Monthly Archives: March 2016

I Sing the Body Dissected: Speakers of the Dead

31 Thursday Mar 2016

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Review: Speakers of the Dead, by J. Aaron Sanders
Plume/Penguin, 2016. 301 pp. $16

Not quite halfway through this mystery novel set in 1843, a man who makes most mortals tremble says, “Your ego surpasses your reputation. Not every New Yorker believes you’re the next Charles Dickens.”
To which comes the reply, “Your nose seems to have healed,” a reference to a tussle that defined their previous meeting.
The man who landed the punch is a youthful Walt Whitman, and the target belongs to a Tammany Hall ward heeler from Manhattan’s toughest neighborhood, so Speakers of the Dead offers the chance of a fresh, zesty tale. Throw in that Sanders has plumbed an arresting piece of social history–a controversy over medical dissection–and the novel promises even more.

Elizabeth Blackwell, medical pioneer (Undated photo, courtesy Wikimedia Commons via National Library of Medicine; public domain)

Elizabeth Blackwell, medical pioneer (Undated photo, courtesy Wikimedia Commons via National Library of Medicine; public domain)

Unfortunately, however, Speakers of the Dead seldom delivers more than the novelty of a poet serving justice with pen and rough-and-tumble. The storytelling depends solely on revelations and surprises rather than what lies within the characters, which means that Sanders has to keep pulling novelties out of the hat. Well before the end, the mystery peters out, and you can often hear the literary machinery creaking between the lines.
The narrative begins as twenty-two-year-old Mr. Whitman, who’s written tons of newspaper stories and an admittedly bad temperance novel but little poetry, tries to save a woman friend from hanging for murder. But the police prevent Walt from presenting evidence, and as she dies, he vows to prove her innocence. As editor of the Aurora, a struggling newspaper, Whitman has a ready mouthpiece to raise public opinion. But powerful men quickly make their opposition known, and his life and job are threatened. The furor only grows when Whitman discovers a link between so-called resurrection men, body snatchers who sell the newly deceased to medical schools, and the murder for which his friend died. Not just that murder, either; since the resurrection men have a lucrative (and illegal) business, they’re more than capable of protecting it by creating more medical specimens.
The most interesting part is the deep-seated objection to dissection. Many people, encouraged by clerics, believed that dissection prevented the soul from reaching heaven. In the novel, their protests at medical institutions quickly turn violent, and Sanders portrays the mob scenes with frightening vividness. As I read, I couldn’t help thinking of their present-day counterparts, attacks on abortion clinics and the blood libel against Planned Parenthood, a comparison that Sanders underlines. Lurid rumors swirl about medical practitioners known to have performed the random abortion, testimony to public fear and ignorance.
Sanders takes this idea one step further, probing the notion that beauty exists in what we fear, in death as well as life. In one vivid scene, he has Whitman observe human organs preserved in jars:

The sheer enormity of the collection overwhelms Walt. He looks away, but there is no away in this room, and he has to confront these objects, and so he regards them as they are . . . and he feels pulled at by their odd beauty, their untranslatable state, and he is overcome with the sense of his own decomposition, his flung likeness, coaxed to vapor and dust, and he gives himself to the image of his impending death. . . .

Several well-known figures populate Speakers of the Dead. For instance, Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States, represents feminist themes about male power and female suffering. Edgar Allan Poe makes a memorable cameo appearance, shouting like a madman to help his fellow poet escape capture. But except for Poe, these famous characters are flat, without edges.
Sadly, the narrative suffers the same flaw. Walt learns the apparent connection between the resurrection men and the murders rather easily, and no contrary evidence complicates his reasoning. He fingers the culprit fairly early on, and the only question is how much trouble he’ll get into before he can plead his case.

