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Our National Shame: The Mercy Seat

24 Monday Sep 2018

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Review: The Mercy Seat, by Elizabeth H. Winthrop
Grove, 2018. 254 pp. $26

When the clock strikes twelve one steamy midnight in 1943, New Iberia, Louisiana, will send one of its sons to the electric chair. Willie Jones, an African-American teenager, has been convicted of raping a white woman. But whether young Willie deserves to die for this crime — or, in some minds, whether there was rape involved — divides this small, rural community to the point of violence.

Replica of the electric chair once used at Louisiana State Penitentiary (courtesy Lee Honeycutt via Wikimedia Commons)

Winthrop’s tale evokes To Kill a Mockingbird, of course, but she follows a very different, necessarily compressed route, for the action takes place entirely within twelve hours. The trial is eight months gone, ancient history, so there’s no Atticus Finch to plead for Willie’s life. Rather, his court-appointed lawyers, who never appear in the narrative, hardly opened their mouths to defend him. There is a child narrator, a sort of moral chorus role, the district attorney’s son, Gabe. But he’s one of nine third-person voices telling the story, seven white and two black. All are sympathetic to Willie, in varying degrees and for very different reasons, yet nearly all believe that there’s absolutely nothing they can do or could have done differently. No matter what their station in life, well off, scraping by, or dirt poor, they have one thing in common — they are terribly lonely, and their feelings about the forthcoming execution, which can’t be easily expressed, show just how isolated they are.

The great genius of The Mercy Seat is how Winthrop extracts almost unbearable tension from voices reacting to events that have been ordained, a Greek tragedy about modest lives. Although she reveals slivers of back story that challenge the reader’s assumptions, information isn’t what propels the narrative with such irresistible force. It’s feeling, pure and simple, rendered in physical description, as with this passage from Gabe’s point of view. This kind of writing takes my breath away:

He looks at his father — the lines bleeding back from the corner of his eyes, the hard bone of his nose, the flat space between his eyes, the quiver of muscle along his jaw as he chews — and for a frightening moment Gabe can’t find in all those features the father he knows. He can’t see the man in the backyard, shirtsleeves rolled up, pitching him a ball, or the man with the fishing rod and tan hat at the edge of the bayou, or the man sitting on the edge of Gabe’s bed at night, reading glasses on the tip of his nose. For a frightening moment, studied hard, his father’s features combine into the face of someone he can’t recognize, someone willing to send a man to death, and he feels himself reel the way he did when he took the slug from the Kane twins’ father’s flask, the world suddenly shot into the distance.

Every character in the novel lives with an urgent question, the necessity for all fiction, and that’s what provides the tension. Gabe’s question is whether he can still love the man who’s prosecuted Willie and sent him to the electric chair. And because the reader cares about both characters, you want to know how that will resolve. The Mercy Seat reminds me that heroism may be measured in small gestures, because there’s no chance of a great one.

The passage above comes from a two-page chapter, an authorial decision that cuts two ways. I don’t know how else Winthrop could have told her story through nine, well-crafted individual voices, especially with such thrift and elegiac power. Nor do I ever feel, as I have with other novels told in brief chapters, that the writer is pandering to readers with short attention spans. Still, the rhythm of rapidly changing perspectives gets to me after a while. I’ve never been much for pointillism, though the way Winthrop has selected her dots accomplishes one thing. Six of the seven white narrators wouldn’t call themselves bigots, and you sense their fear of the bitter, violent men who are.

With one significant exception, The Mercy Seat re-creates the time and place in ugly, frightening detail, down to the eagerness of the citizenry to witness the execution or listen to it on the radio (!). But World War II is hardly to be seen, except to provide an emotional transition for two characters. There’s little mention of rationing, though a bakery figures in the action, and there seem to be an awful lot of military-age civilians around.

But that’s a quibble. The Mercy Seat — which takes its title from a blues song about the electric chair — is easily one of the most powerful novels I’ve read this year. And I’m sick at heart to think of how the senseless hatred that condemns Willie Jones remains powerful enough in our country that politicians can appeal to it and hold public office.

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

Pioneer Abolitionists: The Invention of Wings

27 Monday Aug 2018

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Review: The Invention of Wings, by Sue Monk Kidd
Viking, 2014. 373 pp. $28

On Sarah Grimké’s eleventh birthday in 1803, her mother, Mary, “promotes” her from the nursery to a bedroom, a welcome, long-awaited change. Sarah’s tangible birthday gift displeases her immensely, however — a slave girl named Hetty, a.k.a. Handful, slightly younger than herself, to be her maid. Sarah’s oldest memory, from age four, which still terrifies her, is of watching one slave whip another on her mother’s orders. The brutality and injustice, driven home by Mary Grimké’s obdurate character — she’s a nasty piece of work — mold young Sarah into an abolitionist. That’s quite a turn for the daughter of a planter aristocrat judge in Charleston, South Carolina, and when Mary calls her “different,” it’s not a compliment.

