Monthly Archives: April 2016

Guardian Angel: Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse

28 Thursday Apr 2016

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Review: Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse, by Faith Sullivan
Milkweed, 2015. 439 pp. $26

Had Sinclair Lewis believed in or owned the milk of human kindness, he might have written Main Street more like this novel. Main Street would have been a lesser book, bereft of its cynicism and merciless social edge. But that’s not a knock on Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse, which has its own pleasures, one of which is that Sullivan believes firmly in that precious milk, even as she describes a similar strain of small-mindedness.

Sinclair Lewis's hometown of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, is proud of the fact today (2012, courtesy Kirs10 via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Sinclair Lewis’s hometown of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, is proud of the fact today (2012, courtesy Kirs10 via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

When Nell Stillman’s husband dies, leaving her almost destitute with a baby son to care for, she’s not as bad off as she could be. The late Mr. Stillman was a selfish, insensitive brute, so she’s well rid of him, but it’s the early twentieth century, and as a widow in Harvester, Minnesota, she has few socially acceptable choices. Not only that, the town is blessed with many people who have nothing better to do than let her know when she’s made the wrong ones. But Nell has a gift for tolerating human frailties, which earns her friends and protectors. More importantly, the third-grade teacher is quitting her job, and Nell has a teaching certificate.

Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse has no plot to speak of, just an account of Nell’s experiences, told in bitty, episodic chapters. I dislike that approach, which seems superficial at times and geared toward a tag line, as if I were watching television instead of reading a book. But Sullivan makes it work reasonably well, and it’s easy to sympathize with Nell, who struggles to find solace despite many painful experiences. For one, she’s nearly fired because of what a young woman she hired to look after her child may or may not have done. For another, her son, Hillyard, known as Hilly, is aptly named for the life he must climb through; a more genial, caring, gentle boy you couldn’t find, but he’s meat for the town bullies, and Nell suffers with him.

You’ll notice that these are two good, kind people, the live-and-let-live type who readily draw others to them. All Nell’s friends are like that too, more tolerant than the average, and you can tell them right away, as if they were the ones wearing the white hats. That’s both a blessing and a curse to a novelist, I think. You want to read about these kind people, but they don’t always seem real. Nell, Hilly, and those who smile on them appear to have no flaws, whereas the bullies are, well, just bullies, irredeemable and inexplicably mean, deserving no fuller portrayal or explanation.

Sullivan shades this black-and-white picture to some extent by throwing plenty of sorrow at the good folk. But there’s a limit to how far that goes. I admit, Sullivan tells her story skillfully, but it’s not hard to guess what will happen. I like this novel for what it is, a commentary on Midwestern morals of the past century, but I kept wanting to see Nell betrayed by someone who normally shouldn’t have. Instead, she’s betrayed by just whom you’d expect. I wanted more scenes like the one in which Hilly receives a hero’s welcome returning from the Great War, and things go horribly awry because a friend of Nell’s overreaches. Sullivan creates a wrenching moment, a perfect capsule description of what’s wrong with Harvester. But true to form, the friend apologizes profusely, realizing exactly what she’s done, and nothing like that ever happens again.

The title comes from Nell’s love for literature, especially the social comedies of P. G. Wodehouse, whose titled eccentrics and British preoccupations are worlds away from small-town America. That’s why Nell adores these books; they lift her out of herself and banish her troubles for a while, and there’s no greater compliment than that. Nell even has imaginary conversations with Wodehouse, as she does with the people in her life who’ve died, and those talks comfort her as well.

Sullivan’s novel has This Would Be Great for Book Clubs written all over it, which is perhaps a little precious. But I can also see that readers could pick up Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse and be cheered by Nell’s indomitable spirit, despite her losses.

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

No Holds Barred: The Yid

25 Monday Apr 2016

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Review: The Yid, by Paul Goldberg
Picador, 2016. 307 pp. $27

If I told you that a novel about Stalin’s plans for a second Holocaust will make you laugh out loud, you’d probably wonder whether all this reading I do had tipped me over the edge. But The Yid, whose title merely hints at provocations to come, conducts an irresistible guerrilla war against Russia, the Soviet secret police, and anti-Semitism–inevitably intertwined–as a darkly comic theater of the absurd.

