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Tag Archives: divorce

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.

Feeling Good: Lies in White Dresses

23 Monday Dec 2019

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1952, book review, character conflict, divorce, fantasy vs real life, far-fetched story, happily ever after, historical fiction, predictable plot, protecting characters, Reno, Sofia Grant, unearned ending, unreal psychology

Review: Lies in White Dresses, by Sofia Grant
Morrow, 2019. 359 pp. $17

In 1952, two lifelong friends, Francie and Vi, take a train from San Francisco to Reno, where they plan to take advantage of Nevada’s six-week residency law to obtain divorces. They’ve each got grown children, and neither has a frivolous bone in her body, so you sense a story lurking there, especially since both believe that divorce is a shame and a scandal. But there’s more. Their trip has hardly begun when they adopt June, a younger woman with a four-year-old daughter in tow. Turns out June has a vengeful, abusive husband she’s running from, and she’s practically penniless. So Vi and Francie bring her to the hotel where they’re staying.

Reno, Nevada, in 2007 (courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

It’s a wonderful premise, and it might have propelled an equally satisfying narrative. However, that doesn’t happen. Since I’ve beaten up this kind of book often enough, I’d like to use this example to talk about happy endings and how they get that way. There’s a difference between a happy ending for a character who’s struggled to get there and a happy ending that feels like an arranged marriage. Guess which kind we’re discussing here.

As usual, it doesn’t have to be that way. Lies in White Dresses builds on the wreckage of three marriages, laden with conflict, past and potential, fuel for explosive confrontation. To her credit, Grant doesn’t shy away from ugly scenes. She also gives Vi and Francie a few unpleasant character traits, not least of which are social prejudices they refuse to surrender. So far, so good.

Even better, Vi’s soon-to-be ex-husband is a real doozy, a philandering, controlling egotist who believes money means (and moves) everything. Throw in Francie’s daughter, Alice, born with one leg shorter than the other, which fills Mama with shame, despite herself. I like that complex reaction, which, again, has potential for depth; what’s more, Alice, no fool, resents her mother’s unspoken attitude. But the saddest person is June, who’d apologize to the air for breathing it, if she could. She says she wants to escape her violent husband, but she doesn’t really believe she can. I agree.

The way I’ve described Lies in White Dresses, you might expect real, agonizing conflicts that have exacted a terrible cost. Instead, you get fantasy. Not legitimate fantasy, mind you, in which the protagonist has gone on a quest that tests her, body and soul, or a farce or satire or frothy entertainment in which you know nothing’s real from the start. No; here, you’re shown how people have deeply hurt each other, just as in real life. But there’s no resolution or much attempt at one, only quick-and-easy apologies to calm the roiled waters, which no one dares disturb afterward.

However, something has to take the place of the unsaid and unfelt, in this case two expendable secondary characters, inserted to set up an ending that’s completely far-fetched, yet utterly predictable. One of these secondary characters is the twelve-year-old daughter of the hotel keeper, cute at first but an obnoxious busybody at heart, until she redeems herself by playing the heroine. Even less likely, Grant has the girl absorb wisdom from a whore with a heart of gold. Ironically, this mentor is actually the only honest, appealing character in the novel, having escaped the Lysol bath that’s cleansed everyone else; she freely avows her appetites, whether sexual, monetary, or alimentary.

By now, the narrative has required a tower of scaffolding and construction of faux walls to keep out fickle life. That’s how June can absorb a few months of kindness and develop the self-esteem that’s been beaten out of her for more than twenty years. Or how Alice, the half-loved child, turns out more mature and psychologically whole than her mother. Happens all the time, right?