Aside from an occasional striking detail, New York drifts in and out of focus, a half-sketched landscape with or without figures. I wanted to see facial expressions, body language, scenery just beyond the immediate picture frame, all of which would have helped.
Though Whitman makes a vital, attractive protagonist, full of lust, rage, egotism, and passion for justice, like the other characters, he seems boxed in, restricted to what the narrative demands. I wish he’d been given more rein, especially to develop the theme of beauty in death. But I also wish he’d been restrained, as when he quotes a poem from Leaves of Grass; and decides, in a single paragraph, that he needs to focus on poetry rather than prose. Such self-conscious passages feel like nonfiction, unless they’ve been earned and worked toward, not simply dropped in.

Since the subtitle of Speakers of the Dead is A Walt Whitman Mystery, I gather that Sanders has others in mind. I hope he takes a different approach with them.

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

Elegy for a Town: Long Man

28 Monday Mar 2016

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Review: Long Man, by Amy Greene
Knopf, 2014. 272 pp. $26

Come August 3, 1936, the east Tennessee town of Yuneetah will cease to exist. On that day, the Tennessee Valley Authority, part of FDR’s New Deal, will unleash the Long Man River, and the dam built at its headwaters will submerge the valley. Most residents have left the land their forebears had settled for centuries, whether because the hardscrabble soil couldn’t feed them or, more recently, they bowed to the government’s eviction notices. But Annie Clyde Dodson, who can trace her lineage in part to the Cherokees who hunted this valley, isn’t going anywhere. She’ll stay, even to risk her life and that of her three-year-old daughter, Gracie, even to say goodbye to her devoted husband, James, who’s found a factory job in Michigan.

TVA sign from the Roosevelt Museum at Hyde Park, New York (Courtesy Billy Hathorn via Wikimedia Commons, 2015; public domain)

TVA sign from the FDR Presidential Library at Hyde Park, New York (Courtesy Billy Hathorn via Wikimedia Commons, 2015; public domain)

From the first words, you see Annie Clyde’s mindset, as she overlooks her limestone ridge at sunset:

She would watch with her knees gathered up as the last light mellowed into dusk, falling down the piney bluffs. Before half the homesteads were razed the lowering sun would stain the tin roofs of houses and barns, deepening the rust to oxblood. Gilding wheat sheaves and tobacco rows, shading red clay furrows. Last summer she might have heard a farmer calling in his cows. . . . But now there was only stillness and silence besides the tree frogs singing as twilight drifted toward night.

Such spare, potent prose brings life to these age-old themes of blood, land, and power. That power comes in two forms. One is the electricity the dam will produce, new to eastern Tennessee, and in which everyone will share. The other is the power to take homes away, wielded by bureaucrats who have nothing but contempt for the people who live in them.

But though Long Man treads perilously close to a self-righteous tale pitting salt-of-the-earth farmers against evil city slickers, Greene takes the high road with her main characters. Annie Clyde, as you may have guessed, is almost fatally stubborn, the type who refuses to listen to anyone. So when James announces his intention to move to Michigan, she cuts him dead, and he tries vainly to fight off the conclusion that she’s never loved him. When he finally gathers the courage to confront her, she won’t discuss it, which only hurts him more. But just as she fears leaving Yuneetah would mean abandoning the best part of herself, what she loves about the land, her property, and her ancestors’ graves–her life, in other words–he has his own story.

It’s not just that James hates farming–eating dust, watching the heat burn the corn, and hoping that the next heavy rain won’t wash away what little topsoil is left. Rather, the valley frightens him, for he watched his father drown in one of many floods that the Long Man inflicts on the long-suffering population. Even if they could stay–if the dam didn’t make that impossible–James wants a life where he need not fear for himself or his family, where earning a living need not be such a struggle, where the hard environment won’t kill them before their time.

Nevertheless, as the deadline looms, James realizes that if he goes to Michigan, Annie Clyde will stay behind with Gracie. But during a heavy rainstorm, Gracie disappears, and suddenly the whole population joins the hunt for a child whose spirit and cheerfulness have made her beloved. It’s as if everyone tacitly believes that if she were to die, there’d be no hope left in the world.

