Tag Archives: 1940s

Many Identities, One Extraordinary Woman: Code Name Hélène

06 Monday Dec 2021

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Review: Code Name Hélène, by Ariel Lawhon
Doubleday, 2020. 437 pp. $28

When we first meet Nancy Wake in late February 1944, she’s parachuting out of an airplane over France, assigned to finance, arm, and train Resistance groups in the Auvergne. An Australian-born journalist by training and adventurer by temperament, Nancy goes by several other names, depending on what role she’s playing. Safe to say, though, that if her biography resembles this novel in the slightest — and the author assures us it does — few people could claim to have had a more hair-raising or active role in clandestine World War II operations. Her constant struggle against men who dismiss or try to exploit her adds a superb, extra layer to the story.

Studio portrait of Nancy Wake, 1945, in a nursing uniform, photographer unknown (courtesy Australian War Memorial on line catalogue ID Number: P00885.001, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Imagine someone talking her way into a job as a stringer for Hearst, with no reporting experience, and turning that into several scoops, including an interview with Hitler, another with a much sought-after Austrian Jewish refugee, and a visit to Vienna to confirm his account of brutality. None of those feats rates a byline, because Hearst won’t give her one — sexism, again. Oh, and by the way, she has one of the richest, most charming men in France wrapped around her finger.

From start to finish, Code Name Hélène will grab you and refuse to let go. It’s got to be one of the most compelling World War II stories I’ve ever read. What’s more, we have several narratives, not just the romance and the clandestine activity but further divisions within each, yet Lawhon stitches them seamlessly, from prewar to the war’s darkest days and back. Rest assured that “no — and furthermore” comes thick and fast. As a narrative of action, heartbreak, and sheer brass, Code Name Hélène is hard to beat.

Like any good novelist, Lawhon puts the reader in every scene with physical, active detail evoking emotion, and that’s what hooks you. You could pick any page for an example, but consider this description of Janos Lieberman, the escaped Jewish refugee, whom Nancy meets in Paris in 1936:

He’s pleasant-looking but not remarkable. Dark hair. Dark eyes. Dark stubble across his solemn face. It’s the jagged pink scar cutting its way from earlobe to eyeball that makes him instantly recognizable. The whip split him clean to the bone and nearly took out his left eye in the process. Even from this distance the stitch marks are still evident, little pocked craters at even intervals along his cheekbone. The scar looks like a broken zipper, and he will be forever marked by its ferocity. You cannot help but stare when you see him.

Such technique should apply in any novel, but it’s absolutely essential to portray a character like Nancy, who’s not just larger than life; she’s larger than any three lives put together. If the author did not show each moment in its fullness, portraying its intricacies, mysteries, and, often its physical demands on Nancy, which can be excruciating, you might not believe a word. But because you’re inside her skin constantly, you accept what happens.

That said, you might not accept other aspects of the novel, starting with the portrayal of France and the apparent play to a stereotype, the so-called French obsession with sex. I have no idea whether Lawhon intends this, but as a longtime student of French culture and history, I sense it, and it feels like pandering. Where the French take sex as a natural function, Anglo-Saxons find decadence, fit for squirms, shock, and sorry pilgrimages to the Moulin Rouge.

Speaking of men and women, Nancy’s French lover seems to have no inner life, except as it relates to her. He’s a Marseille businessman, a man-about-town, and politically committed, so why doesn’t he have dreams and desires other than Nancy? Many male authors have been rightly criticized for creating female characters who exist solely for the men around them. The fault also applies in reverse.

As for Nancy’s characterization, I kept wanting to find a flaw and couldn’t. Oh, she insists on her perks, sleeping on a mattress in a nightgown, while the Resistance fighters she commands are lucky to have a blanket. But that’s part of her charm, and everyone understands that nobody is tougher than she is or has her physical endurance. I wish that Lawhon had stopped there, however, and eliminated the Hollywood confrontation scenes, complete with righteous speechmaking.

By contrast, Nancy’s antagonists are all bad, including her male rivals within the Resistance. No one, other than they and the Germans, betrays sadism, sexism, anti-Semitism, or xenophobia. The flimsiest prototype is Marceline, Nancy’s rival for her lover’s affections and another instance of Hollywood—the Other Woman with six-inch fangs.

