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Fictional Essays: The Fire by Night

27 Monday Mar 2017

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Review: The Fire by Night, by Teresa Messineo
Morrow, 2017. 306 pp. $27

If you read this book, you’ll be getting history you probably haven’t heard, about American Army nurses during World War II. You’ll see their bravery, endurance, and resourcefulness, their heroism under appalling conditions, their competence and professional dedication, the constant sexism they faced, the emotional trauma that destroyed their psyches, and the enemies who shot at them, Geneva Conventions be damned.

Army nurse washes her clothes in her helmet, Morocco, 1943 (courtesy history.army.mil)

Even when no particular crisis presents itself, Messineo re-creates the moment-to-moment tensions that afflict her two nurse protagonists:

So begins the long task of finishing the surgeries already in progress; stabilizing those just coming into the post-op tent; giving plasma, or whole blood when available; lifting the ‘heavy orthopedics’ with their colossal casts, arms and legs immobilized by a hundred pounds of plaster. The shock patients with their thready pulses; the boys with ‘battle fatigue,’ whimpering and taking cover under their cots, thinking themselves still in the field; the deaf, the maimed, and the blind, their heads carefully wrapped and bandaged, their tentative fingers reaching out in front of them, seared and melted together from clawing their way out of burning tanks.

Consequently, The Fire by Night bears witness to the unsung heroines of World War II (if not, by implication, all wars). Such a story is long overdue. And yet, despite its powerful moments, rendered so vividly that you feel as if you can’t take any more punishment, The Fire by Night feels incomplete as a novel. In fact, it’s more like a tendentious essay–or two of them, to be precise.

I say two because the protagonists’ stories hardly intersect, and if either were omitted, the plot wouldn’t change, only get shorter. Jo McMahon serves in Europe, whereas Kay Elliott is captured in the Philippines and spends years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. Though each undergoes her own, somewhat different but always harrowing trials, after a while, their struggles seem like a catalog rather than a coherent narrative. Moreover, Messineo is plainly out to set the record straight, and her earnestness undermines her.

Of the two protagonists, Jo has the advantage. Abandoned at the front lines caring for a tent of six critically wounded or ill patients, she must constantly use her ingenuity to keep them, and herself, alive. I like this story better, especially its first half, when problems multiply, she keeps going by force of will, and the men she’s tending are just bodies, not individuals yet. On the other hand, Kay’s narrative, though gripping in detail–she’s captive in what’s essentially a death camp–remains a more solitary struggle. But to varying degrees, both stories suffer from the same flaw: They fall flat when the protagonists deal with men, not one of whom has any depth.

For example, take the captain whose undermanned infantry platoon holds the position where Jo’s tent happens to be. Might he insult her, demean her rank and abilities, and say that he can’t guarantee her safety? Sure. Would he throw tantrum after tantrum and shrug off the lives of the men in her tent? I doubt it. On the flip side, Kay’s husband is a flawless human, the mere sight of whom inspired her to remove her clothes–and that’s just about all we know of him. Back at the other extreme, when Kay and Jo trained Stateside, they worked with a doctor who sexually assaulted the nurses and threatened to blacklist them if they complained. Real problem? Of course. Real guy? No; he’s cardboard, and, to no surprise, his comeuppance arrives all too easily.

Male authors can and should be faulted for failing to draw their women characters as full people. But the reverse must also be true, and to call this novel “women’s fiction” would be no excuse. More importantly, to describe sexual brutalities perpetrated by cartoon men only cheapens the impact, when subtlety would serve much better. These themes deserve no less.

I also hope that Messineo (and her editor) pay closer attention next time to the words on the page; I was startled that a writer this capable should commit so many lapses. For instance, civilians and other noncombatants are interned in a prisoner-of-war camp, not interred, as the text says here, though that might also occur eventually, as it frequently does. A bomber doesn’t hone in on a target; it homes in. Finally, the redundant phrase historical fiction novel has always struck me as the mark of an amateur–and in this book, it appears in the Acknowledgments section. Yikes.

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

Too Much Conscience?: The Second Mrs. Hockaday

13 Monday Mar 2017

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Review: The Second Mrs. Hockaday, by Susan Rivers
Algonquin, 2017. 254 pp. $26

After her half-sister’s wedding in rural South Carolina, seventeen-year-old Placidia Fincher makes a bold decision. She accepts a marriage proposal from Major Gryffyth Hockaday, a widower considerably older than herself, whom she has never met before and to whom she has spoken but briefly during the wedding reception. Over the next two days, Placidia has cause to wonder whether she made a mistake but also a sense that her heart has led her to her true love. Unfortunately, she has no time to figure out which, for the year is 1863, and the Civil War claims his attention. Recalled to his regiment sooner than anticipated, Major Hockaday leaves his bride in a perilous, unsettled situation. She must put aside her fears that he may be killed at any moment; raise his young son by a previous marriage; manage their farm, something she has never done; and face various threats to which she’s particularly vulnerable, as a young woman, alone.

What a splendid premise, and what a strong way to begin a novel. However, that’s not how Rivers approaches her narrative. Rather, she picks up the story from the major’s return from war in 1865, whereupon he discovers that Placidia has given birth to a child that couldn’t possibly be his, and that the law has charged her with murdering the infant. This is a pretty good premise too.