Long Man offers many pleasures, not least the subtle symbolism, which feels almost biblical in scope. It’s like the Flood that will sweep away an old world; but there’s no ark, no Noah, and, most important, no God to watch over anyone. I also like the name Yuneetah, which reminds me of a famous biscuit, an ironic similarity–you need this dam. But Annie Clyde thinks she doesn’t, and she’s betting that the new world the water brings will be worse than the old.

I also like Greene’s characterizations. Besides the two principals, the most memorable is Amos, a drifter from Yuneetah who’s mean, unpredictable, and the definition of passive-aggressive, but who thinks he has the charismatic spirit everyone else lacks–and may be right. However, Greene sometimes interrupts her narrative for backstory about a minor figure, and though I understand her desire to give everyone his or her due, that can go too far. I also find it unbelievable that the only social prejudices belong to the bureaucrats, and that nobody talks about race–this is 1936, after all, in the South.

Still, Long Man is a terrific book.

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

Mangled Shakespeare: Beatrice and Benedick

21 Monday Mar 2016

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Review: Beatrice and Benedick, by Marina Fiorato
St. Martin’s, 2014. 431 pp. $28

Beatrice, a young woman from Verona, is walking her cousin’s estate in Sicily when she sees a Moor making love to a white woman who wears an identical wedding band to his. Though at first surprised that interracial marriage is even possible, Beatrice comes away wanting a husband too, especially one who’ll desire her so powerfully. As it happens, her uncle is about to play host to Spanish noblemen representing the power that rules Sicily; joining them are Benedick and Claudio, merchants’ sons from Padua and Florence, respectively. Beatrice and Benedick fall for each other on sight, while Claudio cozies up to her cousin, Hero.

According to legend, this balcony was where Juliet entranced Romeo (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, undated)

According to legend, this balcony in Verona was where Juliet entranced Romeo (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, undated)

Readers familiar with Much Ado about Nothing will recognize this setup as backstory for Shakespeare’s comedy. Maybe you’ve also identified the passionate couple on the beach as Othello and Desdemona. And when you hear that Beatrice’s older brother is named Teobaldo (aka Tybalt), and that a feud between the Montecchi and Capuletti families is tearing apart Verona, you’ll know to keep an eye peeled for Romeo and Giulietta.

This bold contrivance promises a rollicking story and a bushel of grand themes: jealousy, the nature of love, the sexual double standard, how appearances deceive, split loyalties, and so forth. But Beatrice and Benedick falters from the get-go, and the narrative seldom rises above what feels ordained. It’s never easy to create tension in a well-known story, but Fiorato tries by adding plot rather than by deepening her characters. That’s a mistake.

The trouble begins with her premise, which supposes that Shakespeare was Sicilian. I might accept that notion for the two hours’ traffic of her stage if she portrayed him as a rising poet and dramatist, a charismatic figure caught up in his verse. But her ink-stained scribbler’s capacity for invention takes a distant third behind the terrible wrongs done him and his thirst for revenge. He claims the mantle of authorship solely by spouting words that have since become famous, which prompts either a wink-wink, nudge-nudge or uneasy laughter. Worse, Beatrice and Benedick quote random snippets from Guess Who and even pen sonnets from the same source. You too can write great literature in your spare time, without any practice at all!

This implausible conceit would matter a lot less if the characters, especially the men, amounted to more than a collection of attitudes, locked in place for an obvious purpose. Benedick, aside from his looks and ability with a rapier (how he learned is never adequately explained), has little to recommend him, and his pride, ideas about women, and approach to life seem handed to him rather than born from within. As the wheels turn, you sense that he’s got a long journey to make, and much ado about transforming himself, before the final drama with Beatrice takes place.