Wood engraving of Sarah Moore Grimké, date unknown, presumably during her lifetime (courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

Sarah has no friends or confidantes, and her only allies in her family prove treacherous. Given her longings and principles, she turns to Handful, attempting to free her, sharing secrets and teaching her to read and write (against the law, of course). Handful, however, remains largely unimpressed, seeing her unwilling mistress as a representative of the system.

The Invention of Wings is a superbly imaginative, engrossing novel that occupies difficult terrain, and I applaud the author’s effort and intentions and much of the execution. Still, I wonder about the portrayal of the key relationship, which throws the novel off its footing. From her life as a slave and her own social isolation, Handful would likely recognize the loneliness in the plain, socially awkward Sarah, who struggles with a stammer, and who’s crushed whenever she objects, protests, or simply expresses her individual viewpoint. To be sure, Sarah would never be whipped, may read and write without fear of punishment, eat whatever she wants, need not labor, and at least may protest openly, for what little good it does.

All the same, I think Handful would have come across more completely had she wrestled with two opposing instincts: to go further toward accepting Sarah’s friendship in the spirit it’s offered, warily, while also resenting her like hell. Kidd takes pains to show how Handful’s mother, Charlotte, instills in her the urge to resist, so we’re meant to think her rebellion is earned. Yet her attitudes seem so fully formed and coherent, I kept thinking she anticipates 1960s radicals by a century and a half. Is that implausible? I’m not sure. The Grimké sisters, Sarah and Angelina (Nina), were famous radicals of their day, pamphleteers and lecturers for abolition and feminism. Unlike the vast majority of abolitionists, Sarah campaigned not just for ending slavery but for racial equality. So why can’t Handful offer a counterpart?

Maybe it’s because the voices don’t feel quite right. Like Handful’s what-have-you-done-for-me-lately, Sarah’s righteousness rings hollow after a while. I want her to put two and two together and realize, at least dimly, that her financial and social privilege derives entirely from a system she detests, and that when she dresses up to go to a ball, what she’s wearing on her back has come from beatings, repression, and the cruelest kind of exploitation. Otherwise, how could her hatred of slavery be so certain? I also want the two main characters to tangle over what separates them; instead, they have a few unsettling exchanges and withdraw from one another to the extent that they can.

Despite these flaws, Kidd’s narrative makes an excellent story, and The Invention of Wings re-creates the antebellum South in its mesmerizing, ugly panoply. Her prose feels effortless, never calling attention to itself, with carefully chosen, lucid images inducing a mood. Sarah sees bare tree limbs “spread open like the viscera of a parasol,” or herself betrayed as “the collared monkey dancing to his master’s accordion.” Handful pictures God as a white man, “bearing a stick like missus or going round dodging slaves the way master Grimké did, acting like he’d sired a world where they don’t exist.”

I like how Kidd takes a real-life abolitionist and feminist pioneer and shows you how she came to be. In fact, the feminist thread feels more nuanced and sure-handed to me, evolving rather than springing nearly full-blown into life. Giving the elder Grimké sister a foil in Handful is a bold move, even if their relationship wants more fleshing out, more controversy.

The Invention of Wings is a brave book; perhaps a little more bravery would have made it even better.

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

Humanity Sinks Low: The Winter Station

26 Monday Mar 2018

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Review: The Winter Station, by Jody Shields
Little, Brown, 2018. 334 pp. $27

In Kharbin, a northern Chinese railroad nexus under czarist Russian rule (it’s 1910), dead bodies appear in the streets in ever-increasing numbers. The Baron, the city’s medical commissioner, slowly and methodically deduces that the cause must be plague, and not bubonic, either, but a strain he’s never seen or heard of. However, no one wants to hear it, and though the Baron has connections — he’s an aristocrat, which matters, and he has the ear of General Khorvat, the military governor — he can’t act as quickly or as thoroughly as he’d like. The Baron has also compromised that urgency, however, by coming rather slowly to accept that the deaths are from plague. By the time officialdom concedes the obvious, it’s too late to save the populace. The medical organization belatedly assembled lacks cohesion, common purpose, or even an altruistic outlook. The Baron soon becomes a minority voice for humane policy, sensitivity, duty to heal, and sound science.