The Confederate flag flies over Fort Sumter, South Carolina, April 1861, from Alma A. Pelot’s stereoscopic photograph (courtesy Bob Zeller via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Nevertheless, about halfway through its short narrative, The Second Mrs. Hockaday goes wrong for me, despite having so much in its favor. I confess that I dislike epistolary novels, but that’s not my problem here; Rivers handles the form expertly, using letters, diary entries, and legal depositions to advance the plot. I also admire her prose, which captures Placidia’s voice beautifully, as when she dances with Hockaday at her half-sister’s wedding:

His hands were calloused and he held me at a distance in the way Abner [a slave] holds a fresh coonskin–like he was fixing to nail me to a shed before the smell made his eyes water. . . .He was telling the truth when he said he was a poor dancer and he was so tall I had to tilt my head back to see his jaw and his Adam’s apple while we danced. But as the music ended he guided me into the alcove in the dining room where his left hand slid down my back while his right hand pulled me to his side. I stumbled. He smoothly righted me with his hands on my waist. Didn’t I tell you I was clumsy, I said, and I must have been blushing because I fancied my hair was on fire.

Rivers further excels at creating a wartime ambience, based on painstaking research and telling detail. South Carolina was the first state to secede, and Major Hockaday’s Thirteenth South Carolina Regiment fights with stalwart pride, but the landowners she portrays strike poses while shirking their contribution to the cause. Deserters pretending to gather supplies for the army rob the countryside blind, and Placidia suffers their depredations.

So where’s the beef? Simple: Rivers gives the game away too soon. The reader sees how the case against Placidia will go, and though the why comes later, to me, that’s disappointing. I wish the author had let the crime and the mystery surrounding it hold center stage throughout. But maybe that’s the drawback of the epistolary style, whose very economy, though it drives the narrative at a good clip, undoes any chance to linger or spread out, so that the resolution comes too quickly.

But Rivers has something else in mind too, and that’s where I begin to lose confidence. Slavery gets a light touch here; too light, in my opinion. The racial divide tinges the narrative but doesn’t infuse it, as if Placidia were holding it at arm’s length, much as Hockaday held her during their first dance. And yet, this is the Civil War. Brutality against slaves occurs, but, with one exception, never at her hands (and she regrets it as an economic necessity). It’s always someone else, somewhere else, who supports the evil institution and will kill to preserve it, whereas Placidia, and the people she loves, at times sound like 1960s liberals, working for change.

Not only do I find this hard to believe, I see only the feeblest connection between this narrative and the crime of which Placidia stands accused. No doubt, it must be uncomfortable to write a novel in which otherwise good people are slaveowners, and I understand the urge to redeem them. But Rivers would have convinced me more readily had she not bothered and let the main story, which needs no adornment, carry The Second Mrs. Hockaday.

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

Eccentrics at Love and War: The Dust That Falls from Dreams

23 Monday Jan 2017

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Review: The Dust That Falls from Dreams, by Louis de Bernières
Pantheon, 2015. 511 pp. $28

To his 1939 comic drama The Time of Your Life, William Saroyan added an end note, as if he worried that his audience would miss his all-too-obvious theme: “In the time of your life, live. . . . Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding-place and let it be free and unashamed.”

The Dust That Falls from Dreams reminds me of Saroyan, providing a cast of (mostly) lovable and often hilarious eccentrics. Whether they realize it or not–and someone will eventually tell them–they’re searching for goodness everywhere, which they manage to find with surprising frequency. In other words, The Dust That Falls from Dreams bears only a passing resemblance to real life, though de Bernières has taken pains to re-create the Edwardian era and the First World War in precise detail. What matters most, he plumbs his characters’ inner lives. The apparent divide between the scrupulously accurate everyday and the fairy-dust plot is at once the novel’s charm and chief drawback; the earnestness with which de Bernières tells his tale fails to persuade me that his characters are plausible, much as I’d like to meet them.

 

A fashion plate from 1909 shows well-dressed ladies in front of Harrod's (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States)

A fashion plate from 1909 shows well-dressed ladies in front of Harrod’s (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States)

That said, it would be churlish to dismiss The Dust That Falls from Dreams as mere fluff, and even if it were only that, it’s a lot of fun. The premise, loose as it is, supposes that the children of three neighboring families in the countryside south of London have formed such a strong attachment that even the First World War can’t shake it–if anything, the bonds become stronger. How that happens, and what tragedies get in the way, make for a wide-ranging narrative that explores social class, love, sex, religious faith, valor, family relations, and a once-established morality uprooted by war. The chapters are short and episodic, a format I dislike, yet de Bernières usually succeeds with it, because his characters carry the day.

There’s Hamilton McCosh, father of four daughters and husband to Mrs. McCosh, a vicious snob, bigot, and altogether impossible woman. “What mortification and inconvenience it was to live in such terror of one’s wife,” he muses, “and to be obliged to stand up to her so often.” The only way he (or anyone else) can get around her is by telling her that a royal personage or duchess has endorsed a particular activity or behavior, in which case it passes muster. Mr. McCosh survives by playing golf, inventing gadgets, and keeping mistresses (though these are hardly mentioned and don’t figure in the story). The four daughters–Rosie, Christabel, Ottilie, and Sophie–are each irrepressible; my favorite is Sophie, whose malapropisms send everyone, this reader included, into hysterical laughter.