So Code Name Hélène is a curious mix, an absolutely riveting story that sweeps you away and conquers disbelief, yet peopled by figures who seem too cut-and-dried to be real. Treat yourself and read this novel, by all means. But if you’re like me, you’ll keep the salt shaker handy.

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

Shame: Paris Never Leaves You

06 Monday Jul 2020

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Review: Paris Never Leaves You, by Ellen Feldman
St. Martin’s, 2020. 347 pp. $18

Ten years after Paris was liberated, Charlotte Foret lives in New York but is still in chains. No one’s threatening her anymore; she has her beloved daughter, Vivi, now fourteen; and a career as an editor at a prestigious publishing house, Gibbon & Field. Her boss, Horace Field, is also her landlord, for the Forets live in his East Side brownstone.

Further, Horace and his wife, Hannah, sponsored Charlotte and Vivi to come to the United States after their internment at Drancy, the camp in the Paris suburbs that was a way-station to Auschwitz. Charlotte loves her job and is grateful for the apartment and the sponsorship, but the arrangement feels more than a little awkward, especially since Hannah, a psychoanalyst, has plenty of parenting advice to give, though she herself is childless.

As the novel opens, these threads threaten to unravel, first via a letter from Bogotá that she can’t bear to read. (Melodramatic, but okay, I’ll bite.) More plausibly, Vivi asks about her heritage, specifically about her father, killed in the war, and what it means to be Jewish.

But Charlotte has always said that it took Hitler to make her a Jew, and she wants no part of such explorations. Charlotte’s so adamant, so resolutely opposed to reflection on or discussion of her past — their past, for Vivi lived through the war too — that you have to wonder whether psychoanalyst Hannah has a point. Charlotte’s not only too tightly wrapped, she’s a lousy mother, forbidding her child to discover her identity. To all and sundry, however, Charlotte says, with truth, You weren’t there, so you don’t know.

Even now, in her dreams, she heard Vivi crying, not the childish whimpers and sobs of temporary discomfort but a shrieking rage born of an empty belly, and chilled-through bones, and the agony of rashes and bites and festering sores. Sometimes the crying in the dream was so loud that it wrenched her awake, and she sprang out of bed before she realized the sound was only in her head.

But Charlotte’s memory of Vivi’s sufferings is by no means the whole truth. Paris Never Leaves You excels as a moral tale, for Charlotte’s secret feels so shameful to her that she believes — with reason — that to confess it would make her a pariah. Specifics here would spoil the suspense; once more, I advise against reading the jacket flap, clever and subtle though it is.

Feldman brings alive Paris under the Occupation, as she does New York publishing, some scenes of which are positively delicious. In Charlotte and Horace, she’s created two memorable characters, and the dialogue between them crackles like a moral duel, full of challenge and riposte. Horace wants, nay, demands that Charlotte think and reflect on who she is and what she believes, and as a result, the novel pushes the reader to do the same. That’s what Paris Never Leaves You has to offer.

But, if you’re like me, you’ll have to overlook several flaws, starting with the bland title, which sounds like the compromise offspring of a deadlocked editorial meeting, and the cover, which says nothing except, “See, here’s the Eiffel Tower, so guess where this story takes place?”

More seriously, a key aspect of Charlotte’s secret seems historically implausible, despite what the author maintains in an afterword. I don’t believe the circumstances permitting the premise could have existed for so long, if at all. And even if you take Feldman at her word, there’s Vivi, who’s too sweet, calm, and reasonable for fourteen, and who bears nary a psychological scratch from her wartime early childhood. No nightmares, no tics, no fears, just perfectly adjusted.

As for psychological thinking, I’m tired of reading about dictatorial, heartless psychoanalysts, especially those who sleep with their analysands. It’s also unnecessary, here. Feldman didn’t have to make Hannah an expert—it takes no letters after your name to know that teenagers are trying to figure out who they are–and Hannah’s involvement in Charlotte’s life, particularly her friendship with Vivi, give her standing to sound off.

It’s also odd that nobody, not even Horace, asks Charlotte how she can feel so intensely about literature, an art that lives within reflection and self-examination, yet refuse to look at herself. To do so, of course, would reveal the exact cause of her shame, and though Feldman derives tension from that secret, Charlotte can’t even think about what she has to hide, or the reader will know. That contrivance makes me ask whether Charlotte could have spelled out the secret in interior narrative early on, which would invite the reader deeper into her dilemma, a more generous approach, and perhaps a more genuine characterization.

