Monthly Archives: May 2023

Lying About a Death: Florence Adler Swims Forever

29 Monday May 2023

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Review: Florence Adler Swims Forever, by Rachel Beanland
S&S, 2020. 304 pp. $26

In June 1934, twenty-year-old Florence Adler of Atlantic City, New Jersey, is training to swim the English Channel. But one day, during a routine practice, she drowns within sight of the shore. Even with no other disturbances, such an accident would be heartbreaking. But of course there’s more—and for that reason, or despite it, her family makes an unusual decision, which adds a sharp edge to the story.

Since Florence’s older sister, Fannie, is on forced hospital bed rest in her seventh month of pregnancy—and since Fannie lost a previous child, born prematurely—the Adlers choose to keep her ignorant of the death until after she gives birth. They go to great lengths, suppressing reports in the press, swearing beach lifeguards and hospital nurses to secrecy, and hounding the youngest Adler, seven-year-old Augusta (Gussie), to keep her mouth shut.

Bain News Service photo of Gertrude Ederle, who swam the English Channel in 1927, the first woman to do so (courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

From this elegant premise comes a gripping family drama about life and death, sacrifice and dreams, and coming to terms with limitations. I like novels that pack a punch with only a few moving parts, and Florence Adler is one. The deceptively simple idea, withholding news about a death, throws this already fractured family into chaos, exposing layer after layer of their loyalties and resentments, not all of them pretty.

Beanland’s refusal to rescue her characters is one of the pleasures found here. Nobody’s too good; everyone’s got weaknesses and obligations from which they hide. Even the most decent character freezes up and refuses to speak his heart or act when he should. Young Gussie, though she has her charms, can behave like a brat at times. And the worst of the Adlers, though entitled and dishonest, nevertheless has his moments. This is a rounded, believable cast.

True to an ensemble performance, each of the seven narrates sections of the novel, a technique that tests an author’s mettle. Are the voices distinct? Do the sections overlap too much or too little? Does the narrative stall? I’m glad to say that none of those issues mar Florence Adler, though I prefer some voices to others.

Much tension derives from keeping sequestered, bed-ridden Fannie in the dark. How cruel, I think, an idea of dubious merit that only controlling parents (my least favorite kind) could have dreamed up. But I believe these parents implicitly. They reason that Fannie’s a nervous type; left unspoken, though shown, is how little help or support she gets from her husband, Isaac, the aforementioned entitled and dishonest member of the family.

However, when the family views Fannie as weak, they encourage her to act that way—which serves their purposes, though they don’t recognize this. I like this setup very much, which feels absolutely true to life.

But that’s not the only paradox for Fannie, who, having lost her last child, feels that bringing this one to term is a make-or-break judgment on her, an unfair burden that raises the stakes. But what else has she known? Furthermore, her high blood pressure alarms her doctor, a concern that makes the expectant mother even more anxious. Yet, as he’s aware, a key source of worry is that Florence, with whom Fannie has quarreled recently, hasn’t been to see her and never seems available.

A deeper, longer-standing worry, however, is Fannie’s husband. Like most troubles in the Adler family, it’s not to be spoken of:

When Isaac first started taking Fannie out, a million years ago now, he hadn’t had two cents to rub together. He liked to promise her that, once he was a little more established, he’d be able to buy her steak dinners at the Ritz but, in the meantime, she often returned from her dates hungry enough that she had to go straight to the kitchen to make herself a sandwich. She tried to tell him she didn’t need fancy dinners, so long as they were happy, but over time, his promises just grew bigger.

Another problem stressing the family, also not spoken of, is Anna Epstein, daughter of a family friend, whom Joseph Adler, the father, has sponsored on a student visa to get her out of Nazi Germany. Anna’s frantic about her parents, who, despite Joseph’s efforts, can’t get visas—and the major obstacle is American officialdom. They don’t want Jews entering the United States.

I go back and forth on Anna’s voice and character; I’m not sure I understand her arc, and her share of the novel’s resolution feels less credible than the rest. But I like that Beanland has handled Jewish themes and concerns straight on, with knowledge and understanding. And if Anna herself doesn’t always persuade me, her place in the story feels right, as the young woman who happens to be about the age of the late Florence, which is enough to upset a certain character.

Florence Adler Swims Forever is a story that takes risks, from an author who cares to delve past her characters’ surfaces. I highly recommend it.

