Monthly Archives: November 2018

Telling Too Much: The Hamilton Affair

26 Monday Nov 2018

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: The Hamilton Affair, by Elizabeth Cobbs
Arcade, 2016. 403 pp. $26

He’s illegitimate, an orphan born to poverty in St. Croix; she’s the daughter of one of upstate New York’s first families. He, though a devoted family man who yearns for the warm, close-knit hearth he never had, loves nothing more than a fight, whether on a battlefield or in a political assembly. She, though she picks up the pieces — her lot as a woman — resents her husband’s role as a lightning rod and correctly predicts that they’ll suffer for it.

This is the romance between Alexander Hamilton and Elizabeth Schuyler, and a tragic, touching tale it is. Cobbs begins the narrative with each protagonist as a child. Alexander struggles against the shame of his birth, and you don’t need to be told (though Cobbs does) that he’ll grow up touchy about his honor, in an era when the concept already has a rigid, constraining definition.

James Sharples’s pastel portrait of Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, 1795 (courtesy Smithsonian Institution, via Wikimedia Commons)

Meanwhile, Eliza feels like the odd one out too, awkward, unschooled, incapable of knowing what to say or how to act. An early passage recounts her visit with her father to a conclave of the Six Nations:

The shadowy interior smelled of wood smoke and roasting meat. Shelves burdened with gourds and lidded baskets lined the walls, and ears of drying maize tied by their silks hung from the rafters. Groups of men lounged on rugs, some made from bearskin, others from cloth. The translator showed them to a bench facing a low table made from a single plank. Thank goodness, Eliza thought, since she hadn’t the faintest idea how to sit on a bearskin with the dignity she knew her father expected.

The description reveals a major strength of The Hamilton Affair. Cobbs, a noted historian, renders the scenery, sensations of everyday life, mores, and issues in vivid, economical prose. You can see, for example, how the North-South divide over slavery, banking, manufacturing, trade, and foreign policy crops up the minute the Revolution ends, setting up the Civil War. Cobbs does a great service paying due homage to Hamilton, whom I had always thought a man of ability but an elitist. I’ve now learned that this is the viewpoint his detractors left to history, because they had the last word.

But it’s how he got those enemies that makes Cobbs’s narrative of interest. Her Hamilton doesn’t suffer a fool gladly, but there’s much more to it. How ironic that his opponents cast him as beholden to patrician interests when they’re the patricians — the Virginia planters like Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, or the New York gentry like Burr or Clinton. As a largely self-taught polymath, a nobody who rises to be Washington’s right hand—his accomplishments are truly mind-boggling–Hamilton poses a threat to men who feel they have the right to rule. Throw in his intense dislike of slavery, and he’s doomed.

What a fascinating story, but as a novel, The Hamilton Affair seldom escapes a mechanical, ordained feel. Eliza, a woman much put-upon, would have been much more sympathetic (rather than an object of pity) had she more depth, as in a serious flaw or three. She represents important feminist ideals before they had that name, but she’d symbolize them all the better as a rounded character.

The narrative structure is the crucial weakness, though. Cobbs chooses key dramatic events for many chapters, which is fine, but the intent to cover her protagonists’ entire lives sets up gaps of time and circumstance, which in turn involves playing catch-up so that the reader doesn’t get lost. As a consequence, the author throws dozens of facts into dialogue and internal narrative, which land with a dull thud; and many chapters start at pivotal moments, only to backtrack, covering so much material that the forward narrative stalls. It’s just too much to fit, especially when the two principals don’t meet until about page 120.

If fact, description, and the march of history take precedence here, that leaves less space for emotions, and Cobbs surrenders to the temptation of telling rather than showing them, even at make-or-break moments. During the courtship, for instance, when Hamilton sees that he can’t put off telling Eliza about his birth and early life, you’d think he’d feel intensely pent-up. Here’s a man passionately in love with a beautiful, adventuresome, understanding young woman, yet he fears she’ll reject him once she knows the truth of his origins. This emotional moment, surely among the most significant of Hamilton’s life, receives a brief, rote paragraph.

I’ll say this for The Hamilton Affair: The book prompts me to put Ron Chernow’s highly regarded biography of the great man on my to-be-read pile. But as fiction, Cobbs’s novel tries to tell too much, and winds up showing too little.

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

Albania Bleeds: Chronicle in Stone

19 Monday Nov 2018

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

Review: Chronicle in Stone, by Ismail Kadare
Translated from the Albanian by Arshi Pipa
Edited by David Bellos
Arcade, 2011. 301 pp. $18

A nameless, near-sighted young boy living in a small Albanian city near the Greek border grows up in the late 1930s. To call him an unreliable narrator would be incorrect, for he sees everything unfold around him with great precision — his relatively cushioned existence during the Italian annexation of spring 1939, the world war that soon follows, and numerous occupations, as the city changes hands.