De Bernières takes you into all manner of nooks and crannies, whether how to fly a Sopwith Camel, what it was like to clean and maintain an Edwardian house, attend a séance, or talk philosophy with Bertrand Russell during a chance meeting on a train. You also learn what it was like to live and die in the trenches in 1915 or work in a hospital tending the wounded. But the narrative seldom shows the fighting or the chaos of triage as the stretchers are unloaded, only their aftermath, usually recounted by a witness or participant. I believe this is a conscious choice, and that de Bernières wants the reader to focus on the aftermath and effects, described with an eye to the individual, the peculiar, because it’s individuals who matter above all to him.

Where The Dust That Falls from Dreams rubs me wrong lies with Mrs. McCosh and her eldest, Rosie. Mama McCosh abuses people right and left, almost all of whom rush to excuse her. She’s maddeningly funny in her ridiculous social prejudices, but she also causes immense damage. I get that The Dust That Falls from Dreams is about the milk of human kindness, but the narrative squares up to other cruelties without making excuses for them. She, however, gets a pass.

I find Rosie irritating for similar reasons; priggish self-denial is seldom interesting, and she won’t let herself dream of what she’s missing, which makes her even duller. She remains fixated on her fiancé, killed in battle, in a plodding mysticism that surpasses understanding, and her sense of duty threatens to strangle her and everyone else. Since the fiancé was a well-liked, kind, noble-hearted romantic of no particular accomplishment or talent–a beloved nonentity, if you will–I suppose that de Bernières is trying to use the pair to represent the Edwardian age, golden but doomed, irretrievable. But Rosie’s obstinacy, which forbids even any mention of what’s happening, can be tiresome.

Consequently, I think The Dust That Falls from Dreams succeeds best as a discursive, sometimes antic take on its subject that delivers its most serious impact when, paradoxically, it doesn’t take itself too seriously.

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

Degas and Cassatt: I Always Loved You

02 Monday Jan 2017

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Review: I Always Loved You, by Robin Oliveira
Viking, 2014. 343 pp. $28

In 1877, the painter Mary Cassatt has reached a crossroads. The official Paris salon has just rejected her work, yet again, leading her to question whether her dream of being a painter is an egoistic fantasy. Back in Pennsylvania, her father thinks so, and since he’s supporting her life in Europe, he also thinks that gives him the right to tell his daughter–now in her early thirties–that it’s time to give up her foolishness and settle down to what a woman’s supposed to do. Not that she disagrees, entirely; Mary loves children and would like to have a husband and family, all other things being equal.

Mary Cassatt, The Boating Party, 1893-94, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (Courtesy National Gallery, Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Mary Cassatt, The Boating Party, 1893-94, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (Courtesy National Gallery, Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

But they’re not equal. With few exceptions, notably Berthe Morisot, Édouard Manet’s sister-in-law, a vivid character here, women don’t paint. They adorn canvases, share artists’ beds, offer admiration, and otherwise stay out of the way. Mary, as a foreigner, a real talent, and a woman unwilling to walk ten paces behind anyone, poses a threat to the fraternity of French painters, as a professional and a prospective marriage partner.

At this critical juncture, when the personal and artistic paths seem blocked, Cassatt meets an artist she’s long admired, Edgar Degas. Right away, he tells her that she can paint but is wasting herself trying to ape accepted styles rather than find her own. To be successful, she must serve her obsession, whatever great theme drives her to put brush to canvas. These words electrify her, as does his rigorous devotion to his art, and since he despises social convention, he takes her more seriously as a fellow professional than many of their contemporaries.

However, the social conventions Degas despises include sensitivity toward others, generosity, courtesy, kindness, keeping promises, or pulling together toward a common goal. He also has no love for anything or anyone other than himself and his art. Cassatt couldn’t be more different, so you know that whatever these two artists mean to one another, it will be a bumpy ride.

Then again, this is Paris, and the characters who populate this novel are artists–vain, gifted, self-doubting, jealous, often careless of others’ feelings. Oliveira excels at portraying this atmosphere, in which only the thick-skinned survive, and half the battle is knowing when not to put skin on the line. Consider this social gathering:

Soon after, the men abandoned their plates for the candlelit corner next to the piano, where a few rested their elbows on its ebony skin and the rest sprawled in armchairs, twirling their delicate flutes of amber champagne, which they held by their stems. No one spoke, but they eyed one another as if waiting for a starting gun, boredom and anticipation warring on their spectral faces as the flickering candlelight painted shadows on the wall. Someone lit a cigar. Mary moved to join them, but Berthe motioned to her to sit beside her on a brocade loveseat away from the men.

This tableau is like a painting, which could be titled Just Before the Verbal Fireworks. In what follows, Mary subtly bests Émile Zola, one way she proves that she belongs. But her struggle is never-ending, because that’s the artist’s lot, whether within herself, her profession, or society at large. I have to think the author is talking about writers too when she has Degas and Cassatt wrestle constantly with the “unbidden terror”: whether their work is as good as they think and hope it is, and whether the right touch will suddenly desert them, if it hasn’t already.