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

Murder in the Mandate: The Red Balcony

22 Monday May 2023

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Review: The Red Balcony, by Jonathan Wilson
Schocken, 2023. 274 pp. $27

In March 1933, a Jewish resident of Palestine is murdered on a beach by two men. His widow, the only eyewitness, changes her testimony several times within hours, variously claiming that the assailants were Arabs, not Jews, and vice versa. Either answer would have been plausible politically, for her late husband was a marked man, hated on all sides.

His crime? Having negotiated with Josef Goebbels, propaganda minister in the newly installed Nazi government, a plan by which German Jews might emigrate to Palestine while retaining a modicum of their assets, contrary to the policy in force of stripping everything they have.

Despite the publisher’s statement that The Red Balcony has historical basis, I find the story of such negotiations dubious. But whether they took place doesn’t matter. If they did, some Jews in Palestine would have strenuously objected to dealing with the Nazis, whereas Arabs would have opposed further Jewish immigration. Those circumstances provide a motive for murder.

British troops disperse Arab rioters, October 1933, American Colony (Jerusalem), Photo Department, location unclear (courtesy Library of Congress; public domain)

Into this maelstrom drops Ivor Castle, a British Jew who has come to Palestine against his better judgment. Trained in law, Ivor has a solid sense of right and wrong, which his new surroundings test to the utmost. He’s assigned to help the well-known Phineas Baron defend two Russian-Jewish immigrants accused of the murder. That means Ivor does the legwork, while Phineas hobnobs with British colonial officials.

A key witness for the defense promises to be Tsiona Kerem, an artist who frequents a café where the accused claim they were drinking at the time of the murder. If Ivor can get Tsiona to corroborate their testimony, they’ll go free. But she flatly refuses to tell him anything.

Instead, she sleeps with him multiple times, tantalizing him but declaring plainly that he’ll never get what he wants from her, which could refer to love, not just the statement that would free his clients. Already in love, or thinking he is, Ivor dares not press her, because whenever he does, she withdraws, which pains him greatly.

You won’t be surprised to hear that Ivor’s not her only lover. It doesn’t help that Palestine seems like a corrupt, lawless place to him, despite its allure and magnificence—and, by the way, that the defendants are probably guilty.

There’s little mystery involved here, then, but that doesn’t matter. The Red Balcony often reads like a thriller, and even though worlds aren’t at stake, the pages turn rapidly, as reversals come thick and fast. I like the wry humor, as Ivor repeatedly gets himself in hot water, a Jewish innocent abroad who can’t figure out his identity, even in the one place in the world where he might feel whole.

The political differences among his coreligionists baffle him too, and well they might. The groups they represent seem like precursors of those that would barely tolerate each other during the fight for independence in 1947-48.

By contrast, Baron, also Jewish, doesn’t even bother to try to figure out who he is, instead playing different roles, depending on whom he’s with. To Ivor, he avows his resentment of the anti-Semitism endemic to their native land; among colonial officials, he’s English to the teeth. In all this, the narrative feels pitch-perfect.

However, Ivor’s bumbling and refusal to speak up for himself wear thin after a while. The Yiddish word nebbish fits him perfectly; he’s practically spineless, helpless in the face of demands of just about any kind. I got tired of how he hides his feelings whenever anyone asks, then apologizes for having failed to provide what was wanted. As a matter of storytelling, though, the trouble he gets into drives the novel.

I wish the narrative tone didn’t resort to archness as often as it does; too much of that feels like a pose. And though I like the writing, Wilson sometimes favors obscure words when a plain one will do, including at least three I couldn’t find in my dictionary.

Still, The Red Balcony gives a marvelously evocative picture of Palestine during the British Mandate:

Almost all Ivor’s impressions of Tel Aviv had been of an unregulated place, free from its moorings. It wasn’t only the flowing eclecticism of its architecture—the houses frequently had no numbers, women smoked in public and wore bathing suits on the bus. In England he had been closed-in by taboo, a suffocating mix of British reserve and Anglo-Jewish restraint. Here he was free, the muddle of his identity of a piece with the town itself.

Wilson also has the colonials down pat. They wear the wrong clothes and eat the wrong food for the climate, symbolic of their inability to understand that they don’t belong there—yet smug in their superiority.

I’ve read several novels about Palestine during or before the war for independence, but this one’s evocative in its own way and, unusually, focuses on religious identity—of a man who’s not religious. That’s original.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book through my work for Historical Novels Review, where this commentary appeared in shorter, different form.