It’s 1953, and though Stalin’s rumored to be dying, the killings and “disappearances” continue unabated, at his orders. The Great Leader has been assembling lists of Jews and collecting rolling stock from the farthest reaches of the empire, preparing for a mass pogrom to rival Hitler’s. Meanwhile, the secret police have been rounding up Jews for torture, “confession,” and murder, and the blood libel has as strong a currency among Russians as ever (the notion that Jews require Christian blood for ritual purposes, specifically to make Passover matzos).

Consequently, one early morning in February, three secret-service thugs enter the Moscow apartment of Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, an actor from the now-defunct Jewish State Theater. I won’t tell you what happens next, only that he surprises his captors:

The reason for denying the humanity of your arrestees and your executees is simple in the extreme: you block them out, because as humans we have little control over our ability to listen. And when we listen–sometimes–we hear what is said. And sometimes this leads to a dangerous bond between the arrester-executioner and arrestee-executee. Nothing good comes of such bonds.

Levinson conceives a bizarre, hopeless plan: to assassinate Stalin and prevent the pogrom from going any further. Levinson’s profession and needling, cynical sense of humor lead people who get swept up in his scheme to wonder whether he’s serious. But he is. And the cast he assembles for his drama (which appears in sections labeled “acts,” occasionally rendered in playscript) includes several memorable performers.

There’s Friederich Lewis, an African-American who fled Chicago (and other places) for the USSR because he believed that racism wouldn’t exist in the Soviet paradise. He speaks fluent Russian and Yiddish, the latter of which allows him to understand and respond to Levinson’s quips and insults. Russians call Lewis “Paul Robeson,” whom they supposedly admire, yet they expect Lewis to be only a half-step above an ape, even though he’s studied Communist theory more coherently than they and is a gifted engineer. In a final absurdity, he must often go about in whiteface to carry out Levinson’s plan; as a black man, he’d stick out, otherwise.

Aleksandr Kogan, a surgeon, regularly faces anti-Semitism, because, in the Russian mind, Jewish doctors are murderers, intent on infecting the population. Yet Kogan feels that dignity under pressure is important, so when ignoring the bigots doesn’t help, he tries to reason with them. Kima Petrova, a young woman who goes out of her way to challenge death, says nothing about herself. But we learn that the police say her mother blew her brains out and left behind a typed suicide note, though she owned no weapon and no typewriter. The typed note was a carbon copy.

Decree awarding Lydia Timashuk the Order of Lenin for "unmasking" the so-called Doctors' Plot, January 1953 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Decree awarding Lydia Timashuk the Order of Lenin for “unmasking” the so-called Doctors’ Plot, January 1953. The medal was revoked the following year, after Stalin’s death. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Kogan observes, “Let’s be fair: in our country, you don’t have to be a decent person in order to get arrested.” But it helps. When the secret police warn him that he’s about to be arrested, and that he should make a full confession, Kogan rebuts the accusations one by one. The most absurd is that he’s killed a fellow doctor, another Jew, because, his interrogator says, “Sometimes you have to kill one of your own, so people won’t think you are killing only Russians.” The interrogation follows the same lunatic pattern as random expressions of anti-Semitism, so Goldberg seems to be saying that the paranoia of the bigot and the secret service are one and the same. And with Lewis, the author makes a similar point: People don’t listen to this man, who should be a hero, because that would challenge their prejudice that he’s not really human.

Goldberg made up less of The Yid than it might appear. Stalin’s final purge, which took place shortly before the novel opens, involved accusations against eminent doctors who had treated top party officials. When those patients died, Stalin accused the doctors of murdering them as part of an international Jewish conspiracy to undermine the regime. To assume that he’d plan a national pogrom in response may sound far-fetched. But in his afterword, Goldberg insists that the lists of Jews and the movements of rolling stock have been documented. He dedicates the novel to his parents, whose names were on the lists.

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

Will the Walking Wounded Speak Up?: The Railwayman’s Wife

18 Monday Apr 2016

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Review: The Railwayman’s Wife, by Ashley Hay
Atria, 2013. 269 pp. $26

One moment, you’re feeling confident, happy, because you believe that you’ve preserved the most precious part of life. The next moment, your security has vanished; how do you cope?

