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Tag Archives: desire

No Possession, Only Determination: Hour of the Witch

10 Monday Oct 2022

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1663, accusations of witchcraft, Alfred Hitchcock, book review, Boston, Chris Bohjalian, desire, divorce, envy, feminism, gossip, historical fiction, literary fiction, no and furthermore, Puritans, seventeenth century, thriller

Review: Hour of the Witch, by Chris Bohjalian
Doubleday, 2021. 400 pp. $29

Mary Deerfield leads what many people in Boston in 1663 would call an enviable life—though they’d never admit it, because envy is a sin. Her father, a leading merchant, imports many useful items like furniture, cloth, and cutlery. Mary’s husband, much older than herself, is a prosperous miller, a man others look up to. However, she’s still childless at twenty-four, which arouses suspicions of possession by Satan.

But Mary’s only possessed by qualities a woman must not have—a strong will informed by intelligence and desire. She dares want a better life than the one her brute of a husband allows: he beats her mercilessly, and his idea of sexual relations is equally violent and shaming. For every insult he endures, or thinks he endures, Mary pays; and when he’s drunk, which is often, he imagines slights everywhere.

One of the many reasons I’m glad I didn’t live in seventeenth-century Boston.

Worse, he knows how to dissemble. Though familiar at the tavern, he’s never earned the constable’s reprimand for drunken behavior or punishment in the stocks. He beats Mary in private and makes up outlandish excuses when friends or family ask about the occasional bruise that shows. She wonders whether their young servant, Catherine, sees through the lies—not that she’d sympathize, because Mary suspects the girl lusts after her husband.

Mary understands lust. She feels it when she’s around her son-in-law, Jonathan, married to Thomas’s daughter by a previous marriage, and for Henry Simmons, a man who works in a merchant’s warehouse. At night, after Thomas has rolled off her and begun snoring, she touches herself and struggles to rationalize the pleasure, half-believing that the devil has, in fact, taken hold.

Nevertheless, when Thomas stabs her hand with a fork hard enough to break a bone and draw blood, Mary has had enough. Despite the odds, she decides to file for divorce, ignoring all counsel to desist. It’s not just that a woman has no chance against her husband, particularly one as clever as Thomas. It’s also the fork, which her father imported—a fork that has three tines, the extra tine suggesting, to some, an instrument of the devil.

I admire so many aspects of this brilliant novel that it’s hard to know what to name first. So I’ll start with the voice opening, which establishes the Puritan mindset and beliefs about sin. Few authors, particularly thriller authors, display the confidence to pull this off—where’s the action? Won’t I bore the reader?—but Bohjalian delivers.

These few pages wax terrified at the temptation lurking everywhere, implying that terror will recur in the following narrative. Most important to historical fiction, the author shows how people think in seventeenth-century Boston, and how that contrasts with today’s mores—or does it? Aren’t people still scared of their desires, and doesn’t the tremendous shame they carry prompt them to behave their worst?

Whoops; I’ve just praised a prologue. In my defense, I’ll point out that this one reveals no forward action.

But it does prepare us to see Mary as decent, mostly kind person struggling with being a vessel of desire and, though she wouldn’t recognize the word, a feminist. An early description of her down by the wharf shows how she tries to cast herself:

The men were tanned and young, and though it was autumn and there was wind in the air, the sun was still high and the crates and casks were heavy, and so she could see the sweat on their faces and bare arms. She knew she had come here to watch them; this was the reason she had walked this far. But she didn’t believe this was a sin or the men had been placed there as a temptation. Visiting the wharf was rather, she decided, like watching a hummingbird or a hawk or savoring the roses that grew through the stone wall at the edge of her vegetable garden. These men—the fellow with the blond, wild eyebrows or the one with the shoulders as broad as a barrel and a back that she just knew under his shirt was sleek and muscled and hairless—were made by God, too, and in her mind they were mere objects of beauty on which she might gaze for a moment before resuming her chores.

But Boston’s a place where every move is watched and judged, and this is how Hour of the Witch turns the screws. It’s not just that the threat may emerge anytime, anywhere, and often does. Nor is it only that “no—and furthermore” blooms here like dandelions (Mary’s image for envy), or that Bohjalian pushes his heroine to the absolute limit. With Thomas, he creates an antagonist who’s truly despicable yet apparently normal, which makes him that much more dangerous. While reading this book, I often thought of my favorite Hitchcock films, for the natural relentlessness of his villains and the manner in which ordinary objects, like the three-tined fork, become charged.