Civil War in Ireland: The Winter Guest

15 Monday May 2023

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Review: The Winter Guest, by W. C. Ryan
Arcade, 2022. 321 pp. $27

A dangerous, painful task brings Tom Harkin from Dublin to Kilcogan House, a now-crumbling country manse, in winter 1921. An IRA ambush has attacked a car near the house, killing a high-ranking British officer; an innocent bystander along for the ride; and Maud Prendeville, eldest daughter of the house, who wasn’t meant to be traveling that night.

However, the IRA insists that the volley that riddled the car didn’t kill Maud—minutes later, witnesses say, they heard a single shot, presumably from a different hand. The distinction matters politically, because Maud was a heroine of the ill-fated Easter Rebellion of 1916, and such honors are not forgotten. If the IRA were responsible for her death, the crime would embarrass them and provide propaganda for the British forces attempting to suppress Irish nationalism.

National Army troops aboard ship during Irish Civil War, 1922 (courtesy National Library of Ireland on The Commons via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

As an IRA intelligence officer, Tom’s well placed to understand the considerations implicitly and knows what few other do—that Maud, among others, was trying to arrange an arms purchase for the IRA in the United States. What’s more, she was Tom’s erstwhile fiancée, back when they were university students before the Great War. While he was an officer in the Dublin Fusiliers serving in France, she broke off their engagement, by mail. Consequently, he has more than one reason to investigate, and her death feels deeply personal.

But in this civil war between Irish nationalists and those who oppose independence from Britain, neither side shows quarter or much regret for innocents caught in the crossfire. For the most part, Tom can count on people not to care to know about his connection to the IRA, and to keep their suspicions to themselves, if they have any.

That’s for the most part. A betrayal from any source will see him tortured and killed, and he can never rule out the possibility that one or more of his acquaintances are playing a double game. Nobody, no matter what their loyalties, believes his cover story that he’s working for an insurance company that holds a policy on Maud, even though he has papers to show.

Not surprisingly, more than one person warns him that no good can come of his investigation, only more murders, yet Tom persists, an old trope. But in a twist, he suffers what would today be called PTSD, as ordinary sensory perceptions remind him of his wartime trauma and of Maud, the latter appearing as a ghost or in troubled dreams. I’m not much for gothic, but the PTSD makes perfect sense, and Ryan conveys the tactile First World War experience as well as any writer I’ve read.

This brilliant, gripping mystery/thriller (the novel has elements of both) offers many pleasures, including atmosphere:

If anything, the fog becomes thicker as they make their way slowly through the town—the horse’s hooves sounding like a muffled echo of themselves. The few shops and pubs glow like islands in the mist, while somewhere a church bell rings, its mournful sound seeming to come from behind them one moment, and from up ahead the next. A donkey cart loaded down with milk churns looms towards them from the other side of the street. The flat-capped farmer holding the traces looks in their direction with such a blank expression that Harkin is not even sure that he has seen them.

As with the sterling prose, the characterizations are spot-on. Ryan takes pains with every figure on stage for more than a minute, including the villains, which I always like to see. The bad guys are truly bad, but they believe in what they’re doing. As for the majority, who fall in neither the nationalist nor pro-British camp (at least not obviously), they each have particularities and, often, something to hide that one side or other will object to, if not both.

The storytelling feels entirely sure-handed. Early on, Tom corroborates the single-shot theory, but that’s less helpful than it might be, not least because he has to discover who could have known Maud was riding in the car. Several suspects emerge, but as soon as he settles on them as possibilities, facts turn up that challenge his assumptions. Such “no—and furthermore” is constant in The Winter Guest, and Tom, though an observant detective, makes mistakes through false assumptions.

Meanwhile, the ever-present chance that he’ll be unmasked as IRA ratchets up the tension. Much of his investigation hinges on delicate diplomacy, as he decides how much to reveal, and to whom, to obtain the information he seeks. He also has to cut deals with people who might suspect who he is, but, for their own reasons, wish to see justice done for Maud.

I would have liked a hint as to why Maud broke off her engagement to Tom, and for him to struggle more with that rejection, particularly the way she handled it. I also find the obligatory confrontation between Tom and the bad guys not entirely credible, with a hint of melodrama. But those are small complaints about an exceptional novel.

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

Dust Bowl Mystery: Funeral Train

08 Monday May 2023

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Review: Funeral Train, by Laurie Loewenstein
Akashic, 2022. 263 pp. $38

One evening in 1935, a passenger train derails near Vermilion, a small town in the Oklahoma panhandle. The wreck causes fearsome damage and fills the hospital with the wounded and dying. Sheriff Temple Jennings is overwhelmed, not just with the enormity of the tragedy but its personal nature for him: his beloved wife, Etha, was on that train, and he panics when he can’t find her among the survivors.