Moreover, for no good reason, he immediately embraces as great friend Don Pedro, a Spanish nobleman who wears villainy barely concealed below his charm. Yet it takes Benedick, supposedly a perceptive fellow, a very long time to get the message. Further, he does so while serving Don Pedro aboard ship in the Spanish Armada, a nod to the political theme. But the conflict between Don Pedro and Benedick could unfold anywhere, and burdening the narrative with yet another epic story–one with an inevitable ending–is too much. Maybe more to the point, Fiorato’s narrative seems to lose its moorings at sea, while it’s far more authoritative at the Spanish court, where, for example, King Philip II keeps a red-headed dwarf as a caricature of England’s Queen Elizabeth. What a fabulous scene, full of tension from unexpected undercurrents.

That leaves it up to Beatrice to save this hodgepodge, but she can’t. How she got to be so independent-minded, capable with a sword, or virtually oblivious of sex until watching Othello and Desdemona are only some of the questions I have. Her conversion to ardent feminism feels unnecessarily earnest, maybe because she doesn’t have that far to travel. Further, I’m not clear how a woman who holds feminist views (and knows how to defend herself physically) surrenders so meekly to her tyrannical father. One such surrender, however, provides what I think is the author’s best scene. Before male witnesses, a doctor brusquely examines Beatrice to prove her virginity so that a marriage contract may be drawn up. Nothing speaks more eloquently than this humiliating, abusive act, which needs no further commentary. I wish the rest of Beatrice and Benedick had shown the same directness and economy.

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

Lethal Delusions: The German War

17 Thursday Mar 2016

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Review: The German War: A Nation under Arms, 1939-1945, by Nicholas Stargardt
Basic, 2015. 570 pp. $35

Some books, no matter how harrowing their subject, how unrelenting, or how complex, display such mastery, vivid detail, and fresh perspective that they demand a reading. To me, The German War is one, though I shuddered and cringed my way through, sometimes cursing or even shouting in anger. That’s what happens when terrible history feels as if it took place yesterday.

Stargardt, who teaches at Magdalen College, Oxford, asks a question that many other historians have posed: How did the German people feel about the war they waged between 1939 and 1945?

That deceptively simple inquiry involves many interlocking pieces, among them the Holocaust, Allied bombing, euthanasia, rationing, German leadership, and Nazi ideology. Stargardt covers these and more, plumbing private letters, government documents, newspapers, film, and court cases. Perhaps most revealing about public attitudes, he cites reports from the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, the security arm of the SS, which gathered what people were saying among themselves. Having sifted through this stunning amount of material, the author conveys not only the implications of political and military decisions at the highest level, but how they affected the lives of sixteen individual Germans, in their own words.

The Nuremberg rallies were perhaps the largest public expression of loyalty to Hitler and the Nazi program. This one dates from September 1934 (Courtesy German Federal Archives, Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

The Nuremberg rallies were perhaps the largest public expression of loyalty to Hitler and the Nazi program. This one dates from September 1934 (Courtesy German Federal Archives, Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Stargardt has a myth-busting mission, which at times makes his narrative more than a little polemical. However, I think he succeeds, and it would be picky to condemn him for imperfect pitch when he shows why the most popular, accepted tunes are based on flat notes.

For instance, he demonstrates how the overwhelming majority of Germans supported both Hitler and the war effort, even to the end, even if they felt no sympathy with Nazism. This can be hard to understand, because most foreigners have grown up believing–or being taught–that the Nazis had somehow “brainwashed” an entire nation, that Germans obeyed out of fear, and that merely a fraction knew about the crimes committed in their names, let alone perpetrated them.