Hour of the Witch is a sterling example of a literary thriller, unafraid to dwell in emotional moments and use them to connect to the reader. I leave it to you to read this gripping narrative and ponder to what extent the Puritan scourge has marked our country to this day.

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

Destroyed by Desire: The Midnight Cool

20 Monday Mar 2017

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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book review, con men, desire, dreams, First World War, historical fiction, literary fiction, Lydia Peelle, mules, romance, Tennessee

Review: The Midnight Cool, by Lydia Peelle
Harper, 2017. 359 pp. $27

Summer 1916, Richfield, Tennessee. Billy Monday and Charles McLaughlin, grifters who could smooth-talk just about anyone into buying a bridge, have rolled into town, normally a prelude to a quick deal and an even quicker getaway. But Leland Hatcher, the wealthiest man in Richfield–note the town’s (fictional) name–has advertised a beautiful black mare, The Midnight Cool, for sale. Charles, who knows horseflesh a little, has never seen so captivating an animal, and though he may be a vagabond, he decides he’ll have that horse. Billy, who knows people as well as horseflesh, is skeptical (and, by the way, note his name too, an ironic twist on Billy Sunday, a famous evangelist). What’s more, Hatcher’s daughter, Catherine, whom Charles meets by chance, tells him the horse isn’t worth his money.

But Charles is after more than the horse, something he realizes only when he tries to buy it. He wants to be welcome in homes like Hatcher’s, to ride in a car like his Pierce Arrow, and to be well thought of, as he supposes Hatcher is. But most of all, Charles wants Catherine, as captivating a young woman as he’s ever seen, though he assumes he’s not good enough for her. Wouldn’t you know, once Charles has sunk all the money Billy and he possess into The Midnight Cool, the horse throws and tramples Billy and must be destroyed. Naturally, the pair have to stick around in Richfield, so that Billy can heal and Charles can earn some money. Of course, that also gives him time to woo Catherine.

To his amazement, he succeeds more than he has any right to expect. Not only does Catherine respond, recognizing her own dreams of escaping Richfield in her new beau’s apparent freedom, he makes more money than he’s ever had before, and it’s even honest work. The British Army, fighting the First World War in French mud, has been buying American mules by the shipload. Charles scouts them out for a military contractor, and suddenly, the town worthies, including Leland Hatcher, begin to think of him as an up-and-coming young man involved in a righteous cause.

Unsung hero: a mule on the Western Front (courtesy warmule.org, via the National Library of Scotland)

But, as Billy, an Irish immigrant who’s fallen into many troughs on the waves of life, observes:

Caveat emptor, that was the first rule. The second was to never lie. Twist the truth, yes, hide it, decorate it, do what you would with it, of course, but you never looked a man in the face and opened your mouth and spoke an outright lie. You never knew when you might come through a town again, and you wanted to maintain a reputation.

Caveat emptor, indeed. Just as Charles has bought a murderous horse from an unscrupulous man (Hatcher drugged the horse so that she would seem docile), his other desires have blinded him too. He sees only the sympathy and attraction between Catherine and himself, not their differences; for starters, she’s a rebellious individualist, while he wants to fit in and be respectable. The mismatch between desire and personality repeats with all the other characters, save Billy.

Where many, if not most, novelists would focus on how people overcome obstacles to get what they want, Peelle’s more interested in how it hurts them once they have it. Hatcher does much worse than drugging horses, and he gets away with everything because he’s rich, but he’s also miserable. Peelle’s fascinated with power, which nobody uses well in this novel, and which always burns them. The reason that Billy lies outside this realm is that he wants what most people would consider little or nothing–only to see and appreciate life in its magnitude. Nobody can give him or deny him that, so he’s safe now, though of course, it wasn’t always so.

The Midnight Cool is a fine novel indeed, but reader, beware. As with Billy’s statement about telling lies and hiding truth, Peelle never lies outright, but she does hide things, sometimes in plain sight. I hate prologues, but I’ll make an exception here, because this one tells you what you need to know. Take it at face value, and if you keep going, you’ll be treated to a riveting, potent tale with characters whose inner lives are right out there. The Midnight Cool is a literary page-turner, what reverse snobs say is impossible, but trust me, Peelle’s an excellent storyteller, and her prose can be electric.

She does rely on one or two coincidences that might be predictable or predictably ironic or both, and she also shoves bits and pieces in odd places, so that you can learn how Billy and Charles met up and what keeps them together. But hell, nobody’s perfect. What I find more annoying are the cutesy mannerisms, such as the absence of quotation marks or the consistent use of alright instead of all right, which, though technically correct, strikes me as showing off.

All the same, Peelle has written something to brag about.

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

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