Still, I think the moral framework stands out, and Paris Never Leaves You may be worth your time because of it.

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

Little Love, Lots of Squalor: The Magnificent Esme Wells

03 Monday Sep 2018

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Review: The Magnificent Esme Wells, by Adrienne Sharp
HarperCollins, 2018. 335 pp. $27

When Esme Silver is twelve, in 1945, her family moves to Las Vegas to work for Bugsy Siegel, the infamous mobster, who’s trying to build a casino and has gotten over his head in debt. You can guess that the Silvers, Ike and Dina, have blithely gone swimming in shark-infested waters, but as you quickly discover, they’ve been doing that ever since Ike got Dina pregnant when she was sixteen.

Their daughter has an inkling of what she’s inherited; the only thing she doesn’t know is how much she’ll suffer for it. As a six-year-old, Esme accompanies Ike to the racetracks of Los Angeles, watches him strut, lose his stake, and then fight with her mother, whose wedding ring he has likely pawned. Or else the little girl joins Dina at the Hollywood movie lots she frequents to grub for chorus-line roles in B pictures. The biggest difference between Ike and Dina is that Ike never blames her for his setbacks—let’s not call them failures — whereas Dina’s resentment simmers just below the surface. If it weren’t for Esme, she thinks, she’d be a star.

And Esme’s penance is heavy indeed. Ike feeds her, sort of, when he has charge of her, but Dina seldom bothers. The little girl wears her mother’s clothing, never gets her hair combed, and rarely bathes. Nor do the Silvers send her to school, but the sort of education she receives is one of a kind–playing her part in the lie Dina tells at the movie lots, that Esme is her little sister, or at the racetrack, scrounging for winning tickets that might have been dropped.

Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel’s mug shot, 1928 (courtesy New York City Police Department via Wikimedia Commons)

Consequently, venal, mob-ruled Las Vegas, though bad for Ike and Dina, is absolute poison for their daughter, particularly once she enters her teenage years and shows she’s inherited her mother’s beauty. Since Dina has always told her that a woman’s face is her fortune, you know that Esme is about to prove it, and with the worst guy possible.

What a dark coming-of-age story, and though Esme is a marvelous narrator — astute, witty, with more than her share of courage—she’s in great pain. I cringed to read about an abused, neglected child who becomes an exploited woman. Nevertheless, she never asks for sympathy, and her clear-eyed honesty compels my allegiance: She admits that she doesn’t act purely from necessity. She enjoys the risk, the reward, and the adulation, and as such, she recognizes her parents in herself.

Sharp’s descriptions, which infuse settings with deep feeling, offer a primer on novel writing. She re-creates Los Angeles and Las Vegas as though she had a camera. You can practically smell the hair oil on the gangsters, and you stand in the casinos with chips in your hand. But the best part is how she reveals both ambience and character. This passage, for instance, shows Ike at the racetrack:

When my father was winning, riding a good streak, every one of his picks coming in big, he would stroll the track, and with each step he took at the turnstile, the paddock, the Study Hall, the grandstands, men called out to him, “How you doing, Ike,” came up to shake his hand, asking who he liked in the fourth or the fifth or the sixth. But when he wasn’t winning, he hunkered down in the back corner of the Study Hall on the bottom level, the concourse, like a delinquent student serving detention. He smoked his cigarettes at his table overflowing with racing sheets, made desperate notes with his worn-down stub of a pencil in his lucky red notebook, always the same kind, which was always fat with money in the morning and by the end of a bad day, thin with nothing but its own lined leaves of paper.

For better and worse, Sharp seals off Esme and her parents in a bubble, with every surface and reflection lovingly rendered. You can understand the temptation, because Esme witnesses scenes she’d otherwise never see, but it’s not always credible. Why doesn’t anyone ever notice that a six-year-old girl isn’t in school? That the Silvers move every few months, and that they don’t want officialdom to know their circumstances, may explain Esme’s truancy, but not how they get away with it. There’s an awful lot of lawbreaking in this story, but no police.