Russian, Chinese, and Japanese on Kitaiskaia Street, Kharbin (Harbin), perhaps during the 1920s (courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Instead, politics rules, and a hard-hearted goddess she is. The Russian administration cares nothing for the Chinese inhabitants of Kharbin, who, at first, constitute the vast majority of plague victims, and whom the Russians blame for the disease, as though they themselves couldn’t possibly be carriers. What counts is to keep order and please the czar. The Imperial Throne in Beijing (which, incidentally, would be overthrown the following year) cares only for its international prestige. What matters is that the Russian government doesn’t push Chinese medical experts around, and that no foreigner ever criticizes the measures taken. Worse, to supervise those measures, Beijing sends a young, arrogant microbiologist interested only in saving face and advancing his own career. Meanwhile, Japan, victor of the Russo-Japanese war six years earlier, has apparent ambitions in Manchuria that make both other governments nervous.

Shields excels at portraying these conflicts, inevitably personal as well. The Baron, married to a Chinese woman and respectful of Chinese traditions, can never say anything in council without his Russian colleagues calling him a “Chinese lover” and dismissing his views out of hand. Bigotry and dissension are therefore as virulent as the plague, and just as destructive. Kharbin falls apart before the reader’s eyes, and you witness how people progressively cut themselves off from human feeling and connection, as if those qualities too spread contagion.
Against this tide stand the Baron and his few friends, who try to find respite, something to hold onto:

Chinese calligraphy was the Baron’s solace in the evening. On the narrow stage of his desk, under lamplight, a rectangle of white paper was the shape of discipline. He could barely fathom the perimeters of its difficulty, the years of practice, but this elusiveness and uncertainty was part of calligraphy’s seduction. When he was lost, nervous about executing a brushstroke, he had learned to wait calmly until the character was visualized and wavered into shape, opening like a novelty flower of folded paper in water. He sometimes dreamed about written Chinese characters, angular brushstrokes, thick and thin, scattered like dark hay over a field of white paper or his wife’s hair loose against a pale cushion, black as sticks. Paper was a surface with the impermanence of snow.

Shields also depicts elaborate tea ceremonies, in which the doctors summon up pleasant memories as their only defense against despair. Like the calligraphy practice, these scenes are beautifully rendered and very affecting. But The Winter Station feels too brutal to me, seemingly insistent on grinding hope to single molecules, which will then blow away in a stiff wind. Love can’t survive the plague; nothing can. After a while, I felt pounded reading The Winter Station, a mood I never experienced with Albert Camus’s masterpiece, The Plague, or Geraldine Brooks’s Year of Wonders, both of which are plenty grim. Shields’s style sometimes aggravates the pounding, as when she’ll write a brilliant scene in which the Baron’s enemies outmaneuver and marginalize him — and then she’ll tell you that’s what they did.

The Winter Station offers vividness, power, and depth. But it’s too bleak for me to recommend wholeheartedly.

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

The Old Lie: The Fifth Servant

12 Monday Feb 2018

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Review: The Fifth Servant, by Kenneth Wishnia
Morrow, 2010. 387 pp. $26

On Good Friday, a young girl in Prague is found murdered, her throat cut. Since the year is 1592, suspicion automatically falls on the Jews, and since that evening also marks the start of Passover, why, that settles it. Whoever killed her must have used her blood to bake matzoh. Never mind that by Jewish law, blood is ritually impure, literally untouchable, or that matzoh must be made of flour and water. The infamous blood libel has had a long, sturdy life, and in late sixteenth-century Prague, just about every Christian believes in it implicitly.

In taking this ancient lie as its premise, The Fifth Servant pushes its characters (and the reader) to look closely at bigotry and hatred while also inviting laughter. To explain that, I could say that oppressed people need humor to survive, and that Jewish humor, especially of the ghetto or shtetl variety, is well known. But that’s only half the story. This remarkable novel promises a wild ride even in the front matter, which compares the word shamus, or private detective, with its Yiddish ancestor, shammes, or sexton of a synagogue.

Benyamin Ben-Akiva, a Talmudic scholar newly arrived from Poland, is the shammes in question, the fifth of his calling in a ghetto with four synagogues. This makes him literally a fifth wheel, and he’s easily the squeakiest in town. Benyamin has three days to solve the crime, or the ghetto will pay, probably with its destruction. This doesn’t exactly come as a shock to him.

Holy Week and Eastertide were especially risky, and a gambling man would say that we were long overdue for some old-fashioned Jew-hatred. Every year the Jews got thrown out of somewhere. The lucky ones merely got beaten up, had their property stolen, and escaped with their books and the clothes they happened to be wearing at the time. But one Easter a while back, a mob of enraged Christians had practically burned down the entire Jewish Town, leaving only the black and stone shul and a few crummy houses that refused to fall over. Three thousand people murdered in one weekend, all because some idiot said that a Jewish boy had thrown a handful of mud at a passing priest.

