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Portrait of a Family and an Era: Margreete’s Harbor

03 Monday May 2021

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Review: Margreete’s Harbor, by Eleanor Morse
St. Martin’s, 2021. 384 pp. $28

One day in 1955, Liddie Bright gets the phone call she’s long dreaded: Her mother, Margreete, has set fire to her kitchen, final proof that she can no longer live alone. An institution is out of the question; Margreete would never go. A woman who has survived three husbands and can be stubborn even in her lucid moments has equally effective ways of exerting her will at the times her clearer faculties desert her. So someone needs to care for her, and Liddie’s elected, or believes she is, which amounts to the same thing.

Trouble is, Liddie, her husband, Harry, and their two kids, Bernie and Eva, have a settled, more or less happy life in Michigan. Margreete lives in Burnt Harbor, Maine. Liddie, a professional cellist, has begun to establish herself with local ensembles after years of hard work. Harry has a teaching job he likes and good prospects. Bernie and Eva don’t want to go anywhere.

But the family does move, perhaps with too little marital conflict, though Morse gets a lot of mileage out of her premise. As the years progress, each character grapples with internal changes and those around them, or tries to. Since we’re mostly talking about the Sixties, there’s upheaval, and the author finds great meaning hitching the personal to the political. Harry, a conscientious objector during World War II, feels the Vietnam War like an insult and sounds off in his classrooms. Bernie’s only friend is Black, which puts the civil rights marches in an intimate context. Liddie, though less politically committed than her husband or son, nevertheless reflects the feminism in the air as she tries to figure out why her marriage constrains her.

A demonstrator against the Vietnam War offers a flower to a soldier guarding the Pentagon, October 1967 (courtesy Staff Sergeant Albert R. Simpson for the Department of the Army; National Archives and Records Administration, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Consequently, Margreete’s Harbor consists of small moments writ large, what the publishing industry calls “a quiet book,” an often pejorative label. After all, who wants to buy a “quiet” book? (Probably more people than editors realize.) That’s a pity, because you can always tell when an author injects noise for its own sake, and if those books sell better, they do so through shadow or trickery, not substance.

Instead, Morse gives you characters as deep as the Maine harbor on which they live, contradictory, sometimes cranky, secretive, and altogether real, depicted in gorgeous prose. She’s not afraid to show you their faults, to the extent that I have the urge to bang Harry’s and Liddie’s heads together—he, for his preaching and inability to admit mistakes; and she, for her self-pity. Yet their struggle redeems them, for they want to understand what happened to their dreams and their marriage, which, at times, feels like an increasingly leaky vessel. I love the way Morse portrays the kids, who battle for parental attention, reach for or push one another away, and try to find out who they are.

But Margreete’s the center, in many ways, and the keenly observed, loving portrait of a woman losing her mind will stay with you:

Some days she could think almost like normal, and other days everything was so mixed up — the jumble inside her, what happened yesterday, what did she eat for breakfast, who was that man who cooked in the kitchen and called everything a blue plate special. Words came from her mouth that she knew weren’t right the minute she said them, but the words she searched for fell down holes. She could see her blunders on the faces lifted to hers. The way strangers called her honey as though she were seven years old. The way they spoke loud to her as though she was deaf. She wasn’t deaf, she was haywire. If she could open her brain for them, they’d see. They would see the circuits floundering for their snaps. They would see the mess in there and know she was doing damn well considering what she had to work with.

If I have one complaint about Margreete’s Harbor, it’s the scope. The narrative has an interior feel, which I accept, to a point, because the family relationships matter most. But that doesn’t stop me from wanting to see a wider camera angle, particularly to reveal Burnt Harbor. There’s a classroom, a fast-food joint, a principal’s office, all of which could exist anywhere—and again, we’re back to interiors. I want to feel the town vibe, a little, see a crowd scene. The brevity of certain chapters also perplexes me—scope in a different sense—though I understand that Morse has a many years to cover, changes in season, and so forth.

But these objections shouldn’t keep you from reading an excellent book. Whether you like relationship novels or wish to discover (or relive) the Sixties, portrayed here with great fidelity, you’ll be rewarded.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book through my work for Historical Novels Review, where this post appears in different form, as does my interview with the author.

The Vanity of Masochism: Mrs. Osmond

05 Monday Feb 2018

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Review: Mrs. Osmond, by John Banville
Knopf, 2017. 369 pp. $27

Isabel Osmond (née Archer) has disobeyed her husband, Gilbert, something she’s never done before. Against his will, she’s left their home in Rome to visit her dying cousin in England. After the funeral, friends urge Isabel not to return to Gilbert — a remarkable notion for the 1880s – whose cruelty and deceit have ruined any hope of happiness.

Readers of The Portrait of a Lady, the Henry James masterpiece, will recognize the situation and characters. They will also know that Isabel wouldn’t dream of taking flight from her lawfully wedded husband. But Banville has set his imagination to work, and he finds much meat in what an American-born woman of the Victorian Age would do if she discovered that her vicious husband had married her only for her money.