The stakes increase for Cassatt when her father decides to move the family back to Paris (they had lived there in Mary’s youth). Though Robert Cassatt is no longer telling her to pack up her easel and come home to Pennsylvania, he’s an impossible man, and he’s there all the time. Demanding, selfish, self-absorbed, and dedicated to the proposition that if something doesn’t make money, it’s not worth doing, he’s poison for his long-suffering daughter, who expends much energy standing up to him.

That she’s had to deal with him all her life makes her a match for Degas, whose faults loom large in these pages. Thanks to Oliveira’s fully rounded portrayal, I understand him. But I don’t like him one bit, and you have to wonder why Cassatt still bothers with him long after he’s burned her, and others, many times. There are other excellent artists within her circle, and she must have met many kinder, more sensitive men. Why, then, her fascination with a selfish boor?

As an art lover, though, I admit my biases. Degas’s work has always seemed repetitive to me–ballerinas and bathers–and it’s hard to get around his rabid anti-Semitism, though, to be fair, Paul Cézanne and Auguste Renoir shared that prejudice. On the other hand, having seen too few of Cassatt’s paintings, I’d always thought of her as a minor artist, until I visited the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., a year ago. She’s very much the real deal–Degas was right about that–and I Always Loved You does her justice.

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

Better Off Without Him: A Man of Genius

26 Monday Dec 2016

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Review: A Man of Genius, by Janet Todd
Bitter Lemon, 2016. 347 pp. $25

The protagonist of this well-written, keenly observed, but occasionally tiresome novel is Ann St. Clair, a woman judged unusual for 1816–she’s independent. Ann earns a very modest living churning out Gothic novels, a supreme irony, given that she’s shy, shrinks from gory sights or bad smells, and swallows a hundred times more feelings than she expresses. Nevertheless, this shrinking violet enjoys her freedom to go where she will, with whom, and to manage her own affairs, even as she realizes the price she pays. With no husband, father, or suitor, Ann has no male protector and is therefore an outlier, something that strikes her most vividly when she visits her kindly cousin Sarah, married and a mother several times over. Sarah believes that a woman’s place is in the home, but she doesn’t criticize her (marginally) more worldly cousin.

Enter Robert James, an Irish-born writer who has attracted a coterie of men who hang on his every word. Robert has written nothing except a poetic fragment titled Attila, and he has a gift for cruel mimicry, yet this earns him the title of genius, a mantle he assumes as his due. Ann, who has drifted into this circle–one of two women the group tolerates, though just barely–is thrilled that the great man has noticed her. So starved is she for attention that she willingly becomes his lover, even though he cares not one whit about pleasing her and grows more and more abusive with passing months. Attila, indeed.

Gaspar van Wittel, View of the San Marco Basin, Venice, 1697, the original of which hangs in the Prado, Madrid (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Gaspar van Wittel, View of the San Marco Basin, Venice, 1697, the original of which hangs in the Prado, Madrid (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

If the subtitle were How to Create a Masochist, A Man of Genius would almost qualify as nonfiction. Ann’s mother has hated her from birth, literally slapping her for daring to open her mouth, while lionizing Gilbert, the father who died before the poor girl was born. So of course Ann finds the most criminally narcissistic man available, violent and sullen by turns, and attaches herself obsessively. In one of her more clear-sighted moments, she wonders:

What was it that made others come to Robert? She had not a tenth of such power; had she been turned into a man she would still not have had it. What gave some people influence to pull others toward them–even if they burnt them when close–while others, all well-meaning and eager, stood solitary?

We’ve all known someone like Robert, but, I hope, have had the sense to avoid them and, even more important, the self-respect to resist their gravitational pull. Since masochists believe they have no gravity–or, more precisely, that its laws benefit them only on sufferance–reading about such people drives me absolutely crazy. In fact, when I reached the rather too lengthy part when Robert spouts dull, pretentious drivel, and his friends lap it up, I realized that I’d tried reading A Man of Genius once before, and that this section had persuaded me to put the book aside.

But this time, I kept going and was rewarded. An ardent feminist, Todd has much to say about the peripheries in which women reside, either for safety’s sake or because men have displaced them from more comfortable, visible quarters. Yet she never pretends that by definition, women are superior, or men, evil, and she sketches out the limits of discourse and understanding between the sexes with a sure hand. The context is historical, yet you get the picture–not as much has changed as we might like to think. Also, though Todd dares literary cliché by having her characters move to Venice to try to escape themselves, she describes that city so masterfully that you forget you’ve read a dozen other novels about it. Further, the trip to Venice prompts Ann to delve into secrets from her past, which kicks the storytelling into a higher gear, and whose twists and reversals keep you guessing until the end.

Where A Man of Genius falls short, I think, is the dynamic between Ann and Robert. I like novels that render each emotional moment with care–one reason I stayed with this one–but too often here, the psychological currents swirl in tight circles. Robert never gives Ann a reason to think that he cares for her or enjoys her company, for which she blames herself. I’d have believed this part more readily–and skimmed less–had he doled out morsels that tantalized her, only to withhold them otherwise. That would have positioned Ann as coming back for more rather than holding onto nothing, and her self-blame would have been easier to swallow. It would have also made her initial attraction more plausible; other than her own pathology, I can’t figure out why she’d bother.

For all its flaws, though, A Man of Genius is a bold, painstakingly rendered portrait of what can happen between men and women.