Not so, says Stargardt. Hitler was widely revered, and his radio broadcasts warmed the populace, lending them strength to bear ever-increasing sacrifices, even in the war’s final weeks. Many people assumed that if he’d only known of the daily injustices and hardships they suffered, he’d have corrected them. (The SD, as the Propaganda Ministry insisted, tolerated grumbling, so long as it betrayed no disloyalty.) Nobody welcomed the outbreak of war in 1939, except for the few who thought it an adventure, but, on the other hand, nobody questioned that the war was necessary to break the stranglehold of enemies threatening to destroy the Reich. Devout Christians, Catholic or Protestant, may have deplored the Nazi scorn for religion, but they agreed that Jews, as part of an “international Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy,” must be destroyed. Even in the last weeks, German forces bled freely for every inch of ground they yielded, as they had for almost six years. That tenacious, steadfast bravery could not have come from fear. Rather, the nation was determined not to surrender, as it had in 1918. Many fought on past the point of hopelessness to wipe away what they considered that old stain on the national honor.

As for what would later be called the Holocaust, the German public learned about it early and often. Not only did Hitler publicly promise on several occasions that Jewry would be wiped out, but on the Eastern Front, the army took part in mass killings, which were treated as perfectly natural. Soldiers described them in letters and took photos, which they showed to friends and family. The home front heard of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and so forth as death camps, though exactly how they functioned remained secret. Few people even cared until Allied air raids began causing serious destruction and loss of life, at which time many Germans assumed that these were retribution for killing Jews. Many also believed that the Jews were behind the raids, whose perceived intent was to exterminate Germany. By the same logic, Germans implicitly accepted that they were victims, not perpetrators, and even after 1945, insisted they had fought a legitimate war of self-defense. Some 37 percent still believed that their security had demanded the murder of “non-Aryans.”

If there’s one thing missing in Stargardt’s account–hard to believe, given its length and depth–it’s how certain German attitudes remained unchanged from the First World War. The notion that Britain had conspired to “encircle” and “strangle” Germany out of jealousy dates from then, as do the mantra of a defensive war compelling invasion of other countries and the belief in German victimhood. Hitler didn’t have to fabricate these popular narratives, only recall them from his own days as an ardent soldier in a Bavarian regiment.

The German War can be hard going because of its subject matter. But I’m glad I read it.

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

Uneasy Lies the Head That Wears a Crown: Master and Commander

14 Monday Mar 2016

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Review: Master and Commander, by Patrick O’Brien

Norton, 1990. 459 pp. $14

I don’t know why or how I avoided reading this novel, the first in a famous series about the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, but as a recent convert, I advise you to hie yourself thither. Master and Commander is no ordinary sea story, even if you think one cannonade is much like another, or that you’ve heard all you care to about wooden ships and iron men.

HMS Victory, the most famous British ship of the Napoleonic Wars, if not any era (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

HMS Victory, the most famous British ship of the Napoleonic Wars, if not in all of history (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Rather, O’Brian takes the genre giant steps beyond its normal limits. There’s nothing he doesn’t know about sailing ships, how they functioned, or life (and death) at sea, yet the narrative wears this information lightly. Moreover, he has an extremely perceptive eye for character and mood, revealing the inner lives of the main cast, certainly, and even glimpses of what the minor players dream about, portrayed in vivid, easily flowing prose. I wish he’d given more depth to the two women who appear most frequently; they’re little more than ambitious sex objects. Nevertheless, it’s pretty clear that O’Brian is master and commander of both the English language and psychological observation.

The premise is deceptively simple. Jack Aubrey, a Navy rat in his late twenties, has finally obtained a captaincy over the Sophie, a brig assigned to patrol western Mediterranean waters. His career has suffered severe ups and downs, mostly because he can’t control his feelings about idiotic, narrow-minded superiors who give him idiotic, narrow-minded orders. Since we’ve all felt that way, we can sympathize, though I suspect that most people would display better judgment than Aubrey, who conducts a more or less open affair with his immediate commander’s wife. On the other hand, Aubrey has a friend or two in high places and his excellent seamanship to recommend him. So he’s given the Sophie, which he sees as his chance at redemption and getting out of debt, for the navy rewards its captains for every enemy ship they bring home as a prize of war.