Still, how can Benyamin do anything when Friday evening is not only the first Passover seder but the Sabbath, and he may undertake no labor? Moreover, since the crime took place outside the ghetto, and the authorities have closed the gates to Jewish traffic, how can he possibly gather clues or question witnesses? Finally, how can Benyamin carry out his investigation when several rabbinical authorities oppose him and his rationalist methods? It’s that heretical way of thinking, they believe, that caused the trouble in the first place. If everyone were properly devout, they argue, there’d be no blood libel.

Rabbi Judah Loew’s tombstone in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague (courtesy MKPiekarska, via Wikimedia Commons)

But Benyamin has one respected ally, Rabbi Judah Loew, a rationalist himself (and a historical figure, incidentally). Between the two of them, using Talmudic logic and wisdom from the Torah and other texts, they try, little by little, to crack the mystery surrounding the girl’s murder. But the odds are heavily against them, and you won’t be surprised to hear that “no; and furthermore” greets them at every turn — excuse me, neyn; un noch, since Yiddish is the key language, here.

Along the way, Wishnia re-creates sixteenth-century Prague, Jewish life of that era, and a world of intellectual ferment alongside brute superstition. I’ve never read a mystery in which the sleuths are Talmudic scholars, quoting references from sacred writings to support the inferences they draw from observed facts. (For that matter, even the ghetto’s whores are learned enough to enter the debate.) That can be very funny, especially when they have to explain themselves to Christians, who believe that drawing inferences from anything must be an example of Jewish witchcraft. Such humor carries a dangerous edge, of course. But even among his fellow Jews, Benyamin has to overcome suspicion of his origins, scholastic pedigree, and ways of reasoning. For instance, when one skeptic asks, “How come I haven’t heard of you?,” he replies, “Because the angels who sing my praises do it beyond the range of normal hearing.”

At times, Benyamin’s commentary wears thin; a little less archness would have worked a lot better. And the reader unfamiliar with Hebrew or Yiddish may feel at sea, though the text explains the many quotations and expressions. (There’s also a glossary at the back.) But such is the draw of The Fifth Servant that it pulls you into its world and doesn’t let go – for laughs and heartache, both.

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

Blood Money: Savage Country

22 Monday Jan 2018

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Review: Savage Country, by Robert Olmstead
Algonquin, 2017. 293 pp. $27

It’s rural Kansas, 1873, and many farmers have gone bust, whether from overextended investment, rapacious creditors, or the swarms of locusts that have wreaked destruction of biblical proportions. Elizabeth Coughlin, recently widowed and deeply in debt, decides to try to recoup her fortunes by assembling a buffalo hunting expedition. Properly cured buffalo hides are worth a fortune, prized as leather for factory drive belts or other applications requiring particular strength or resiliency. And to lead her expedition, Elizabeth asks her brother-in-law Michael, newly arrived from his latest journeys as a big-game hunter. Against his better judgment, Michael agrees — and no sooner has he said yes than the party gathers and prepares to head south. Michael, it seems, would rather do just about anything than talk, and when he’s around, life-changing decisions happen in a New York minute.

Digitally retouched photograph dating from the mid-1870s of a pile of bison skulls, to be ground into fertilizer (courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States)

But he anticipates the dangers that lie ahead. As they cross the so-called dead line separating Kansas from Comanche territory, Michael finds the remains of a couple wagons whose murdered and scalped occupants make a grisly display. You know right away that Elizabeth’s quest will be a struggle to the death, but, as it happens, the Comanches aren’t the main antagonists. When it comes to raiders, white brigands are the worst; and if something burns, bites, floods, or falls from the sky, the Coughlin crew will have their fill of it. But what’s in the human heart causes even more misery, for it’s the pursuit of wealth, especially wealth that comes through killing, which destroys the spirit as well as the body.

Savage Country shows this in its vivid, gruesome descriptions of the buffalo hunt in its appalling carnage, and the inevitable rivalries and prejudices that divide the expedition. For instance, when a group of sick, starving black escapees arrives from a turpentine plantation — a form of industrial slavery — Elizabeth hires them to skin hides as a kind of rescue. But you sense that violence will erupt sooner or later, because not all her employees share her outlook.