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

Call Her Madam: Belle Cora

12 Monday Dec 2016

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Review: Belle Cora, by Phillip Margulies
Doubleday, 2014. 591 pp. $29

On their mother’s death from tuberculosis in 1838, Arabella Godwin and her beloved younger brother, Lewis, are sent from their New York City home to their aunt and uncle’s farm upstate. Neither the children nor their new guardians enjoy the arrangement, but Aunt Agatha isn’t the worst problem. It’s cousins Agnes and Matthew, two of the most devious, cunning torturers an aching child has ever met, at exactly the most vulnerable time of life, whose viciousness (of course) largely escapes Agatha’s detection.

In such a life, no quarter need be asked, for none will be given. Consider the first day of school, in November:

A chalky shard of moon sat in the sky over the barn roof; a veil of frost turned weeds, sheds, and barrels a shade paler; and the frozen vegetation was springy under our feet. Steam rose from fresh dung the boys shoveled into a wheelbarrow, while the girls milked the cows, often dozing for a few seconds on the creatures’ warm bellies. Twice, after I had milked a full bucket, the cow stepped forward and flicked its manure-coated tail into the milk, ruining it, and I was whipped.

But school also brings a ray of light in Jeptha Talbot, a boy whose quiet understanding touches Arabella deeply. Trouble is, Cousin Agnes has had her eye on him, and however skillful a plotter and manipulator Arabella thinks she is, her rival always seems to go her one better. Arabella may have Jeptha’s heart, but Agnes has many cards left to play. More importantly, neither girl has figured on Matthew, whose mastery of psychological bullying, combined with physical strength, make him an even deadlier opponent. When he decides he’ll have Arabella whether she wants or not, violence ensues, and she must eventually leave town.

San Francisco harbor, Yerba Buena Cove, 1850 or 1851 (Courtesy Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons)

San Francisco harbor, Yerba Buena Cove, 1850 or 1851 (Courtesy Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons)

From there, and not for the reasons you might expect, Belle, as she now fashions herself, becomes a prostitute, then a madam, making her fortune in gold rush San Francisco. She’s good at what she does, and she treats her employees well, but what that means becomes open to interpretation. A strength of Belle Cora is how deeply and thoroughly it examines the sex trade. Though the novel painstakingly reveals the hypocrisy of polite, so-called Christian society and how cruel, un-Christian, and immoral it actually is, Belle is no saint, either. She thinks of herself as a caring, warm-hearted person who believes in justice and fairness, and in many ways, that’s true. But she also recognizes that her “girls” are unlikely to live long, healthy lives; that they’ll suffer stigma they can never escape; and that she’s profiting off them.

The men who’ve tried, often successfully, to exploit Belle, are horrid, certainly, and deserve punishment. However, whether they merit it as she dishes it out is an open question. But Belle Cora is much more than a tale of romantic competition and revenge; Margulies’s narrative unravels nuances in the infinite calculus of relations between men and women. For instance, Belle must constantly hide who she is from people who shouldn’t know, including–especially–her family, a falseness that pervades her life in ways she wishes it didn’t. On the other hand, when secrets come out, they often explode, in predictable fashion. It doesn’t matter who she really is as a person, whether her critics are any more moral than she, or, more specifically, whether they’ve ever visited a house like hers. As Belle bitterly observes, no matter what a whore does to redeem herself, no matter what charitable works she devotes herself to, people will never treat her as anything but a whore. “The world,” she says, “holds murderers in far less contempt.”

You have to admire Margulies for tackling such a deep, complex subject, though I have to admit, it takes patience to read his six hundred pages, gifted storyteller though he is. But I do like his design, which, as the jacket flap claims, is to write in “the grand tradition of Moll Flanders and Vanity Fair,” about a good girl who becomes a bad woman. At her most manipulative, Belle indeed reminds me of Becky Sharp, Thackeray’s heroine in Vanity Fair, though Belle has more heart. But the character who kept coming to mind was George Bernard Shaw’s Kitty Warren of Mrs. Warren’s Profession, a thought-provoking play that stays with you much as Belle Cora does.

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

An Irresistible Tale: The Hummingbird’s Daughter

17 Monday Oct 2016

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Review: The Hummingbird’s Daughter, by Luis Alberto Urrea
Little, Brown, 2006. 495 pp. $15

This beguiling novel defies first appearances, and a lucky thing for me, or I wouldn’t have read it.

Set in late nineteenth-century Mexico, The Hummingbird’s Daughter tells the early life of Teresa, the so-called Saint of Cabora. Born the illegitimate, half-Indian child of a well-to-do rancher, Teresa shows remarkable aptitude from a young age. She learns to ride a horse better than most men, to read, to dispute, and to remain serene in the face of insult, all of which appalls and enthralls her natural father, Don Tomás, who–extraordinarily–welcomes her into his house. She also studies with Huila, a salty, old herbal and spiritual healer, eventually surpassing and supplanting her; that too appalls and amazes Don Tomás, who worries what will happen. The young girl travels to far-off lands in her dreams, converses with God, delivers babies, and develops a large following, which, as Don Tomás has predicted, can come to no good.