Just before he’s due to sail, he meets Stephen Maturin, a penurious doctor who shares his love of music, among other interests. The captain persuades his new friend to become the Sophie’s surgeon, a real coup, given that most vessels must put up with half-educated sawbones just as likely to kill their patients as cure them. Further, having lived in the western Mediterranean for years, Maturin’s knowledge of the Spanish coast and its languages make him a valuable asset. But Stephen’s greatest task may be to slip gently inside the captain’s blustery, mercurial exterior and understand his rough edges in ways that nobody else does.

This is where Master and Commander excels. Maturin’s presence as a landlubber curious about everything nautical–and his subtly raised eyebrows at customs and traditions that he thinks make no sense–gives life under sail an extra dimension, a view with which the reader identifies. But it’s not just that O’Brian’s characters move fluidly among every rope, spar, and pulley, employing their names and functions so naturally that they have trouble explaining them to Stephen in terms he can understand. It’s that Aubrey, a very social creature who loves good drink and good conversation, and who has dreamed all his life of being master and commander, realizes that his new rank forever separates him from the shipboard society he craves. Dining with the Sophie’s officers brings this sad truth home:

Everyone was unnaturally well behaved: Jack was to give the tone, as he knew very well–it was expected of him, and it was his privilege. But this kind of deference, this attentive listening to every remark of his, required the words he uttered to be worth the attention they excited–a wearing state of affairs for a man accustomed to ordinary human conversation, with its perpetual interruption, contradiction and plain disregard. Here everything he said was right; and presently his spirits began to sink under the burden.

What perplexes Aubrey most is why he can’t seem to break the ice with James Dillon, his extremely capable lieutenant who holds him in guarded contempt. Stephen understands Dillon better, for they’re both Irish-born and became acquainted during the disastrous Rebellion of 1798. Aubrey’s prejudices against “Papists” touch Maturin less, because he’s Protestant, but he deplores the captain’s careless, disparaging remarks about Catholics and Irish rebels, which, naturally, set Dillon’s teeth on edge.

These touchy relationships add tension, but they also underline a central theme, about social rank, power, and their far-reaching effects. Rank and power can swell to a geyser propelling a man upward or a vortex dragging him down, and managing these equal possibilities requires a keen hand on the wheel, day in and day out. Even men of lower rank and prospects face the same problem. The sailing master, a gifted navigator, curries Aubrey’s favor, partly because he’s sexually attracted to the man the crew nickname Goldilocks–but homosexuality is a hanging offense, so he’s careful to make his fawning look like anyone else’s. Another example is an ordinary seaman who clearly has the gift to advance but fears to progress beyond what he thinks is his natural station. The Sophie is an entire world in a short stretch of timber and canvas.

Disclaimer: My son loaned me his copy of this book, which he read long before I did, a mark of his good taste.

What an Annoying Book: The Signature of All Things

07 Monday Mar 2016

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Review: The Signature of All Things, by Elizabeth Gilbert
Penguin, 2013. 501 pp. $35

Henry Whittaker lives an eighteenth-century rags-to-riches story, rising from a gardener’s assistant at London’s Kew Botanical Gardens to become the wealthiest man in Philadelphia, trading in quinine and other tropical or unusual plants. Men from all over the world flock to his estate, White Acres, to share species or scientific information, or offer investment opportunities.

His daughter, Alma, born in 1800, is herself a hothouse flower. Speaking five languages by a ridiculously young age, she’s brought up to help entertain the stream of dinner guests with intelligent, provocative questions, and to develop a rigorously inquiring mind. What she’s not taught is how to deal with people except from an intellectual perspective, what the purpose of emotions or desire might be, or what’s that thing called love. Nor may she venture out to learn; everything and everyone are brought to White Acres, and she’s expected to react as her parents wish. In fact, her Dutch mother, Beatrix, seems to have two messages for Alma. One: Listen while I tell you about your mistakes, which you will never repeat; and two: Kill inconvenient emotions before they multiply.