Grand events pose another problem. Sure, Dina and Ike are self-absorbed, but even World War II doesn’t seem to touch them and is barely mentioned, while nobody talks about the Great Depression at all. Despite their Jewishness, which might have pointed them toward events in Europe, anti-Semitism evades their notice until Mickey Cohen, one of the Jewish mob they work for, takes matters in hand. With such an eye for small detail, Sharp could have painted the larger picture, I think, without getting lost in it.

All the same, The Magnificent Esme Wells is a powerful, bold novel, and I recommend it.

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

Boy Meets Girl: The Golden Age

15 Monday May 2017

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Review: The Golden Age, by Joan London
Europa, 2016. 221 pp. $17

Unlike nearly all their extended family, twelve-year-old Frank Gold and his parents survived the Holocaust in Hungary, after which they emigrated to Perth, Western Australia, in 1946. But shortly afterward, Frank comes down with polio, a cruel blow that overwhelms his mother and father, neither of whom has much capacity for warmth or emotional expression, which leaves the boy struggling to find a reason to live or to hope. He’s a cynical lad, in some ways, too clever for his own good, though what’s underneath is raw and vulnerable. But he needs an outlet for those feelings, and he’s unlikely to find one without help.

Perth, Western Australia, as it appeared around 1955 (courtesy E. W. Digby, via Wikemedia Commons)

At the Golden Age, a small institution devoted to young polio victims, Frank, now almost thirteen, meets Elsa Briggs, six months younger than he. Until she was stricken, Elsa was a happy, radiant child, joyful and self-directed. Her parents are even less capable of facing their family tragedy than Frank’s, especially her father, who finds reasons to avoid Elsa. During his few visits to the Golden Age, he exhorts her to learn to walk again, already.

Meanwhile, Elsa’s mother, with younger children to care for, is too overwhelmed to do much, and she’s a doormat anyway. So Elsa, like Frank, feels abandoned, especially as she gathers that her younger siblings have taken over her belongings, her bedroom, her place in the house. Never having grappled for existence as Frank did, she’s less defended against her plight, which makes her both more innocent and yet more resolved, in her own quiet, self-enclosed way. She’s waiting for someone to understand her, though she doesn’t quite know it yet.

How these two brave, suffering kids find each other makes for a touching, beautiful story. But it’s not only a romance; I admire the way Elsa and Frank begin to realize themselves, how they unfold as the adults they will become. Which is only natural, for love would otherwise be impossible–and make no mistake, their feelings are real, not puppy love.

Being close made them stronger. They sat talking on the verandah or the back lawn. Their faces had colour. For some weeks now they’d shared the lonely task of rehabilitation, doing their exercises together. The Scottish physiotherapist commented on their rapid progress and motivation. The days were not boring, but seemed to hold at every glance something to tell the other. During the night they missed each other. Each morning was a reunion.

London’s prose is sparing and her chapters short, as is the entire book. But her vision and clarity ring out from every page, and each character has an inner life, not just the principals. I’ve rarely read a novel in which the author paid so much attention to minor figures, but you never feel as if the narrative has lost its way. On the contrary; everything fits. What’s more, the story, though more or less plotless, never flags, as each small moment takes on great significance. And the Golden Age is no Dickensian horror but a warm, sensitive, caring environment, staffed by hard-working people.

Rather, the horrors are the parents, who don’t know how to deal with their children’s illness except as a slap, a shame, a comment on themselves, which only sharpens the divide the kids feel from the outside world. By contrast, Olive Penny, the head nurse, is an intuitive, empathic soul who understands her charges and refuses to judge them. Her search for love mirror’s Frank and Elsa’s, though of course she’s coming from a vastly different perspective. She doesn’t expect much, but she’s not bitter about it–she gets that life has its limits, and there’s nothing you can do about that.

Other parallels to Frank and Elsa’s tale are those of Meyer and Ida, his parents. They struggle with their feelings of displacement from Europe, the guilt of having survived, their terror that, as so-called New Australians, they’ll be perpetual foreigners–or, in Ida’s case, her refusal to accept Australia as her permanent home. Meyer unbends more easily and, as such, can help Frank more. But in the end, Frank has his own path to follow, and, true to himself, he finds it from a fellow patient, a boy older than himself who writes poetry in his head while ensconced in an iron lung.