It’s violence that shapes Savage Country, and I say that even as I recall other unflinching novels about the West, such as The News of the World or The Way West, which involve their share of brutality. Olmstead’s tale will deter some, but I, who consider myself squeamish, didn’t recoil. Maybe it’s because the violence establishes its own context, and that the characters, Michael and Elizabeth especially, try to make sense of it. And Michael has seen it before:

Michael listened to what the reverend doctor had to say until his mind began to wander. He held no anticipation of punishment or reward after death. He experienced no terror of the underworld, of the afterlife. He had no dread of suffering upon perishing. He believed in the transition of souls into horses and in the second sight of dogs and their ability to see invisible spirits and witches. He believed in omens and dreams and warnings and instinct. He believed, contrary to the Gospels, the meek, however blessed, would not inherit the earth.

But Michael, the rock of the narrative, resembles that substance in his refusal to express anything, which grates after a while. His deliberate terseness sometimes comes across as harsh and unyielding as the weather. The narrative succeeds best, I think, in its vivid descriptions of life and death on the prairie, which are as tense and dramatic as could be. But when it comes to human speech, the characters — even those who show more of themselves — don’t speak as much as they declare, as if they were coining homespun aphorisms, or trying to. I don’t believe that late-nineteenth-century frontier folk avoided contractions like the plague or snarled their syntax to avoid saying an extra word. Here, their language can be so stilted as to sound pretentious, and these people are anything but.

Still, I found the novel worth reading, both for its depictions of nature and the way it dramatizes its central themes. As Elizabeth observes, “For all the slave lords the war had killed, a new generation was born in their ashes and born inside of the new generation was the enmity of the old.”

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

The Terror of 1492: By Fire, By Water

15 Monday Jan 2018

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Review: By Fire, By Water, by Mitchell James Kaplan
Other Press, 2010. 284 pp. $16

Luis de Santángel, chancellor of Aragon and trusted counselor of King Fernando, has a fatal secret, half of which is common knowledge. Everyone knows that three generations back, Santángel’s family was Jewish. Such is the suspicion against so-called conversos, however, that a man like Santángel, despite considerable service to the crown, must never be seen talking to a Jew or found possessing Jewish texts or ritual objects. Consequently, the other half of Luis’s secret is that he’s begun to feel curiosity about his Jewish roots.

But the Inquisition, led by Tomás Torquemada, Queen Ysabel’s confessor, operates a large, many-tentacled network of spies and informers. And when they sweep up a close friend of Santángel’s, a fellow converso, for having secretly observed Jewish rituals and discussed the holy texts, Luis has had enough. Recognizing the danger to himself and his son, and believing that Torquemada’s brutalities are un-Christian behavior and unwise politics, he decides that the Inquisition must be checked. But that is a very tall order, notwithstanding King Fernando’s comparative lack of religious zeal. Ysabel has enough for both.

I like how Kaplan handles the politics, whether royal or ecclesiastical. The characterizations of Torquemada, Fernando, and Ysabel have depth and conviction. It would be too easy to betray them as cardboard villains, but Kaplan takes the high road, showing them as true to themselves. Consider, for example, this passage through Torquemada’s eyes:

The inquisitor general loved the sharp, rough, solid feel of skillfully hewn stones, joined together with or without mortar. They yielded to the will of man only with difficulty, but once shaped, did not budge. They stayed where one placed them. They performed their humble tasks without grumbling or questioning, holding up a building, providing shelter through storms, giving townsfolk a place to gather and pray. Of course, they were not alive, but they were part of God’s creation, and thus worthy of man’s respect. Aye, of man’s wonderment.

Of particular interest is how Fernando, as King of Aragon, is the less powerful monarch, conscious that Ysabel brought more to their marriage than he did. He’s much more interested in conquering the lone remaining Moorish bastion, Granada, than in church affairs, a preference that has disastrous consequences. I also like how the narrative depicts another friend of Santángel’s, a Genoese sailor named Cristóbal Colón. He has the harebrained idea, based largely on religious texts, that he can sail west from Spain and reach both the Indies and Jerusalem. Santángel has arranged an audience for Colón with the monarchs.

Luis de Santángel, by an unknown nineteenth-century artist (courtesy Museo Naval de Madrid via Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the U.S.)

I’m less drawn to the other characters and subplots. Luis, a widower, falls for a beautiful Jewish widow in Granada, Judith Migdal. She’s a silversmith, an extraordinary fact, but one that few people seem to remark on or object to. That idealized glow shrouds much of what she does, for Judith has no apparent faults, and her unerring social skills always save the day. Kaplan re-creates Jewish life in Granada with love and fervor, and I like reading about that. But aside from subtly underlining that the Spanish monarchs are bent on destroying a culture of which they understand nothing and from which they could learn much, its place in the narrative sometimes feels tenuous. The romance is frankly unbelievable and turns on a cliché.