José de la Cruz Porfirio Diaz Mori, who ruled Mexico for thirty-five years,, photographed in 1910; this novel portrays him, from afar, as a corrupt, malignant figure (Courtesy Aurelio Escobar Castellanos Archive, via Wikimedia Commons)

José de la Cruz Porfirio Diaz Mori, as he appeared in 1910, ruled Mexico for thirty-five years; this novel portrays him, from afar, as a corrupt, malignant figure (Courtesy Aurelio Escobar Castellanos Archive, via Wikimedia Commons)

As a rule, I avoid magical realism. As far as I’m concerned, One Hundred Years of Solitude is aptly titled, because those are the conditions I’d need before I could finish it. My teeth hurt if I have to read how the mystically gifted sweep away evil merely by waving a hand, and how a popular uprising forestalls the vengeance that would ordinarily result. Nor do I care much for macho fantasies in which beautiful women fall into an unscrupulous seducer’s arms without having to be asked twice, and that their love either reforms him, makes the earth move, or both. And much as I detest various aspects of modern life, I groan whenever I come across a narrative based on “the wisdom of the ancients,” as if peccadilloes of the past like witch-burnings, serfdom, or endemic smallpox never happened, or that our contemporary malaise wouldn’t last ten minutes if we could only summon up pseudo-profundities said to be lost to time.

Nevertheless, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, which skates parallel to that last category, is a terrific book. Urrea wins over this jaundiced reviewer for several reasons, chief among them his refusal to let his theme obscure reality. Teresa, or Teresita, as she’s usually known, may be called a saint, a title she dislikes and has never sought, but that only increases her burden to prove herself. Thousands of people flock to receive her healing powers, imputing to her motives, methods, and sympathies that she doesn’t possess. The established church calls her a heretic; the politicians, a traitor who preaches revolution. Men despise her for being a woman beyond their control, even as they dream of raping her. Those who fashion themselves of European extraction hate her as an Indian. Consequently, not only does Teresita fail to bring evil to a standstill–never her intention, anyway–everyone sees in her what they wish, using her for their own purposes. Naturally, the poor young woman tires of it all.

Only vigorous, unbridled prose can carry a narrative like this. Urrea’s grasp of biblical phrasing, Spanish cadences, and florid, earthy expression make this novel a delight to read:

Crows, attracted by the stink and the tumult, spied on them from the treetops, hopping along from tree to tree, peeking out from between the ragged leaves. And buzzards, attracted by the flapping crows, hypnotized by all the wandering meat beneath them, circled and dreamed of putrescence and death, the deliciousness of rot. And unknown and unseen, to the north of the trail only five miles away from the rancho, three dead men grinned under the soil, shot by Rurales for their scant gold and their boots, buried hastily and half-eaten by beetles and voles, tunneling wildcats and foxes, these three leathery travelers vibrated underground as the people passed, shook in their paltry graves as if they were laughing, giggling, their yellow mouths wide in toothy hilarity.

But besides casual violence, lust, and the hardness of life, there’s humor too. I laughed at the burro who dreamed of kicking the children entertaining themselves at its expense, at Don Tomás’s seemingly endless supply of friendly insults, and the various harmless obsessions that grip the characters. The laughter helps see to it that events and actions in The Hummingbird’s Daughter are seldom just one thing but many, depending on how they’re viewed, and Urrea has the sense not to push too hard. For instance, Teresita learns to remember always that she comes from the earth and belongs to it (the essential difference between herself and the corrupt, Westernized church and government). Yet she also comes to appreciate modern conveniences that Don Tomás’s engineer friend, Lauro Aguirre, has installed in the main house. So the reverence for old ways gets tempered, somewhat, or at least makes room for certain pleasures.

And speaking of pleasures, that’s what The Hummingbird’s Daughter is, a rollicking tale in which the many pages slide swiftly by.

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

Vietnam, Up Close: The Man from Saigon

03 Monday Oct 2016

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Review: The Man from Saigon, by Marti Leimbach
Nan Talese/Doubleday, 2009. 342 pp. $26

Have you ever read a first-rate novel that still leaves you unsatisfied? For me, The Man from Saigon is one, because, good as it is, it should be ten times better. The subject is riveting, the writing sublime, and the plot couldn’t have more tension. Yet though I believe everything that happens to the characters, I don’t believe what happens between them.

You can’t argue with the premise, though, or with how Leimbach carries it out. It’s 1967, and Susan Gifford, who writes for a women’s magazine, goes to Vietnam to cover the war. The story follows her fumbling efforts to understand Saigon, where everything and everyone is for sale; the climate seems too crushing to withstand; and the American officers conducting press briefings treat her with even more contempt than they do her male colleagues. Susan quickly realizes that to file anything worthwhile, she must get up-country, which she does, with the help of Marc, a TV reporter, and Son, a Vietnamese photographer whom no one else trusts.

American soldiers carry a wounded comrade through a swamp in Vietnam, 1969 (Courtesy National Archives)

American soldiers carry a wounded comrade through a swamp in Vietnam, 1969 (Courtesy National Archives)

Leimbach renders these events so vividly that it’s as if you too were getting spat on by the teenage prostitutes on Tu Do Street, huddling in a bunker under bombardment firmly convinced that the next incoming shell will kill you, or watching an army surgeon coked on Dexadrine performing operations round the clock.