If I have one bone to pick with The Golden Age, it’s that London sometimes tells too much. But she also shows plenty, and with such a light hand that it’s hard to find fault. What a remarkable novel.

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

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Darktown

20 Monday Feb 2017

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Review: Darktown, by Thomas Mullen
Atria, 2016. 371 pp. $26

Atlanta, late 1940s, a dark night. Two police officers on foot patrol see a black woman in a car driven by a white man, who appears to have struck her. The woman manages to escape the car, but soon after, she turns up dead in an abandoned lot.

If this premise reminds you of a conventional mystery, Darktown is anything but. First of all, the two officers are black, part of a grudging concession by the postwar city government to a small but growing presence of African-American voters. And when I say grudging, I mean that the Atlanta Police Department would rather collectively bite the head off a rattler than accept the presence of these men, who number eight in all. If there’s a way to see them dismissed, convicted of spurious crimes, or left for dead in an alley, the unreconstructed Confederates will find it.

Atlanta Negro Voters League, 1949 (Courtesy New Georgia Encyclopedia; not in public domain)

Atlanta Negro Voters League, 1949 (courtesy New Georgia Encyclopedia; not in public domain)

Lucius Boggs and Tommy Smith, the two officers who witness the woman’s attempt to flee, have already been bound and gagged metaphorically. Like other police, they wear uniforms and badges and carry weapons. But the rules restrict them to black neighborhoods, where they patrol on foot; they have no squad car. They may not investigate crimes, only report them. They may not arrest white suspects—even to try to detain them would be futile–and to have anyone booked, they must call for backup, which may or may not arrive. They may not enter police headquarters, and their “station” is a YMCA basement, where rain leaks down the walls inside.

At the same time, leading voices within the black community demand that they combat the many brutalities white society inflicts, whereas the people the officers arrest accuse them of doing the white man’s job. Why can’t they just look the other way? It’s a no-win situation. Lucius and Tommy not only feel weighed down by competing expectations, they suffer the knowledge that every interaction between black and white may combust at any moment–and if it does, they’ll be blamed.

They were silent as they rode through downtown. They passed restaurants that would not have served them, some of whose waiters or chefs would attack Boggs if he dared walk in. . . . He passed office towers that only granted admittance to Negroes who shined shoes or cleaned bathrooms. He passed white women who would no doubt scream if he made eye contact with them. ‘Reckless eyeballing’ was the official charge police filed in such cases. . . .

Despite all this, however, Lucius and Tommy investigate the young woman’s death and run into heaps of trouble. They do have one ally, though, Dennis Rakestraw, a white rookie cop who may just be more progressive than his peers, and who does some of the inside work that Lucius and Tommy are forbidden to undertake. But their partnership, such as it is, remains uneasy–Mullen conveys that tension very well–and Rakestraw faces significant obstacles of his own. Moreover, every step of the investigation puts more people in jeopardy, several of whom become victims.

For Lucius especially, the son of a prominent preacher, the cost becomes so heavy that he can no longer see where true justice lies, or say for certain that it’s worth the price. And yet he’s aware that he’s a symbol, for his lineage and his uniform, and that if he were to give in, the loss would affect everyone. For his partner, though, the issue is less ambiguous. Tommy’s father, a veteran of the First World War, was lynched for wearing his uniform and marching in a veterans’ parade. To the son, a man who calls himself a man demands justice.

Among the many pleasures and nuances of Darktown is how Mullen compares these two characters’ views, social backgrounds, and dreams. When Tommy attends a party at Lucius’s house, he’s glad he’s dipped into his savings to buy new clothes:

He felt newly conscious of his dropped g’s and propensity for cursing as he spoke with this doctor and that owner of a barbershop empire. He noticed watches and cuff links. More than once a mildly disdainful look faded when he mentioned that he was one of the city’s new police officers, at which point his unpolished qualities suddenly became praiseworthy.

I don’t want to quibble with such an extraordinary novel, but I wish Mullen had found different, less miraculous ways to resolve the story. That’s a drawback, I suppose, of creating drop-dead desperation, but with everything else seeming so real, I had to wonder at how things work out. I also object to a couple of cheap tricks Mullen inserts at the end of two cliff-hanging chapters; he’s too good a writer to need theatrics.

Nevertheless, this is a terrific book.