Rather, his myopia is emotional, for he understands little or nothing of what goes on around him, which his overactive imagination turns inside out. And that could not be otherwise, when, for some reason never explained, he receives no schooling, and the only perspective he hears comes mostly from elderly relatives and neighborhood widows, whose constant preoccupation is sorcery. Every evil occurrence, or even those actually benign, are explained by malevolent magic, whether it’s a boy who starts wearing eyeglasses — unthinkable! — or a stolen kiss on the street. A young woman is said to sprout a beard; witchcraft must surely be responsible, a sign that the world will end soon (a familiar refrain). Burn your nail clippings and the hair in your hairbrushes, or the witches will target you.

Italian invasion of Albania, April 1939 (courtesy Axis History Forum via Wikimedia Commons)

So Kadare’s naïve narrator may be forgiven for wanting to visit the slaughterhouse, because it promises entertainment, or for admiring the aerodrome the Italians build. He ascribes different characters to the warplanes, as if they were human, and seems not to reckon on what it means that they bomb other places, though he soon finds out what that feels like.

I’ve never much cared for magical realism, and Chronicle in Stone skates close to my sensibilities. But as a metaphorical tale about hatred and divisiveness, the novel packs a wallop — even without a plot. Several characters try to break out of their roles and suffer for it, and the boy comes to learn something of what pleasure and evil mean. But I think the real power — and story, such as it is — comes from Kadare’s painstaking account of persistent animosities that seemingly arise out of nothing for what looks different or potentially threatening, such as the alleged beard that will end the world. It’s a short walk from these prejudices to the violence that grips the city (read: Albania), or, for that matter, juxtaposing a jaunt to the slaughterhouse and a world war.

As with other highly metaphorical novels, the prose has a lot of work to do, and Kadare’s is flawless. This early passage conveys the boy’s imagination and fascination with violent destiny:

I pictured the countless drops rolling down the sloping roof, hurtling to earth to turn to mist that would rise again in the high, white sky. Little did they know that a clever trap, a tin gutter, awaited them on the eaves. Just as they were about to make the leap from roof to ground, they suddenly found themselves caught in the narrow pipe with thousands of companions, asking “Where are we going, where are they taking us?” Then, before they could recover from that mad race, they plummeted into a deep prison, the great cistern of our house.
Here ended the raindrops’ life of joy and freedom.

Kadare captures the stubbornness of people who, for months on end, speak only of a select few topics — you know what they are — take absurd pride in an antiaircraft gun that never hits anything, or expect corruption everywhere. Does empathy even exist? Every once in a while, someone talks sense, but you can be certain no one will listen, to the point that the reader has to laugh. So in a way, the main thrust of Chronicle in Stone is comic, darkly so, which is why having a half-blind, ignorant narrator makes perfect sense.

I can’t say this book is for everyone; if you open it and look for a plot, a climax, or a crescendo, you’ll be disappointed. And yet, this slight novel is worth your time, and the pages will fly by.

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

Human Flaws Exposed: Dazzle Patterns

12 Monday Nov 2018

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: Dazzle Patterns, by Allison Watt
Freehand, 2018. 339 pp. $22

Clare Holmes works in a glassworks in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1917, a port city that buzzes with wartime traffic. Living in the big town instead of on her parents’ farm has provoked a constant, simmering conflict with Clare’s controlling mother, Ada. But Clare has plans that Ada would never dream of. The young woman is saving up for her passage to France so that she can become a Red Cross nurse and be near her soldier fiancé, Leo.

However, when a ship blows up in the harbor, the blast destroys the glassworks and a swath of town, leaving many dead. The consequences for Clare are severe and cascading. Not only does she lose an eye, which means Ada grabs her and brings her home; Clare worries that Leo won’t want her anymore; and, worse, the post-traumatic stresses sap her desire to live. Her friends hold out hope that she’ll be able to return to the glassworks, but her job there involved checking the product for flaws, and the boss isn’t the only one who doubts she can manage that with only one eye. It’s a nice twist, the flaw-checker who feels — and is — damaged herself. And she becomes so aware of her imperfection that she can hardly get out of bed, let alone function.

But Clare is nothing if not independent-minded, and Watt has put her protagonist’s inner life on vivid display. Overcoming her disability literally means Clare has to develop another way to see the world in perspective; and when you read that she takes up drawing, the metaphor gains breadth. But her adaptation of course involves how she sees herself, and this is my favorite aspect of Dazzle Patterns. Where once Clare defined the future as being Leo’s wife, or, more immediately, staying out of Ada’s clutches and becoming a nurse, she now takes a larger view. It’s as if Clare’s loss and necessary compensation for it have let her grow in unforeseeable ways, to extend the metaphor even further.

Watt’s at her best when the narrative stays in Halifax. She portrays the home front and all its fears and prejudices with a sure hand, as well as the boarding house Clare lives in, the glassworks, and the horrific aftermath of the explosion. Here’s the destruction recounted through the eyes of Fred, a glassblower whom Clare later befriends:

Walking back to his rooming house Fred saw houses fallen in upon themselves, charred like abandoned bonfires, or burnt completely away, only the chimneys flooded with black puddles of ash and snow. Standing houses stared blank-eyed, all their windows gone. Telephone poles tilted. On the street, a breadbox, a school bag, a woman’s evening shoe, black patent with a pointed toe and a velvet bow. At the corner of Agricola and West Street, Fred brushed the snow off and righted an empty baby carriage.