And then the story really kicks into gear. Susan and Son join a supply mission heading into the Mekong Delta, supposedly nothing dangerous. But the Viet Cong ambush the column, capture the two journalists, and set out to find their own unit, from which they too have become separated. They take Susan’s boots, spare clothes, and personal possessions, and though she tries, through Son, to explain that she’s not a spy, a soldier, or a threat, they can’t understand what she’s doing there or why. So beyond the cuts on her feet, which become infected, or feeling dizzy and faint from lack of food and water, she fears every second for her life and Son’s.

Leave a box of vegetables in the sun and that is the smell. Lie on asphalt at noon on an August day and that is the temperature. The heat rises from the ground, bombards you from above. The dense brush, the banyan trees, their branches intertwined, connect at the top to form a canopy, allowing no breeze. . . . She has been on such marches before, always with a company of Americans, always with Son who carried the bulk of the equipment. It is different now. A kind of timelessness has set in. She keeps thinking she is dying, that she is walking with a ghost.

I’ve read many eyewitness accounts of the Vietnam War, the centerpiece of my teenage years, but I’ve never read anything as visceral as The Man from Saigon. The pigheaded nature of American policy, the duplicity, the savagery on both sides, the corruption at every level, the misery and death–they’re all here, in beautifully rendered detail.

That said, however, for me, The Man from Saigon fails as anything other than a sort of journalistic fiction. Marc, the TV reporter, becomes Susan’s lover mostly because they share that terrifying bunker under fire. I’d believe that they might sleep together a few times, but not that Susan loves him, as she repeatedly claims. Their only common bond is a passion to know what the army refuses to let them see, and what lies they’re told instead, but otherwise, he’s a closed door. He says little or nothing about his life, feelings, dreams, or past–except that he’s married–and tries to drown his anxieties in drugs and alcohol. He’s got nothing to give her.

Then there’s Son, for whom her affection grows during their captivity, during which he treats her as kindly as he can, even tenderly, at moments. I think we’re meant to compare him to Marc. But Susan doesn’t know who Son really is, so can you call that love? Also, she suspects he’s working for Hanoi, yet somehow, that doesn’t matter; she never considers that his activities might cause many deaths, including those of her countrymen. About Vietnam, I’m as dovish as they come, yet I don’t see how you can duck that moral question; in war, no matter what you do, there are always consequences. And if Leimbach is trying to send a feminist message, that Son’s quiet tenderness beats Marc’s overt masculinity any day, I agree, but not because of what she writes. The narrative allows neither man much of an inner life, so the contrast feels superficial and set up–Son has a gentle character, whereas Marc has a job and an outlook. No contest, there.

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

Not So Puritanical As That: The House of Hawthorne

26 Monday Sep 2016

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Review: The House of Hawthorne, by Erika Robuck
New American Library, 2015 402 pp. $26

Sophia Peabody has received a most unconventional upbringing for an early nineteenth-century woman, even for one born into Massachusetts intellectual circles. Her poor health has much to do with this. Sophia gets crippling migraines from random noises, commotion, or even by expending effort to concentrate–a pity, because she’s a gifted artist. Yet, on certain days, attempting to draw or paint bring on attacks that leave her bed-ridden. Her mother assumes that Sophy must give up all thought of marrying, because, if childbirth didn’t kill her, the work of keeping home and husband would. Consequently, she must devote her life to art and avoid any excitement other than what may be found in her sketchpad and books–only the appropriate sort, of course.

Fat chance. Sent to the reputedly healthful climate of Cuba with her sister, Mary, also of frail health, Sophy finds heat of more than one kind. Nature feels unleashed, more vividly savage, and the colors and marvels of the landscape stir her sensibilities as an artist and a person beginning to realize that she’d like to widen her experience. Living among the plantation gentry, the family entertains neighbors of their social class, who impress Sophy with their manners and bearing. But the slavery that supports these people and, by extension, her sister and herself, is always close at hand, and the revulsion Sophy feels for it, and the sympathy for the slaves, tells her that Cuba is no place for her. In a way, this comes as a wrench, because she’s formed an attraction for a plantation owner’s son, a shy, modest young man who seems to hate the system as much as she does. Nevertheless, the Peabody sisters return to Massachusetts.

Matthew Brady's photograph of Nathaniel Hawthorne, taken during the 1860s, not long before the author's death (Courtesy Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons)

Matthew Brady’s photograph of Nathaniel Hawthorne, taken during the 1860s, not long before the author’s death (Courtesy Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons)

Enter Nathaniel Hawthorne; talk about a thunderclap. They first meet in the company of Sophy’s sister, Elizabeth, who wants him for herself:

When I enter, Hawthorne’s eyes meet mine, and he rises. By the holy angels, I feel my soul at once aflame and reaching through my breast toward him. I falter, and he is at my arm, leading me to the sofa. I try to ignore the heat–the fire of our first joining–and lean back once I am seated. I tear my eyes from his to look at Elizabeth, and I see a pain in her face that makes me wish I had stayed in my room.

Thus begins a lengthy courtship of two people burning for one another, and I mean, they can’t wait to tear each other’s clothes off–except that they do wait, and for years. The House of Hawthorne is a charming novel, and this section is my favorite. Sophy must outwit her jealous sister and prod her intended to tell his family they’re engaged, something he’s extremely loath to do–and he has his reasons. Nathaniel and she must struggle to restrain passions that are positively transcendental. The future author of The Scarlet Letter tries hard not to be a Puritan and succeeds to a larger extent than his reputation might suggest.