Moss growing in the Allegheny National Forest, near Tionesta (Courtesy Ivo Shandor, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Moss growing in the Allegheny National Forest, near Tionesta, Pennsylvania (Courtesy Ivo Shandor, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

When this regime gets too much for Alma, she seeks comfort in Hanneke, Beatrix’s longtime servant, who keeps White Acres humming. But Hanneke’s cut from much the same cloth, so Alma gets no sympathy from anyone. Even when the household adopts Prudence, a girl her own age, Alma finds no company, for her half-sister is about as emotive and flexible as a porcelain plate. Not that Alma herself is psychologically supple or anything but tightly contained. But at least she struggles to understand desire, which, over time, she realizes may often be sexual.

If this description reminds you of a nineteenth-century novel (told from a more modern perspective), I believe that’s Gilbert’s plan. Her narrative and prose feel discursive and authorial, much like those of Dickens, Thackeray, or their contemporaries, though her writing style falls closer to our own sensibilities. Her theme also fits the era (and ours): What’s survival all about, and where does altruism fit in? Fittingly, Alma becomes a botanist, a brilliant woman in a field dominated by men. Gilbert splendidly captures the excitement of discovery in an era during which so many sciences began–indeed, as she informs us, the word scientist was coined. Alma makes her most significant advances in bryology, the study of mosses, and my favorite moment is when she first turns her magnifying glass on a boulder full of them:

This was a stupefying kingdom. This was the Amazon jungle as seen from the back of a harpy eagle. . . Here were rich, abundant valleys filled with tiny trees of braided mermaid hair and minuscule, tangled vines. Here were barely visible tributaries running through that jungle, and here was a miniature ocean in a depression in the center of the boulder, where all the water pooled.
Just across this ocean–which was half the size of Alma’s shawl–she found another continent of moss altogether. On this continent, everything was different.

From that moment, Anna realizes her life’s work, which fits her mission: to make sense of the world. And by the world, she means this one, having little grasp of, or patience for, talk of the next.

To my dismay, however, Gilbert takes this in directions I have little grasp of or patience for. The first third of The Signature of All Things, I mostly felt sympathy for these repressed, suffering people, even Henry, Beatrix, and Hanneke, the most rigid and controlling of the lot. But I quickly began to feel irritated with how the novel develops.

For one thing, everyone’s forever lecturing Alma on how to behave, what she’s done wrong, and to whom. Not only does she listen and adopt whatever she hears as complete truth, however baffling or painful; she immediately careens off to correct her errors. It’s as if she suddenly lost the independent mind she’s honed her entire life and given herself over to a constant string of improbable epiphanies, because of which she makes even less probable decisions.

Worse, these moments of supposed clarity lead her to reverse her appraisals of people who’ve done her harm. Her sister, Prudence, has become a holier-than-thou abolitionist who rubs her self-sacrifice in everybody’s faces, a pretty poor advertisement for a movement that needed all the help it could get. Nevertheless, after one of Hanneke’s drill-sergeant sessions, Prudence, the maudlin half-sibling who never gave Alma the time of day, somehow becomes a saint. Similarly, Ambrose Pike, a gifted plant illustrator, attracts Alma, at first. But he expects her–a convinced scientist who needs to see something to give it any credit–to accompany him in the spirit world. Is he a self-indulgent, deceptive twit? Noooo. After much trouble, Alma learns he’s a saint too.

In the end, The Signature of All Things both delighted and exhausted me. Take that for what you will.

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

Faith and Desire: The Beautiful Possible

03 Thursday Mar 2016

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Review: The Beautiful Possible, by Amy Gottlieb
Harper, 2016. 306 pp. $16

This thought-provoking, flawed novel does at least one thing very well: It makes you think about spiritual connections, even if (as in my case), you don’t have a spiritual bone in your body.