But I think Fred’s less successful than Clare as a character. Watt makes him a prewar German immigrant, which allows her to evoke the jingoistic suspicion of an “enemy alien” who is actually a naturalized Canadian. I like the theme and how Watt plays it, but Fred’s a bit too good to be true, as if the chief victim of the narrative must be a paragon.

Leo’s more believable as a person, but what happens to him, less so. He’s a sapper, assisting the engineer officer who tunnels under German lines. Watt’s depiction of that rings true. But the narrative fudges on what the Western Front looks and feels like, and other details are simply inaccurate. Most critically—and I don’t want to reveal too much–Watt fails to consider what a civilian’s possession of a firearm in a war zone can mean, as in getting the entire village put up against a wall. Moreover, that entire setup seems designed to alter Leo in convenient ways, whereas leaving him as he was, though messier, would add depth and conflict.

Finally, I hope that what I read is an uncorrected proof — although it doesn’t say so — and that a proofreader will catch mistakes like the constant misspelling of Fred’s German name, and the typographical and grammatical errors that crop up.

Still, I enjoyed Dazzle Patterns. The story is compelling, Watt tells it with brio, and has provided a heroine worthy of your time and attention.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher via Historical Novels Review, in which this post appeared in shorter, different form.

Internal Medicine: The Winter Soldier

05 Monday Nov 2018

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason
Little, Brown, 2018. 319 pp. $28

In 1915, war sends Lucius Krzelewski, a third-year Polish medical student, to a regimental hospital somewhere on the Polish front. But what that sounds like bears no relation to what he finds there — he’s the only doctor, aided by a single nurse and three orderlies, and they toil inside a dark, dank, freezing church whose roof has a large hole in it. They have no x-ray machine, laboratory, or hospital beds, and though they have fairly steady supplies of dressings, carbolic, morphine, and chloral, the emergency medicine is far from anything Lucius has ever heard of. In fact, he’s hardly ever touched a patient, his training having consisted of rote memory and recitations. He does possess an extraordinary internalized representation of what the human body looks like beneath the skin, and his diagnostic instincts are very sharp. Unfortunately, what matters now is how quickly and effectively he can perform amputations.

However, Sister Margarete, the nurse, is there to teach him, and he proves a quick study. Not always quick enough for her taste, to be sure — she has a sardonic way of observing formalities that tells him she knows more about his inexperience than she’s letting on. She also senses his social unease, though not its cause, a stuffy, aristocratic upbringing:

He wondered if he had grown up in another time or place — among a different, silent people, his unease would never have been noticed. But in Vienna, among the eloquent, where frivolity had been cultivated into a faith, he knew that others saw him falter. Lucius: the name, chosen by his father after the legendary kings of Rome, itself was mockery; he was anything but light. By his thirteenth birthday, so terrified by his mother’s disapproval, so increasingly uncertain of anything to say at all, his unease began to appear in a quiver of his lip, a nervous twisting of his fingers, and at last, a stutter.

Ever since then, Lucius has seldom been able to talk to anyone easily, unless it’s about medicine, for which he has that preternatural, internal feel. It is his life raft, his hope, his balm for what ails him, a malady he cannot diagnose. Yet he can talk to sister Margarete. That in itself is astonishing, for she belongs to the Order of Saint Catherine of Siena, speaks about lice in biblical phrases, and has been known to withhold painkillers from patients who try to trespass certain boundaries, a mistake they don’t make twice.

Yet this formidable, utterly correct angel of mercy isn’t all she seems, any more than Lucius is, which may explain the growing, unspoken attraction between them. The jacket cover typically tells too much, so I advise against reading it, but this much I’ll say: The arrival of a soldier suffering acute shell shock provides a defining moment in the narrative.

And those hospital scenes are terrific. Mason is not only an exceptionally accomplished novelist, he teaches psychiatry. You sense that his portrayal of psychological battle trauma, terse and stripped-down as it is, is all the more authentic, without a trace of the theatrical. Likewise, his depictions of incompetence, class-consciousness, bitter ethnic rivalry, and utter disarray within the Austro-Hungarian Army ring absolutely true. There’s a brief battle scene (which, though vivid, seems a bit contrived), but Mason’s more concerned with suffering behind the lines and what people can and will do when they are pushed far enough. Only in those circumstances can Lucius see his shortcomings and capacities, which is why, despite the intense cruelty, pain, and heartache, his experience transforms him. Internal medicine, indeed.

Where The Winter Soldier troubles me is toward the beginning and the end. Once Lucius sets eyes on his so-called regimental hospital, the forward narrative pauses for forty or so pages to recount his upbringing and education. It’s interesting, mostly, beautifully written, and often darkly funny, yet I found myself saying, Oh, come on, already. Does the novel need all of this material, and must it come right there? I invite you to decide, as with the ending, not all of which seems entirely credible to me.

But The Winter Soldier is an excellent novel, an unusual tale of romance and coming of age, set against an equally unusual portrayal of war.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher via Historical Novels Review, where this post first appeared in shorter, different form.