Finally, the narrative seems to suspend itself during the religious debates that move Santángel closer to the faith of his ancestors, and the relative absence of tension feels jarring, given that these discussions could cost the participants their lives. I understand why Kaplan has included these scenes, because he wants to show the natural human curiosity about what is forbidden, and to score a few philosophical and theological points. But I think the novel would have worked better had he focused more on the politics, and I wish those had determined the ending rather than the deus ex machina he employs.

Nevertheless, By Fire, By Water has something to say, and though it reenacts events more than five centuries old, to recount the lengths to which bigots will go unfortunately retains deep relevance. Thirty years ago, when visiting an antiquarian in Toledo who had Jewish ritual objects for sale, I mentioned the expulsion, only to be told that I’d “insulted” his king and queen. By Fire, By Water is as clear a fictional exposure of that attitude as you’re likely to find.

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

Adventure on Ironbottom Sound: The Commodore

24 Monday Oct 2016

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Review: The Commodore, by P. T. Deutermann
St. Martin’s, 2016. 296 pp. $27

Ever wonder what it was like to command a U.S. Navy vessel in the South Pacific during World War II? Read this novel, and you’ll know.

It’s 1942, and Japanese land and naval forces are pressing the Marines dug in on Guadalcanal. The learning curve for the U.S. Navy, charged with maintaining and protecting that fragilely held Solomon Islands outpost, has been steep and costly. So many ships have been sunk that one sea lane has been nicknamed Ironbottom Sound. But Vice Admiral William “Bull” Halsey has been charged with winning the naval battle, and to do so, he’s assembled a task force and hand-picked his captains.

Cruiser U.S.S. Portland in dry dock for repairs in Australia after a naval battle off Guadalcanal, 1942 (Courtesy Australian War Memorial via Wikimedia Commons)

Heavy cruiser U.S.S. Portland in for repairs in Australia after a naval battle off Guadalcanal, 1942 (Courtesy Australian War Memorial via Wikimedia Commons)

Among them is Harmon Wolf, a Native American who, before the war, overcame bigotry to graduate Annapolis with a solid record, though his temper, as well as prejudice, have held back his career. For instance, Wolf once entertained notions of entering the Navy’s aviation program, but when a superior officer tossed a racial epithet his way, he tossed the officer through a window. That was deemed bad for business, but Bull Halsey likes aggressive punchers who’ll take the battle to the enemy, and Wolf promises to be that. Soon, he’s promoted to commodore, responsible for a squadron of destroyers.

The lone wolf is a well-worn cliché in military fiction, and by naming his protagonist as he does, Deutermann’s hardly subtle. Likewise, his prose is workmanlike at best (and sometimes repeats itself). Nevertheless, he does a good job portraying the naval mindset that Halsey and his protegés must struggle against. Wolf chafes against the military dictum that junior officers don’t challenge orders, because he senses that doing things by the book will only cause disaster. He quickly realizes that the Imperial Japanese Navy is much better than the office pen-pushers suppose–specifically, that the Japanese excel at night maneuvers; deploy more accurate, reliable torpedoes; have faster ships; and, most importantly, never fall for the same ruse twice. It’s as if the American brass have succumbed to their own propaganda about an inferior, incompetent enemy, a viewpoint that Wolf risks his reputation to correct.

Halsey is different, of course, and lucky for Wolf that he is, for Harmon’s plans don’t always work; as always in war, plans change almost immediately on contact with the enemy. Moreover, the Japanese score their victories too, which adds to the tension and makes The Commodore truer to life. The battle scenes in particular come across with intense vividness; Deutermann conveys what it’s like to be on the bridge or in a control room when high explosives fill the air, and he clearly knows his way around a warship:

J. B. King palpably jumped when the snipes opened the throttles and hit the turbines with a bolus of steam for fifty thousand horsepower. The forced-draft blowers screamed as they spooled up to feed fuel oil going into the fireboxes. King was the lead ship, so if the other two didn’t get the message, there was no danger of King driving over the top of a destroyer still loafing along at fifteen knots.

If you read The Commodore simply for the thrill of action or for a taste of the South Pacific Fleet, you’ll do fine, because you haven’t expected too much. The narrative could have assumed a whole extra dimension had Wolf connected the prejudice against himself with that against the Japanese–or, for that matter, the African-American stewards aboard ship–but Deutermann doesn’t care to go there. The Navy lingo can fly too thickly at times, with COMSOPAC and Div212 and the DRT in the CIC, and I’m still not sure what a Mike boat is. But those details don’t matter, and I’m not the kind of reader who throws a fit just because there’s a word I don’t understand. The action’s pretty clear, and that’s enough.