Luckily, he soon retrieves his bearings, for the derailment may have been no accident, and there are many threads to follow before he can penetrate the mystery. Meanwhile, his young deputy, Ed McCance, locates Etha and sees her to an ambulance, but the sheriff can’t stop worrying about her. That anxiety doubles when the doctor insists that she stay flat on her back, something she’s never done—and for Christmas, a few days away, her niece and her drunk, deadbeat husband are coming to visit. Etha would move heaven and earth for them.

Law enforcement in those parts usually involves dealing with moonshiners. The federal government may have repealed Prohibition, but local law forbids any alcoholic drink stronger than beer, and beer’s enough to bring about drunk and disorderly behavior.

Also, scarcity arising from the depression and Dust Bowl has influenced certain citizens who might have been law-abiding to stray from the straight and narrow. Scams and dodges come to light all the time. And then there’s Gwendolyn, a heifer who wanders in the roadway, causing trouble for motorists, because her owner can’t manage to keep his fences repaired.

Naturally, these concerns fall away once the derailment happens. And the next night, a woman is murdered while walking her dog in her backyard. Since she lived near the tracks, is her death connected to the railroad sabotage—if that’s what occurred—or a separate crime?

A chief pleasure of Funeral Train is how Loewenstein portrays a Dust Bowl town and its denizens. You can practically feel the grit between your fingers, taste the desperation, the search for sweet or pleasant moments amid the dreariness, the thin margins of just getting by. The author shows the tavern, the hospital, the soda fountain run by the local go-getter, the chicken farmer ornery because he’s deep in debt and his wife has run off with the kids.

Also, the lawmen have edges and corners, something not every mystery writer bothers with. Temple’s deputy, McCance, was apparently down and out a year before the novel begins, but the sheriff has taken a chance on him. Ed’s trying hard to learn all he can, make a better life for himself and his young bride. You see both lawmen make mistakes and sweat from unexpected danger, not at all sure they’ll make it. I like that too–and the subplot of the visiting niece feels real.

Loewenstein also pays attention to Jim Crow. The Black passengers on the train suffered the worst of the accident, because their segregated car, made of wood rather than metal and in terrible shape, was hooked up right behind the locomotive. In the crash, the car collapsed like a concertina, and the people trapped within got flooded with scalding water from the boiler. The railroad—the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, or AT&SF—shows complete indifference to them.

Among the characters flowing through the novel is Claude Steele, the detective the railroad sends. Temple meets him when he arrives at the station:

Most of the AT&SF policemen that Temple ran into over the years were ex-cops who continued to dress the part: spit-and shine uniforms, brass buttons, epaulets, and visored caps bearing shields. None of the travelers matched that look. A stranger who did approach him, hand out, was outfitted in a bulky topcoat, woolen suit jacket, and greasy vest. Sagging gray trousers overflowed a pair of unbuckled rubber boots—their clasps flapping with each step. Temple swallowed his surprise.

He’s quite a character, Claude, obsessed with railroads. His hobby is collecting railroad spikes, which come in different designs, though that’s changing in the march toward standardization, which he mourns. No one can escape hearing about the various kinds, including the fortyish woman working in the boardinghouse where he rooms, who actually seems interested. As you might guess, Claude’s also enamored of his detective skills, and since Temple, Ed, and he must team up, that affects the story.

This spanking new 1935 prototype of an AT&SF diesel locomotive, not introduced until the following year (courtesy Acme News Service, published by Mexia Weekly Herald, via Wikimedia Commons. Copyright not renewed; public domain)

By now, it’s probably obvious that where some mystery writers toss in historical details and atmosphere almost as an afterthought, Loewenstein focuses on them. Though that gives Funeral Train a rare sense of time and place, I thought one aspect of the mystery a little too cut-and-dried. But it’s a gripping story whose rough edges feel real, depicting people no better than they should be. I recommend it.

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

Where History Meets Fiction

05 Friday May 2023

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This week, I’ve published two essays about the historical background to Lonely Are the Brave, my novel about a Great War veteran set in rural Washington in 1919.

The first essay, in Historical Novels Review, connects historical fact to my conception of the story and characters, including topics as various as fear of Bolshevism, the laws that required a woman to obtain a man’s cosignature to open a bank account, and theories of childrearing that will make you laugh.

The second essay, a guest appearance on the blog “History Imagined,” traces the myth that the nation went to war to protect American womanhood, and the link between that idea and the sinking of the Lusitania.