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

This Side of Purgatory: West of Sunset

11 Monday May 2015

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Can a Powerful Premise Be Enough: The Secret of Magic

12 Thursday Feb 2015

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Review: The Secret of Magic, by Deborah Johnson

Putnam, 2014. 402 pp. $27

Like millions of other American servicemen in October 1945, Joe Howard Wilson is going home, having fought the good fight. But Joe Howard is African-American, which means he rides the back of the bus through Alabama to Mississippi. The lieutenant’s bars on his uniform collar and his Distinguished Service Cross should command respect, but they don’t–not from white onlookers, anyway–who throw him deadly stares. Sure enough, when Lt. Wilson refuses to leave the bus to make room for German prisoners-of-war, his objection costs him his life. A grand jury, meeting for fifteen minutes, calls his death accidental.

What a stirring start, a window on a vile, painful chapter in our nation’s history. I’ve read about violence against African-American veterans after both world wars, so I was eager to see what Deborah Johnson made of Joe Howard Wilson’s fictional case. Unfortunately, the answer is, Not much.

Regina Mary Robichard, a newly minted graduate of Columbia University Law School, works for Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s office in New York. Against his better judgment, he lets Regina go to Revere, Mississippi, to find evidence to pursue the case, following the request of one M. P. Calhoun, a member of the Revere white aristocracy. Regina singles out this case from the hundreds gathering in her office because her father was lynched by an Omaha mob; and the photo Calhoun sends of the late Joe Howard and his father, which radiates love and warmth, reminds Regina painfully of the parent she never knew.

An African-American enters a Mississippi movie theater from the back entrance, 1939. (Courtesy Library of Congress)

An African-American enters a Mississippi movie theater from the back entrance, 1939. (Courtesy Library of Congress)

This is very powerful stuff, and Johnson takes pains to make its context particular, re-creating the fictional postwar Revere with care. Nothing is as simple as it seems in this town of old families and older prejudices, of conflicting alliances, patronage, and barely repressed anger that needs little coaxing to erupt into violence. The confrontations between Regina and the white citizenry, my favorite scenes, often crackle with fiery subtext that reveals vast gradations of insult and blindness. The Confederate flag flying at the courthouse is only the most concrete symbol, mocking the men like Joe Howard who fought for ideals of justice that somehow don’t apply to them.

However, The Secret of Magic fails to develop these themes to serve or sustain the story. For me, the problem begins with Regina, who really doesn’t belong in the book. I don’t believe for one minute that she’s a lawyer–it takes her three hundred pages to act like one–or from New York, which feels like an address rather than her home or the place that has shaped and educated her.

There’s also no way that Thurgood Marshall would have allowed the clueless, wide-eyed Regina within a thousand miles of Mississippi, a setup, if ever there was one. The subplot involving New York office politics feels like a clumsy attempt to raise the tension, and Marshall has little or no purpose here. The thirty pages during which Regina and he tell each other what they both know stops the narrative cold, and the important bits reappear more effectively through action anyway, the moment she arrives in Revere.

The storytelling falls short in other ways too. Several scenes take place in total darkness, yet, somehow, Regina manages to see remarkably well. Characters promise to reveal their secrets in due time, only to say nothing momentous when that time comes. Repeatedly, the author tells the reader what the characters have just shown.

As for the legal case, there isn’t one. Regina manages to interview a murder witness whom the grand jury failed to question, but that doesn’t matter. Everybody in town knows who killed Joe Howard–the reader can guess too, pretty soon–and no indictment will be filed. So why does the novel require an outsider as a catalyst? Without one, the story would have worked more smoothly and plausibly, with greater tension.

The answer is that Regina’s favorite book growing up was called The Secret of Magic by M. P. Calhoun. The M. P. stands for Mary Pickett (as if Calhoun weren’t enough of a Confederate moniker), whose book was banned in the South for portraying an interracial friendship. Fair enough, so far as Mary Pickett’s character is concerned, though it’s unnecessary; the story fleshes her out in other ways. More to the point, Regina’s fascination with a real, live author feels trivial and star-struck, and the frequent quotations from Mary Pickett’s book only slow down the narrative.

I think that to drag in this literary conceit and honor Thurgood Marshall, Johnson had to twist her story in ways she shouldn’t have. That’s too bad, because she had a fine starting point.

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