Also, Wolf’s outspoken way and maverick thought processes make him an agreeable companion, and Deutermann drops in the “no–and furthermore” device enough to keep you guessing. But he also undercuts the tension by having Halsey intervene, just when you think that Wolf has overreached once too often. And it’s no surprise when a pretty, willing nurse shows up, a war widow who seems to spend little time or energy mourning her late husband, another timeworn cliché.

For what it is, though, The Commodore makes the grade.

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

Brilliant, But a Little Mean: Leaving Lucy Pear

10 Monday Oct 2016

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Review: Leaving Lucy Pear, by Anna Solomon
Viking, 2016. 319 pp. $26

It’s summer 1917, and eighteen-year-old Beatrice Haven sneaks out of her uncle’s home at Cape Ann, Massachusetts, one night to leave her newborn infant in a pear orchard. Her act is desperate, of course, but not entirely random, for Bea anticipates that poachers from town will be coming to raid the orchard and will therefore find the child. What follows is beyond predictable, but Bea’s only thought–indeed, her only choice, as she sees it–is to save her baby from the orphanage. Further, that suits her purposes, for she plans to attend Radcliffe come the fall, though whether that notion is hers or belongs to her mother, Lillian, is an open question.

Bartolomeo Vanzetti, left, and Nicola Sacco, 1923 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons via Boston Public Library)

Bartolomeo Vanzetti, left, and Nicola Sacco, 1923 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons via Boston Public Library)

Meanwhile, the woman who picks up the infant girl is Emma Murphy, mother of eight, wife of a hard-drinking fisherman, Roland. The narrative shifts ahead to 1927, when Lucy Pear, as the foundling is called, is ten years old, and Emma has tired of her husband’s frequent absences and violent temper. She’s easy prey for Josiah Story, mayoral candidate and quarry manager, whose charm, money, and connections prove irresistible. Josiah arranges for Emma to tend Bea’s invalid Uncle Ira, who still lives in the house with the orchard. The job brings Emma needed money, a measure of independence from Roland, and puts her in Bea’s path, for that’s where she lives too. Radcliffe lasted barely a few months, and depression has immobilized her ever since.

So everybody’s got secrets, and cowardice has brought them about. Had Bea been able to stand up to her mother, she might not have made disastrous, self-destructive decisions. If Emma could face down her husband, she’d be better off, as would their children. And so on.

All those tightly contained secrets create an emotional pressure cooker, and Solomon exerts every ounce of tension imaginable, posing moral tests right and left that her characters often fail. I admire her refusal to protect them or ease their way; they’re no better than anyone else, and sometimes less. Yet the author never disengages to throw them in your lap, as if they were suddenly your problem. I think it takes courage to write like that, particularly when, more often than not, the publishing marketplace values the milk of human kindness, even–especially–if it’s artificially sweetened. Reading Leaving Lucy Pear, I’m reminded of the boldness of Philip Roth or Vladimir Nabokov–though she’s more merciful than they–and in most ways, it works for her.

I also admire Solomon’s way of illuminating psychological moments through superb prose:

Her mother looked at her tenderly and Bea felt swollen and strangled. She nearly began to speak. I am already so disappointed. She was stopped by fear: fear that if she started talking about herself, she would never stop; fear that her pain would fall out of her, grotesque, hairless, gasping, and she would not be able to stuff it back in.

All this makes Leaving Lucy Pear a gripping, painful, exceptionally well-observed narrative. And it’s also damned difficult to read, because the only truly sympathetic characters among a multitude are Lucy, Bea’s Uncle Ira, and her estranged husband, Albert. Tenderness is strictly rationed here, whereas hardness litters the ground, blocking every move, or so it seems. There’s a fine line between courageous, unflinching honesty and what can feel, at times, like authorial sadism. Solomon crosses it, I think, which makes her people difficult to sit with.

Similarly, I wonder why the Havens, wealthy Jews, must have no sense of their Jewishness except that they’re ashamed of it, Lillian especially, who’d do anything to pass. I get that Leaving Lucy Pear is partly about people afraid to be who they are, and that the historical background includes the Sacco-Vanzetti trial and the unabashed bigotry it aroused, an atmosphere from which nobody escapes. Even so, the portrayal has a mean edge, and the Havens’ self-hatred digs them a deeper hole than they already have as crass, disconnected, and (in Lillian’s case) manipulative people. Solomon rescues them, somewhat, by conveying how weak and fearful they are, and therefore still human. (Lucy, at age ten, is actually the strongest, most luminous character in the story, outshining both her mothers by far.) Yet Leaving Lucy Pear is a frightening, disturbing ride, and though I like the ending, I felt a bit bruised by the time I got there.