That’s the question behind this gorgeously written, deceptively gentle novel about loss. World War II has hardly ended, and Anneke Lachlan lives with her husband, Mac, and their ten-year-old daughter, Isabel, in an Australian coastal village. They’re the sort of people you’d love to know–thoughtful, passionate, delighting in beauty. They have little money, but their only regret on that score is not being able to visit Mac’s birthplace in Scotland, a trip they’ve both yearned to make. Nevertheless, they delight in fashioning or finding gifts for one another that offer new experiences or ways of seeing things.

Three Australian soldiers, all winners of the Victoria Cross, 1946 (Courtesy Australian War Memorial; public domain).

These three Australian soldiers all won the Victoria Cross and were lucky enough to live to tell about it (1946, courtesy Australian War Memorial; public domain).

But behind that warmth lurks the terrible suffering of the war, whose survivors are conscious that many people didn’t make it. Anneke, known as Ani, is glad her husband kept his job with the railroad rather than enlist. But in the back of her mind, she still worries sometimes, vaguely, that chance will take Mac from her yet. And that’s what happens; a railway accident claims his life, and the pain overwhelms her.

How Ani faces her loss–or not–makes a touching, subtle narrative, of small moments carefully rendered that reveal her character, her place in the village, how people look out for her, and what they expect. She takes a part-time job in the tiny local library and tries to find solace in books. Nor is she the only one to suffer. Frank Draper, a doctor who served in the war, can’t forget the liberated concentration camp inmates whose lives he couldn’t save. He returns to his native village irritable, cynical, and morose, taking up a medical practice but unsure whether he’ll stay.

His boyhood friend Roy McKinnon, a poet who also saw wartime action and won fame for a single poem about it, has come back also, so shaken that he can’t write. He lives with his lonely, difficult sister, Iris, who loved Frank Draper before the war and still hopes to marry him. Roy takes a fancy to Ani, first as a muse, as he struggles to find words worth putting on a page, and then more deeply. But will any of these people have the emotional resilience to break out of the hardened defenses they’ve built for themselves? There are still words they can never say (or write), because they seem risky or paltry or ridiculous next to how they’ve been hurt, or too challenging for the myths they’ve woven to comfort themselves.

A lesser authorial hand might have surrendered to the temptation to dip these familiar themes and situations in treacle and serve up an easier story. Not here. Hay has taken the high road, climbing a good, long way to do so. With one exception, nobody makes life simple for themselves or anyone else, whatever kindness or generosity they may have, and they often refuse to see what’s plainly before them. That makes them utterly believable. And as I suggested above, the prose doesn’t hurt, either:

It’s a still and sunny day, the water flat and inky, the escarpment colored golden and orange, pink and brown. As the train takes the curves and bends of its line, the mountain’s rock faces become great stone monoliths that might have come from Easter Island, and then the geometric edges of some desert temple. Here are the hellish-red gashes of coke ovens; here is the thin space where there’s only room, it seems, for a narrow road, a narrow track, between the demands of sea and stone.

Hay strikes two false notes, however, in her characterizations. Isabel, Ani’s daughter, is the exception to the high road, the only person not to subvert herself. She’s impossibly adorable, empathic and perceptive beyond her years, a child you’d gladly bring home and raise as your own. Unfortunately, I don’t believe she exists. Not once does she act out, throw a tantrum, complain, or even shout or scream–and this is a girl who just lost the father she worshiped. Not only that, when Ani raises her voice to her–all two instances of it–the mother feels like a criminal, which feels too perfect.

At the other extreme, Frank Draper becomes more human, though it’s not clear how. He’s not the sort to talk about what he saw or his feelings, so I want to see how Iris expects to cozy up to him. But Hay doesn’t show this. Are we meant to assume that Iris believes her interest in Frank will melt his icy exterior? I’d need to see that happen before I agree with her.

All the same, The Railwayman’s Wife is a beautiful novel.