Thanks for reading.

Impressions: Beyond That, the Sea

01 Monday May 2023

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Review: Beyond That, the Sea, by Laura Spence-Ash
Celadon, 2023. 348 pp. $28

In 1940, as London’s taking a beating from German bombs, Beatrix Thompson’s parents make a difficult, painful decision, sending her, at age eleven, to live out the war with a family near Boston. How this evacuation happens isn’t explained—you’re asked to take it on trust, and apparently, the historical record supports it—but the rest unfolds as naturally as you please.

Landing among the Gregory family, Bea, an only child, now lives with two brothers—William, thirteen, and Gerald, nine. Ethan, their father, is somewhat withdrawn and controlling, a schoolmaster who takes himself too seriously and never looks at his wife, Nancy, long enough to realize he’s stifling her.

No bombs falling here: streetcar in South Boston, 1940 (courtesy City of Boston Archives via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

But Nancy, apparently the prime mover behind Bea’s presence in their home, is warm and attentive. Aside from tending the boys, she loves nothing better than to care for the girl, whether that means baking cookies or muffins, shopping for a new dress, tucking her in at night, or shepherding her past the social hurdles of a new country.

Just as Bea represents the daughter Nancy always wanted, Nancy’s the kinder, more demonstrative mother Bea has never had. But the girl understands that the life she now enjoys derives partly from the Gregorys’ financial resources, greater than her parents’, and American peacetime plenty, at which her eyes pop.

However, there’s more: the Gregorys also know how to have fun in ways Bea has never experienced. The high point comes during the summer, when the family vacations in Maine, in a house on an island all by itself. The girl learns to eat lobster, to swim, to bake, and to hold her own against two boys competing for her attention.

Consequently, you have to wonder what will happen when America joins the war and again, when Bea returns to London.

I like this premise, which offers plenty of chances for conflict, as with how her parents feel reading her letters; the boys’ sibling rivalry; and Nancy’s instant, consuming love for Bea, which grates on her prissy husband. Nevertheless, I like Beyond That, the Sea less than I wanted to.

Still, there are pleasures here, and first among these is the prose. It’s spare, economical, understated, creating mood and feeling in a few words, as with this early passage in which Bea struggles to write her parents:

She wants to tell them about the colors here: the way the yellow leaves cover the ground under the trees; the tiny purple flowers on the wallpaper on her bedroom wall; the golden raspberries from the garden that ooze out of the breakfast muffins. But she can never find the words. Or the words are there but it feels wrong to share them. She imagines the two of them sitting on the couch in the dark flat . . . . Or she sees them heading to the shelter beneath their building, to their spot a few feet from the unsteady pine steps. The smell of urine and the skittering of the rats.

That economy extends to the narrative, which spans decades lightly, in an impressionistic way. Chapters last only two or three pages, each through the eyes of a different character—seven third-person narrators during the war years, from both sides of the Atlantic. In keeping with the understated approach, Spence-Ash seems to want the reader to think, to enter the story. I want that too.

But I don’t think she succeeds. The terse chapters can be frustrating—I want to know more, see more—and many skip around conflict rather than show it. Often, they begin after a confrontation that a previous chapter has set up, revealing the characters’ reactions to what has happened, a lot of telling after the fact. I have trouble entering a narrative like that, let alone get cozy in it.

The storytelling leaves the outside world at a distance too. Even in the London scenes, the war doesn’t seep into minds or souls; and after America joins the fight, the atmosphere around Boston changes very little. I like my historical fiction to put me up close to the mood and mindset of the time, if not the action. That doesn’t happen here.

In a way, the manner in which the narrative avoids conflict, historical or personal, suits the characters, practically none of whom have a clue how to connect, and who’d rather dance around a point of contention instead of facing it. That’s frustrating too.

The tight-lipped restraint would work better if the reader glimpsed what the characters wanted but couldn’t ask for. But Spence-Ash’s scenes, though they reveal what’s happening in a particular moment, feel transitory, skimming the surface. As a result, I don’t see these characters’ inner lives.

For instance, William, the older Gregory brother, appeals to Bea for his intent to go places, be someone. He’s restless, unsatisfied, passionate, angry. But what would going places look like? He never says; he just wants to be different from his parents.

Accordingly, Beyond That, the Sea, though poignant in moments, never builds for me. I sense no crescendo, no rush of feeling, and no particular immediacy. It’s an interesting story, but I’m not compelled.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher through my work for Historical Novels Review, in which this commentary appears in different, shorter form.