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

The Agony of Passing: The Gilded Years

09 Thursday Jun 2016

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Review: The Gilded Years, by Karin Tanabe
Atria, 2016. 379 pp. $16

In autumn 1896, Anita Hemmings returns to the place she loves most, the Vassar campus, for her senior year. Not only is she the class beauty (by popular vote), she excels at Latin, Greek, rhetoric, and music, the subjects deemed most suitable for young ladies–along with hygiene, of course. Social convention funnels Vassar graduates toward a single profession, teaching school, if not marriage to a wealthy Harvard or Yale man. But Anita dreams of further study, a professorship, perhaps even fieldwork involving ancient Greek artifacts. For someone of her ability, it’s possible.

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Yet it’s also not. Anita is African-American, so for three years she’s been passing as white. To look at her, no one would guess her secret. But if the school were to find out, she’d be expelled, for Vassar doesn’t admit Negroes. In fact, as the story opens, the Supreme Court has just supported segregation, through the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson case. Consequently, Anita has survived three years by remaining on the fringes, not exactly keeping to herself, but avoiding the spotlight.

Her senior year, however, she rooms with Louise “Lottie” Taylor, heiress to a New York fortune and a social dynamo. Lottie loves to shock, talking freely, and (perhaps) knowingly, about sex, alcohol, and other forbidden subjects. As she says, “There has never been a woman more worried about appearances than my dear mother. Luckily she has me to appall her around the clock.” So Lottie’s the perfect foil for Anita, pushing her into adventures that threaten to blow her cover, but which Anita can’t resist. It’s not just that Lottie’s a force of nature; it’s that Anita has desires like anyone else. And those yearnings lead her toward Porter Hamilton, a Harvard man smitten with her, a handsome, forward-thinking son of a Chicago lumber baron.

It’s a wonderful setup (based on a real person, incidentally), and Tanabe goes interesting places with it. Every move Anita makes, she risks pain, indignity, or exposure, all of which she must keep to herself, which provides a constant source of tension. The first meeting of the debating club takes up Plessy v. Ferguson, and Anita has been chosen to argue for segregation. By chance, Lottie meets her roommate’s brother, Frederick, and falls for him. Anita suffers her classmates’ casual references to blacks as inferior, which she must of course swallow in silence.

With that much going for it, I wish The Gilded Years had done more to live up to its promise. The slings and arrows that Anita must endure deserve sympathy, but she never explores them to any depth. Tanabe misses many chances here, starting with the Plessy v. Ferguson debate, which could have revealed much, but which the author prefers to summarize after the fact. That explanatory style, telling versus showing, hurts the novel in several respects, especially in character portrayal. To name one example, Anita declares her passion for intellectual subjects, yet her drive to obtain top grades seems to grip her more, because you see and feel it. But her intellectual ambitions pale beside her hopes of marrying Porter Hamilton, a notion that takes her captive maybe six minutes after they meet. I sense that Tanabe’s rushing things because she wants to compress the subplot to fit a grander design, but that comes at a cost. Anita’s undue haste makes her come across more like her flighty, less substantial roommate than herself.

But even the lightning love affair might work if Anita were reflective enough to penetrate her conflicts, rather than simply ricochet off them. Shakespeare’s Juliet famously observed that a rose by any other name would still smell as sweet, precisely the idea here. But Anita merely dips her toe into what life would be like with Porter but having to deny her family, or how her experience differs from, say, Frederick’s, who could pass physically but hasn’t tried. Despite that good head on her shoulders, she never asks herself what the many accolades she receives from her racist classmates imply about perceptions of beauty, character, intelligence, or social standing. Nor does she ever wonder what makes the Vassar community so sure of its racial and social superiority, what feelings might lie behind this, or how that shapes the world around her. She’s not quite a full person, in other words.

What’s more, it’s Lottie who commands attention, generous and grasping at once in her self-absorption, a grand manipulator and benefactress. It’s she who propels the narrative, has a clearer physical presence (it’s curious that Anita, the campus beauty, doesn’t even rate a physical description), and brings about a climactic confrontation. If Anita can’t drive the action, she could at least spend that energy internally, ripping things apart and trying to reassemble them. Unfortunately, she doesn’t do either.

The publisher calls The Gilded Years “Passing meets The House of Mirth,” evoking Nella Larsen’s 1929 tale of race relations, set mostly in Harlem, and Edith Wharton’s story about social climbing among Fifth Avenue bluebloods, published in 1905. Like other attempts to “package” a novel, the glib comparison misrepresents all three books. Tanabe’s publicists would have done her better service by letting The Gilded Years stand on its own.

The official pub date of The Gilded Years was June 7.

Disclaimer: I received bound galleys from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

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.