I like the writing, which is simple and direct, much like the narrative itself. Notable characters from the Hawthornes’ literary circles, both in Massachusetts and abroad, play roles–Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, and the British poets Browning, for example. But none come fully alive, perhaps because Robuck never grants any more than a thumbnail sketch, generally a familiar one. Emerson is cold and pompous. Thoreau prefers his own company to that of society. Melville is a needy pain in the neck.

As with these characters, Robuck fails to make full use of the themes she introduces. Sophy’s artistic life before and after marriage makes the point, echoed by two characters and the woman herself, that she’s sacrificed to Hawthorne and his career what she might have achieved. It’s not that he discourages her art–far from it–it’s that she doesn’t have the time. But there sits the feminist argument, mentioned and mulled over a little but unfortunately not developed. Likewise, though the Hawthornes discuss slavery and feel deeply about it, especially Sophy, they take no stand, because they oppose war as the means to end it. But this resolution seems unsatisfying, particularly since their siblings, abolitionists all, were mad at them for it, as were, no doubt, their famous friends. I’d have also wanted more thoughtfulness about death, which strikes frequently during the narrative and causes the Hawthornes much grief. Again, they mention it, consider it, and utter a notion or two, but they don’t get down and grapple with it. They save the grappling for each other.

That’s not bad, just less than it could have been. The House of Hawthorne is a nice book, only lighter in impact than it could be.

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

As the Losses Mount: Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

29 Monday Aug 2016

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Review: Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, by Chris Cleave
Simon & Schuster, 2016. 424 pp. $27

This novel is hardly the first about a love triangle in wartime, but if it’s not the best of the genre in recent memory, it’s pretty damn close.

Mary North, a young woman at odds with her stuffy London family, hastens home from a Swiss finishing school in September 1939, just after Britain declares war. She wants to “do something,” so she badgers the War Office, assuming that her services must be required, maybe as a secret agent. After all, her father’s an MP, perhaps destined for a cabinet post, so why not? Nobody really knows what the war will be like, but eighteen-year-old Mary is very sure that for her, it will involve duty, freedom, and a ripping lark. In other words, Mary has the makings of an absolutely insufferable, overprivileged twit–and yet she’s quite the opposite.

 

Bomb damage in Valletta, Malta, May 1942 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Bomb damage in Valletta, Malta, May 1942 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Two traits save her, in my eyes. First, she’s delightfully subversive, willing to challenge commonly held beliefs in herself and others, and does so with wit and style. Second, she tries to live by her discoveries, working around the rules whenever necessary–a free spirit who becomes increasingly aware how much her ability to be one derives from her wealth and social position.

Mary finds a job as a teacher, where her readiness to see things from the children’s point of view makes her an asset. For instance, the day they’re to be evacuated from London (a war measure), her charges exchange their name tags the moment she turns her back. Being who she is, she pretends that their new names are the correct ones, which amuses them no end. “It turned out that the only difference between children and adults was that children were prepared to put twice the energy into the project of not being sad.” But Mary’s superiors think she’s unfit to teach–too much levity and sympathy, flouting the rules–so they fire her.

Are we downhearted? Only for a moment. Mary lobbies Tom Shaw, an administrator who grants her the use of an abandoned school, where she plans to teach those children shunted back from the countryside, spurned because of their skin color, emotional disabilities, or neediness. Mary throws herself into rescuing these kids and, shortly afterward, into Tom’s arms as well.

Meanwhile, however, Tom’s good friend Alistair, an officer who barely survived the Battle of France and was evacuated from Dunkirk, has come home to London on leave. (Notice the recurring theme of evacuation and rescue, and who deserves it, or doesn’t.) By happenstance, the day Alistair ships out again, Mary brings him his duffel bag at the train station. Cleave, in the simple, elegant prose that makes this novel shine, describes the feeling between them:

She laughed then, brightly and without complication, and he laughed too, and for a moment the war with its lachrymose smoke was blown away on a bright, clean wind. Alistair marveled that she could do such a thing with the tiniest inflection of her mouth and the lightest look in her eye: even exhausted, in yesterday’s dress with her hair disheveled, she could make the distance between them disappear.

Consequently, it’s no secret that while enduring the terrible, grinding, years-long siege of Malta, Alistair thinks of Mary and his friend Tom in different, not always selfless, ways. What eventually happens is anything but predictable, even if it seems so at first, because Cleave is master of my favorite literary device, the “no; and furthermore.” Just when you think things are settled, they’re not–they get even worse–and no one’s off the hook. Some readers may object to the unflinching nature of the narrative, which deals out plenty of pain and leaves quite a few prejudices intact. But I urge you to read Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, precisely because these characters earn every drop of joy they get. Along the way, Cleave treats you to terrific dialogue, much of it darkly funny, and pitch-perfect descriptions of new love, intense desperation, and loss. The characterizations feel true in every respect, save one (I don’t believe that Mary’s only eighteen at the novel’s beginning, and she doesn’t act like the virgin she’s supposed to be).

I’ve heard some people call this book same-old, same-old, or too sentimental. Don’t believe them. Everyone Brave Is Forgiven is a wrenching novel, one of the finest I’ve read this year.

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