As a novelist, I understand the urge to protect my characters. We’re all guilty of doing so, and I’m sure that’s hampered me. We love our characters and don’t want to hurt them too badly or have the reader dislike them, because that feels personal, like a slap. You’ve insulted my baby! But overprotective authors hurt their fiction, just as overprotective parents hurt their kids. And if I see antagonists trip over their shoelaces or the good guys cruise into happily-ever-after as though it’s a fast-food joint open 24/7, I get cranky. (In case you didn’t notice.) I’ll accept a happy ending, sure, if it’s earned. But people have to sweat, fight themselves and their conflicts, and if they come out wiser, well, hand them the bunch of roses. Lies in White Dresses doesn’t earn that right, though. Consequently, I wonder how anyone can actually feel good after the feel-good ending. It’s too much like real life, yet also not enough.

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

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Imposter Bride

19 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1946, abandonment, betrayal, characterization, deceit, divorce, historical fiction, Holocaust, identity, Jews, mail-order bride, Montreal, Nancy Richler, refugees, twentieth century

Review: The Imposter Bride, by Nancy Richler
St. Martin’s, 2013. 360 pp. $25

Montreal, 1946. A young Jewish woman named Lily Azerov, escaping from Europe via Palestine, steps off a train, expecting to meet her fiancé, a man she’s never seen. But at the train station, after one look at Lily, he decides he doesn’t want her, so his brother marries her instead.

Boulevard Dorchester, Montreal, 1946 (Courtesy Archives de la ville de Montréal, via Studio Pluche).

Boulevard Dorchester, Montreal, 1946 (Courtesy Archives de la Ville de Montréal, via Studio Pluche).

From this arresting premise comes a richly layered, marvelously observed novel about deceit, betrayal, and (of course) abandonment. Though at first seemingly the victim, Lily never really joins her new family, and she winds up enacting her own betrayal, disappearing from Montreal without a trace. Lily leaves behind a three-month-old daughter, Ruth; a large, uncut diamond; and a diary in Yiddish that, like her name, may or may not be hers. Ruth’s father, aunt, uncle, and grandmother do their best for the abandoned child and answer her innocent questions about her origins; she could never say she went unloved. Quite the contrary.

But as Ruth gets older, she receives the occasional birthday package, always a beautiful rock specimen from various places in Canada, with time, date, and temperature, but no signature attached. Naturally, the girl becomes more curious, less accepting of her relatives’ explanations, more determined to learn the truth about her mother. Do they know more than they’re saying, or is it really a mystery to everyone? That’s the problem, but it goes much deeper. Told from several vantage points (though mostly Ruth’s), The Imposter Bride recounts how each person has his or her own reasons to feel abandoned and betrayed, and how these experiences have blinded them to their own deceptions, of themselves and others.

I got lost in this web occasionally, because Richler jumps back and forth in time. But her narrative always sorts itself out, and her moment-to-moment exploration of what goes said and unsaid reveals a keen grasp of psychology and portrays well-rounded characters. Several times, I had to laugh while shaking my head at familiar Jewish inflections and perspectives, which Richler captures perfectly. I’ve never met these people, yet I know them.

Richler’s prose is simple, depending as much on the states of mind she evokes as on the imagery she sparingly but tellingly deploys. Here’s an example, from when Lily first arrives in Montreal and shuts herself in her room, fearing to go out.

It was as if the world outside her bedroom was a stilted play she’d walked into and couldn’t walk out of again, a dream she couldn’t wake from, where everything was menacing in an intangible, slightly surreal way. She hadn’t felt this way during the war, when the dangers that she faced were real. Had she felt it then, she would not have survived, she thought; she would have given herself away with the sort of anxious glance or gesture that had been fatal to so many.

Why she hunkers down goes beyond the shock and trauma to which her new family at first ascribes her aloof unfriendliness. The answer is no great surprise, especially after the clues that pop up in the story, so the ending feels predictable and fails to carry the force it might have. The novel makes Lily out to be a stable person, yet it’s hard to imagine anyone sane (a) abandoning a three-month-old infant and then (b) trying to keep in touch by sending her rocks. I also wonder how the characters who’ve been abandoned by spouses can even think about remarriage without obtaining a divorce. But despite these criticisms, The Imposter Bride has so much to say about wanting to belong, recovery from tragedy and humiliation, and the purpose of truth–all told in a gripping, astutely described process–that I still like the book very much.

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

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