, destined for immortality, “so much of his life now was making arrangements, and he’d never been any good at it.” Hollywood, though he doesn’t know it, is his last, valiant try:


 

. . . the dream L.A. sold, like any Shangri-La, was one not of surpassing achievement but unlimited ease, a state attainable by only the very rich and the dead. Half beach, half desert, the place was never meant to be habitable. . . .On the streets there was a weariness that seemed even more pronounced at night, visible through the yellow windows of burger joints and drugstores about to close, leaving their few customers nowhere to go. Inconceivably, he was one of that rootless tribe now, doomed to wander the boulevards, and again he marveled at his own fall, and at his capacity for appreciating it.


Fitzgerald’s contradictions are all in this novel. He’s a frat-boy libertine and Puritan; selfish and open-handed; roils with anger, yet tries to make peace (while sober, anyway); yearns for acceptance while believing it’s his right; and wants desperately to do the right thing, even as he surrenders to his worst nature. But West of Sunset is hardly a one-man show. O’Nan gives full life to Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, Scottie, their teenage daughter, and to Sheilah Graham, the gossip columnist with whom Fitzgerald falls in love. Through them, as well as Scott, the narrative holds astonishing tension, despite the cycle of gin and repentance, and the inevitable end.

Another pleasure is the Hollywood scene. Bogart gets a good bit of ink, and Marlene Dietrich, Ernest Hemingway, and Joan Crawford, among others, make noteworthy appearances. The gossipy studio repartee is delicious, as when Dorothy Parker remarks, of Crawford, “She’s slept with everyone at Metro except Lassie.” Charles MacArthur, in town with his actress wife, Helen Hayes, “was over at Universal adapting his last play, a task Scott imagined was like slowly poisoning your own child.”

West of Sunset is a tragic, powerful tale about a man who said yes to all the wrong things because he had trouble saying no.

Disclaimer: I obtained this book for review from the public library.

Art and Seduction: Paris Red

07 Thursday May 2015

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1860s, artists, feminism, historical fiction, Manet, Maureen Gibbon, models, nineteenth century, painters, Paris, women

Olympe, Edouard Manet, 1863. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Olympe, Edouard Manet, 1863-65. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Review: Paris Red, by Maureen Gibbon
Norton, 2015. 282 pp. $26

In a Paris still reeling from the recent war of 1870, two young women, teenagers still, share a tiny apartment and work as silver burnishers. It’s a demanding job but steady work, and Louise and Denise (called Nise) count themselves lucky to have each other’s friendship and a sound alternative to working the streets, however meager their wages. But they also dream of more, of being noticed, picked out from among the crowd.

One day, they pose before a shopwindow, holding drawing tablets, pretending to sketch what’s inside. A man approaches them, and a triangular flirtation begins. At first, Louise and Nise are careful not to push themselves forward, each concerned with not hurting the other; besides, they must at least pretend to play hard to get. But beneath the teasing, Louise senses a strong attraction between herself and the man, who calls himself Eugène, who has some money, has apparently seen the hard side of life, and who sometimes speaks with disarming, if not shocking, directness.

It all happens so easily, it seems, and yet Louise is the type to reflect on why, which is why I like this book:


 

It is about us. Something specifically about us. And I think we should not be surprised. It is what we wanted. With our tablets and our scheming, all the trying not to be ordinary–didn’t we want someone to notice us? To see we were different? . . . Because I do not feel ordinary. Or because I feel ordinary and different at the same time.


 

His name, as she finds out, is really Édouard Manet. Louise Victorine Meurent becomes his mistress, his model, and, to some extent, his muse. I didn’t recognize her name, but I certainly knew what she looked like, because she’s in two of my favorite Manet canvases, Olympe (on the book jacket) and Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Lunch on the Grass). Both created a stir for their frank sensuality and shocking directness. Having dug around a little, I also learn that Meurent became a painter too. Unlike what the novel suggests, she gravitated toward an older, more accepted style than his, which, ironically, earned her more favor than he from the official Salon.

Gibbon has imagined the artist-model relationship in fine emotional detail. I particularly like how she traces the currents that run between them, which don’t always follow the expected route. For one thing, Manet isn’t the absinthe-sodden, self-absorbed, irresponsible artist of lore, which allows him to appreciate Louise for herself, not just as an object. He’s always willing to listen to her, something that takes her by surprise. Just as important, as with the shopwindow scene, you can’t necessarily pinpoint who’s seducing whom, or what it’s for. As Louise observes, “It is not always so clear what someone wants, or what money can buy, or who exactly pays.” Without saying too much, I can tell you that between these two people, it’s more about art than sex, though there’s plenty of both.