The story begins in Berlin, November 1938. Anyone familiar with that dateline immediately goes uh-oh, for it’s the time of Kristallnacht, “Night of the Broken Glass,” the infamous pogrom against Jews. Sure enough, Walter Westhaus loses his father and fiancée to murderous thugs; Walter escapes only by hiding under the bed.

By chance, he winds up in Bombay, where he studies at Rabindrath Tagore’s ashram. A shattered soul wrapped around a brilliant mind, Walter finishes out the war there, and in 1946, a religious scholar who admires him brings him to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Though he has no patience for the nuts and bolts of rabbinic study, Walter’s ability to find meaningful correspondences between Eastern and Jewish teachings sets open minds on fire. One mind not quite open enough belongs to Sol Kerem, a rabbinical student of whom everyone expects great things. At first, Sol seeks out Walter as someone with whom to study the sacred texts, only to reject him. However, Sol’s spirited fiancée, Rosalie, gets more than a little closer.

A mezuzah, which contains verses from the Torah, adorns the doorway of a Jewish home in Macedonia (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons via Pretoria Travel. Public domain; 2013).

A mezuzah, which contains verses from the Torah, adorns the doorway of a Jewish home in Macedonia (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons via Pretoria Travel. Public domain; 2013).

Rosalie, the novel’s only fully developed character, literally embodies the essential struggle of religious life. She’s the battleground where physical desire, belief, practice, and longing for opposed experiences twist her every which way. The retrospective prologue, voiced by her youngest child, Maya, now studying for the rabbinate herself, declares that Walter, Sol, and her mother have an unusual bond. Return to 1946, add Sol’s reluctant refusal to have premarital sex, and you can guess that Rosalie will have an affair with Walter, who understands physical passion but can’t give her anything else, being largely aimless and stuck in Kristallnacht.

Her lover is a homeless man, caught between worlds. He wears the wrong clothes in the wrong seasons. She wants to live in a house, a real house with two tables: one in the kitchen and one in the dining room. . . . She wants to build a family, create a link in the chain of generations. And she wants to do this with Sol, who is learned and sincere and who will teach her Talmud early in the morning before the children wake up.

This is a deep dilemma, which Gottlieb explores with skill. Where does desire figure in a religious life, and what does it truly mean? Are certain desires wrong because the Torah says so? These questions and others bedevil Rosalie constantly. As a reader, I have to reflect along with her, and though I come up with different answers, her story makes me think.

I also like that for once, here’s a novel in which Jewish characters exist in more than name. So many authors borrow Judaism only so that their characters face bigotry but are conveniently secular, in many ways living like anyone else, with scant thought for or tension over the identity for which they’re being persecuted. Not here. Gottlieb portrays observance like a second skin, not just to credibly re-create a belief system or lifestyle, but so that she can grapple with what an observant life means.

That said, The Beautiful Possible remains unsatisfying. Maya’s prologue nearly spells out that she’s Walter’s child, so you’re not surprised when Rosalie and Walter’s affair continues intermittently through the years. Since Sol also feels attracted to Walter, an impulse he reveals once and suppresses forever, potential conflicts are ready to explode in all directions. But both men, with Rosalie’s collusion, plant themselves firmly on their volcanoes and never budge. Sol seems like a stereotypical intellectual cleric, incapable of reaching his congregants, while Walter’s somehow able to sleep with any woman he fancies and write book after famous book, without caring much or even breaking a sweat.

I kept wanting the three main characters to duke things out, not leave themselves to Maya to decipher. I get that Gottlieb means to say that Rosalie’s dilemma about body, soul, belief, and observance is unresolvable, and that Maya’s rabbinical studies will force her to repeat the cycle. But to say that these conflicts are ongoing, and the issues too large to decide, isn’t new. And setting up a conflict that never occurs feels like trickery.

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