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

Narrow Fiction: The Cherry Harvest

14 Thursday Apr 2016

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Review: The Cherry Harvest, by Lucy Sanna
Morrow, 2015. 321 pp. $26

You know what must happen next. It’s spring 1944, and Thomas Christiansen, a Wisconsin cherry farmer who’ll lose his orchards if he doesn’t get help for the harvest, asks the U.S. Army to supply German prisoner-of-war labor. His wife, Charlotte, though she’d do anything to save the farm or ease her daily struggle to put food on the table, has severe misgivings. Her favorite child, Ben, is with the army facing German bullets, and Charlotte wants no Nazis near her house, especially nowhere near her beautiful, innocent, teenage daughter, Kate.

Cave Point County Park, Door County, Wisconsin (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

Cave Point County Park, Door County, Wisconsin (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

Charlotte never expresses her feelings, except about Ben, but for some reason, she’s dissatisfied with her marriage. Her husband, though hardworking, is a mild-mannered intellectual type who’d much rather be running a bookstore, and the physical spark she once felt for him has lessened considerably since Ben went to war. Thomas is always quoting poetry and talking about books with Kate, a subject that Charlotte disdains when she’s not feeling jealous. Naturally, however, she won’t discuss any of this, because her answer to every problem is to shut up and soldier on.

So am I spoiling anything by saying that it’s Charlotte, not Kate, who has an affair with a German prisoner? Further, the jacket flap gives away that Ben returns wounded, though you’d have guessed that too. And when you read, early on, that he romanced the girl next door at a dance, you need no crystal ball to figure what kind of wound he has. As for yet another dose of predictable, when Kate nearly drowns in a lake and washes up at a fancy vacation home, who should rescue her but a handsome senator’s son, who’s smitten with her from the get-go and promises to fulfill all her dreams? That said, however, I do like the scenes in which she tries to mingle among his posh friends, which capture what a poor, simple farm girl trying to pass in La-La Land would feel like, including her reaction at a bathroom large enough to live in.

My point isn’t to beat The Cherry Harvest into the ground, but to figure out what went wrong. Sanna has tried valiantly to re-create a moment in time, and though I don’t really believe we’re back in 1944, particularly, I do believe we’re in Door County, Wisconsin, during hard times, and farm life comes through loud and clear. She’s got an excellent premise to work from, and Charlotte’s a mess, which means she has potential.

So what could Sanna have done differently? Let’s start with Ben, who, though a crucial character, doesn’t show up until fifty pages from the end. Aside from rare smiles or jests, he’s a hundred percent the angry, bitter, young warrior, spiraling out of control, repelling everybody faster than you can shout, “Incoming!” because, well, the novel has to end. Thomas has possibilities, but, aside from an explanation that he has the farm only because he inherited it, we see only that he’s forgiving, reasonable, thoughtful, and everything else a patient, long-suffering husband should be. At one point, Charlotte wonders, briefly, whether he had another life before they met, an instance of authorial telegraphy that repeatedly mars this novel. But we never witness his soul-stirring. Nor do we get past the surface of Karl, the English-speaking German who tutors Kate in math (natch; what Germans are expert at, ja?) and makes love to her mother. He’s got a feral side that draws Charlotte, but the rest of him is blank, aside from his many declarations that Germans are good people, just like Americans. It was all Hitler’s fault, you see.

When he says that, I’m waiting for Charlotte, proud of her Norwegian heritage, to blurt out, or at least think, Then what the hell are you SOBs doing in Norway? Or the rest of Europe, for that matter, where surely she knows that goodness has folded its tent long ago. But nobody says anything like that, only repeats that Ben has been fighting them, so they have no place on the farm.

What kills The Cherry Harvest for me, then, is its narrowness. If you’re going to whistle an old, hackneyed tune, add a harmony or three, an improvisation, a surprise, an unexpected duet or trio. Charlotte clearly has an Oedipal entanglement with her son, but we don’t know why he’s her special child. Likewise, Kate never resents playing second fiddle, nor does Thomas question his wife’s obsession. As for Karl, he could be a fascinating character, someone who entices Charlotte but also repels her for who he is, not just the uniform he wore. Instead, he rescues her from rape, and the prisoner who assaults her is the badass nobody likes, who so happens to have a scarred face. Compounding these literary felonies, Sanna has Charlotte fantasize all too easily about a life with Karl, though never really developing the idea, just dropping it in, only to dispense with it even more quickly two pages later.