The beginning feels a little romanticized, like a sepia photograph that’s been airbrushed. The Paris of Paris Red isn’t nearly as seamy as that of Cathy Marie Buchanan’s Painted Girls, and Louise, though she stints herself at times, seems relatively safe. The key word is relatively, however, because just as Louise has abandoned Nise, which troubles her (somewhat), she worries that Manet will abandon her. She may not starve or have to go on the street, for she has a skilled trade to fall back on. But she will lose her dreams and the connection to Manet on which they depend. As she says, money figures into it, but it’s not everything.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Scarred Lives: The Jazz Palace

04 Monday May 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Uncategorized

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1915, 1920s, Al Capone, Chicago, gangsters, historical fiction, inner lives, jazz, Jews, Mary Morris, music, Prohibition, race relations

Review: The Jazz Palace, by Mary Morris
Doubleday, 2015. 245 pp. $26
It’s 1915, and Chicago’s South Side has its clubs where black musicians assume that the very few white patrons must be there to steal their secrets. But that’s not why young Benny Lehrman hangs around, using the money intended for his piano teacher to bribe his way past the door. Jazz, whose name Benny doesn’t even know at first, reaches him because it says everything the tongue-tied, soulful teenager can’t put into words.

Jazz speaks of loneliness bred in the bone, of having to drag yourself to a job you hate, of desire for the kindness, attention, and sympathy he can never have and believes he doesn’t deserve. Underlying his pain is a family tragedy: Several years before, his younger brother, the family favorite, died in a blizzard. Ever since, Benny has unfairly taken the blame.

However, the novel opens on a different catastrophe. Three of Pearl Chimbrova’s brothers die when the S.S. Eastland rolls over and sinks just after leaving the dock. Benny, who happens to be watching from the same footbridge as Pearl, dives into the water and tries to help, but the bodies he pulls out are already dead. Even without reading the jacket flap, you know Pearl and Benny will meet again.

S.S. Eastland, ca. 1911. (Detroit Publishing Co., Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons).

S.S. Eastland, ca. 1911. (Detroit Publishing Co., Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons).

Pearl’s mother never recovers, leaving her eldest daughter to pick up the pieces. As the years pass, Pearl takes over more and more responsibility for running the family saloon and mothering her younger sisters. Like Benny, she believes that she doesn’t deserve care or attention. Only routine keeps her going.

For Benny, it’s music, as he pursues learning jazz with a single-mindedness and energy he has never shown toward anything else. When he hears Napoleon Hill on trumpet, he knows why:


Everything he’d ever known about the world–that gravity holds you down and mothers are there when you get home, that baseball has nine innings, and sleep awaits you at the end of the day–was turned upside down. He forgot about his brother lost in the snow and the dead girl he’d danced with when the Eastland went down. . . . He even forgot he was a person in a crowd, not a very old person at that, just a boy. His arms and legs all melted into one. He wasn’t anywhere but inside the music he was hearing.


Napoleon and Benny, African-American and Jew, become close friends and musical partners, drawn together in part by vulnerability. With the advent of Prohibition, Pearl’s saloon has turned into a speakeasy, and Napoleon plays there from time to time, a great risk for a black man to take in a white neighborhood. Naturally, Benny sits in one night, but if you think you know the rest, you’ll have to read this book to see why Morris is too good a novelist to take the low road.

The Chimbrovas, the Lehrmans, Napoleon, every character in this book, even Al Capone, has been emotionally (if not physically) scarred. In this world of pain, in which warm currents drift through–sometimes within reach, sometimes not–there are no answers, only doing what you have to. But there are dreams, for those who dare, whether it’s just to be able to keep going, or to reach for something that might, one day, feel like happiness.

As I’ve said recently, I generally dislike novels about crossed paths, but The Jazz Palace nails it. I could explain that by saying that Morris opens up her characters’ inner lives, gets beneath their skins, and writes lyrically in the bargain. But it’s also that these people, like their creator, know they can’t afford cheap sentiment, and that whatever they want must be earned.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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