Pure, uncomplicated qualities–and their inevitably flimsy transitions–make for weak fiction; they’re Hollywood. Round them out, give them depth through complexity. That’s what The Cherry Harvest fails to do.

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

Mistaken Identity: The Good Lord Bird

11 Monday Apr 2016

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Review: The Good Lord Bird, by James McBride
Riverhead, 2013.417 pp. $28

Young Henry Shackleford, who lives in the Kansas Territory in 1856, thinks he’s about twelve. He can’t be sure, because slaves don’t always know when they were born and often adopt January 1 as their birthday. But even in his brief life, Henry has managed to make quite a reputation for himself as a lazy, lying, good-for-nothing who cares only for his next meal and making sure that if and when bullets fly between pro-slavery and abolitionist militia, they pass harmlessly overhead. (They didn’t call it “Bleeding Kansas” for nothing.)

Enter John Brown, the legendary abolitionist who’s committed a few murders himself and whose likeness is plastered on Wanted posters in several states. An argument with Henry’s owner leaves the boy’s father dead, and Brown takes Henry into his band. Over the next four years, ending with the failed rebellion at Harper’s Ferry, the two repeatedly separate and find one another again, their fates bound in many an ironic twist.

John Brown, 1859, copy of a daguerrotype attributed to Martin M. Lawrence (Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

John Brown, 1859, copy of a daguerreotype attributed to Martin M. Lawrence (Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

That irony, often humorous, drives the narrative, starting with Henry’s character. He misses slavery, because the eating was regular, and, unlike his time with Brown’s band, he suffered few hardships. (In fact, he thought his master a good sort and reserved his dislike for his father.) Also, since this novel is about identity and disguise, McBride pushes the envelope and has Henry choose to pass as a girl, which will keep him out of the fighting–or so the boy thinks. Strangely, Brown calls him Little Onion and believes that God sent “her” as a sign. Crazy? Sure. But then again, the Old Man, also known as the Captain, sees what he wants to see and does what he likes, confident that he performs the Lord’s work with every breath. This extends to exposing himself to enemy fire carelessly, while his men hide behind any cover they can find:

He stood mute, as usual, apparently thinking something through. His face, always aged, looked even older. It looked absolutely spongy with wrinkles. His beard was no fully white and ragged, and so long it growed down to his chest and could’a doubled for a hawk’s nest. He had gotten a new set of clothes someplace, but they were only worse new versions of the same thing he wore before . . withered, crumpled, and chewed at the edges. . . . In other words, he looked normal, like his clothes was dying of thirst, and he himself was about to keel over out of plain ugliness.

Brave as John Brown is in battle or by hewing strictly to his convictions, don’t ever ask him a direct question, because he’ll unleash a sermon that lasts for hours. Many are hilarious, and such is the fear he instills in his men, even his sons, nobody dares interrupt or hurry him to get to the point. I also laughed when Henry meets Frederick Douglass, whom the boy (still disguised as a girl) has to drink under the table to ward off the leader’s groping hands. Douglass comes off poorly in this book, as all talk about freedom but no action, whereas Harriet Tubman is another matter. She sees right through Henry, sensing his cowardice and belief in nothing except saving himself.

That’s the lesson that Henry learns, slowly, as he moves from frying pan to fire to another, hotter frying pan: that being a man means the willingness to act like one. But that prescription is particularly difficult when he’s trying to pass as a girl, though it’s laughable how easily he fools the men around him (albeit seldom the women, of course). His disguise carries a particular risk when he’s away from Brown’s band, for white men cozy up to him, and he can’t drink them under the table. So The Good Lord Bird isn’t just about racial identity; it’s about power and what it confers on those who wish to use it, sexually or otherwise.

Much as I like McBride’s prose and the picaresque aspect to a brutal subject–both of which remind me of Joe R. Lansdale’s Paradise Sky–they don’t sustain The Good Lord Bird at its considerable length. Henry’s adventures feel repetitive after awhile, with no new point to make, no further envelopes to push. To be sure, McBride’s a marvelous storyteller, never letting his protagonist off the hook, but by the midpoint, the only question is whether Henry will escape before Harper’s Ferry, and you know how that will turn out even if you haven’t read the jacket flap.

All the same, The Good Lord Bird is worth a look. I’ve always wondered whether John Brown was a maniac or a prophet just before his time, and McBride’s portrayal has given me a lot to think about.

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

Paying the Price: Terrible Virtue

04 Monday Apr 2016

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Review: Terrible Virtue, by Ellen Feldman
HarperCollins, 2016. 260 pp. $26

It’s a truism that very accomplished people make their families miserable. Such was the curse of Margaret Sanger, to whom the world owes a huge debt, but who scarred her husband and children, and whose character made her impossible to live with or work with. Ellen Feldman has tried to render this complex, great woman in fictional form, and she mostly succeeds.

Born in 1879 to an upstate New York family of thirteen children, of whom eleven survive, young Margaret realizes early on what has ruined her mother’s dreary life and decides she’ll grow up differently. She trains to become a nurse, and, while serving a largely immigrant New York City population, she repeatedly hears the same question from distressed, beaten-down women: How can I stop having more babies I can’t feed? But birth control is illegal–it’s just before the First World War–and giving advice about it through the mail is also a crime. Nevertheless, Sanger distributes pamphlets and magazine articles, and is duly arrested.

Margaret Sanger and her sons Grant and Stuart, around 1919 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

Margaret Sanger and her sons Grant and Stuart, around 1919 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

Naturally, the story doesn’t end there; it’s only the beginning. But how Sanger advances her cause, and at what cost, makes compelling reading indeed. Her husband, Bill, who suffers her many, many love affairs, is a frequent casualty. So are their two sons and daughter, who seldom see their mother, because she’s too busy to take care of them. Professing to believe neither in guilt nor regret, Sanger lets herself off the hook all too easily regarding the people close to her; her conscience seems to work only on behalf of the women desperate for her help.

If you’re thinking that this novel reads more like a biography (an assumption the jacket flap unfortunately underlines), that’s not quite accurate. Terrible Virtue packs plenty of tension, and, unlike life, there’s nothing humdrum in it. Feldman has deftly chosen what to include in her short narrative and what to omit, letting her marvelous prose do the rest. For instance, when young Margaret first climbs the hill in her upstate New York town to attend a boarding school, she sees a family of four playing croquet on a large lawn:

I knew no more children lurked in the house behind, though it looked big enough to accommodate a brood of eight or ten or a dozen. I knew it from the whiteness of their clothes, as immaculate as the conception fable the priest handed out to the parishioners at the bottom of the hill; and from the mother’s serene smiling face as she swung her arms and the sound of the mallet making contact with the ball cracked the quiet air. . . .The sight of that perfect quartet who had never scrapped for food or love or attention, who had never been humiliated before an entire class, who had never felt ashamed of anything, reached out and grabbed me like an arresting officer. And I was guilty as charged, of envy and pride and shame.

The reactions to what Sanger does lend Terrible Virtue part of its power. I particularly recall a gloating, nasty policewoman in a fox fur, who arrests Sanger at Planned Parenthood in 1916, the first birth-control clinic in the country, and takes pleasure in it. Throughout the narrative, myriad characters unwittingly expose their hatred for what Sanger represents, as if reproductive freedom stole something from them–to wit, as with the nasty policewoman, if the Brooklyn poor stopped breeding like rabbits, she could no longer hate them the same way. Terrible Virtue is therefore timely; this scene happened exactly a century ago, but when I read what many state legislatures are doing these days to women’s health clinics, I have to conclude we’ve learned absolutely nothing since.

What mars the novel, though, is Feldman’s choice of first-person voice–not that it’s a bad idea, but because she tampers with it. Sanger’s self-absorption and vanity come through loud and clear when she talks about her family, her movement, her struggles. Yet rather than let Sanger’s narrative voice tell the whole tale, the author drops in random, first-person perspectives from the people Margaret has hurt, which feel like jarring interruptions. Is Feldman afraid that readers really won’t understand that there’s another side to the story? If that’s the case, without breaking the narrative voice, she could easily have shown more of what Sanger chose to deny through scenes in which other characters object to what she’s done. I’m surprised that a fine writer like Feldman should have shown so little confidence in herself or her readers.

Terrible Virtue is worth your time.

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