To pen a sequel to Henry James requires a bold, confident hand and a finely perceptive eye. Only a writer as experienced and gifted as Banville would even attempt it, and he succeeds brilliantly. Not only has he captured the Jamesian style, the discursive loop-the-loop sentences that end dead center in observed truth; like the master, Banville derives intense feeling from a gesture or an inflection of voice. As with the original, what’s left between the lines often means more than what is said. Where modern authors interrupt their narratives to reveal their characters’ inner lives (if they bother), for James, there isn’t anything but inner life. For readers who expect a faster-moving story, his approach may be an acquired taste. But he creates tension through deep emotional connection; so too with Banville and Mrs. Osmond.

Letting her eyes close, Isabel dipped into the dark behind her lids as if into the mossy coolness of a forest pool. Yet she could not linger long, for in that darkness she was sure to meet the padding, yellow-eyed, implacable creature that was her conscience. Strange: she it was who had been wronged, grievously wronged, by her husband, and by a woman whom she considered, if not her ally, then not her enemy either, yet it was she herself who felt the shame of the thing.

But to call this novel imitation James hardly does it justice. Where James expounds on the loss of innocence, a favorite theme, especially regarding Americans residing in Europe, Banville emphasizes Isabel’s masochism, so deep and relished that it amounts to vanity. There are stretches in Mrs. Osmond in which I wanted to hit her over the head, because I detest masochism and dislike literary characters who don’t struggle against it the way I’d want them to. But Isabel’s excessive sense of duty is also painful, since Gilbert Osmond must rank among the most odious husbands in literature. He’d never stoop to physical violence or even profanity, never raises his voice, and would consider it gauche and beneath him to be drunk. Yet he pulverizes everyone around him through fifty shades of disdain, many of which require no words.

Consequently, Isabel’s physical journey from London back to Rome takes second place to her inner travels. She believes she must confront Gilbert, a task that requires steeling herself and gathering information, but while she’s doing that, she tries to figure out who she is and what she wants and deserves. Naturally, she goes back and forth, because when you have spent your life as a doormat, even the experience of being cheated and lied to in the worst possible way doesn’t necessarily qualify you to stand up for yourself. Nevertheless, when Gilbert and she finally do meet, it doesn’t go as either of them expects.

I’m not the type to read modern takes on Jane Austen or Conan Doyle, but I made an exception with Mrs. Osmond and am glad I did. We’ve all known someone like Isabel, and it makes no difference that this version of her comes from the nineteenth century. You need not have read The Portrait of a Lady to enjoy it– Banville seems to assume no knowledge of it—but I appreciated the sequel more for having done so.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher via Historical Novels Review, which published this post in shorter, different form.

Texas Three-Step: The Promise

25 Monday May 2015

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Review: The Promise, by Ann Weisgarber
Skyhorse, 2014. $25

The Promise is one of the best novels I’ve read in years, a brave, exacting, often painful work, the type that takes a premise elegant in its simplicity and explores its depths.

Catherine Wainwright was brought up to appreciate and expect the finer things, including the music by which she makes her meager living. However, in this year of 1900, an independent woman’s place is precarious, to say the least, and Catherine has made a costly blunder. An affair with her cousin’s husband has made her hometown of Dayton, Ohio, too hot for her to live in. Polite society cuts her dead, parents cancel their children’s piano lessons with her, and her nascent concert career vanishes. Owing back rent she can’t pay and cut off from the man she loves, she realizes marriage is the only answer.

Map of Galveston, Texas, 1885, Augustus Koch (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain in the US).

Map of Galveston, Texas, 1885, Augustus Koch (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain in the US).

Accordingly, she resumes her correspondence with a Dayton man who has moved to Galveston, Texas, and become a dairy farmer. When they were at school together, Oscar Williams always liked her, and he intrigued her too, in his way. And as it happens, when Catherine writes Oscar again, he’s recently widowed and has a five-year-old boy to think of. After a few more letters pass back and forth, Oscar proposes marriage, and Catherine accepts–without telling him about her disastrous affair.

In Galveston, she finds a different level of heat from Dayton, and not just from the stifling, insect-ridden climate. She shares a bed with a man she doesn’t love, worries that his Dayton relatives will have told him about her, feels deeply hurt by her former lover’s treatment of her, and doesn’t know how to approach her stepson, Andre. Then there’s Nan Ogden, a young woman who keeps house for Oscar and looks after Andre. Nan resents the new Mrs. Williams and fancies Oscar for herself, but she doesn’t let herself think about it, which makes her character all the more fascinating. The two women narrate the novel in their very different voices. What they see (or don’t) in themselves or their adversary turns their already fraught triangle into high drama, even when the action concerns sweeping the floor or making coffee.

The Promise therefore delivers what I’ve come to believe is the key to good literary fiction. Like the musical Catherine communing with Beethoven, Weisgarber plays every note. She lingers over emotional transitions, finding many that lesser writers would miss or skim over, unpacking the compressed moments into their intriguing parts rather than summing them up in shorthand. Yet the narrative moves at a crackling pace, because the author knows storytelling and her characters’ inner lives.

This all begins with Catherine’s flaws. At the start, she’s self-absorbed, entitled, and superior, disbelieving that her comedown should happen to her. She’s terrified of her new surroundings and the scrutiny she’s under:

 

I felt Nan Ogden watching from the house as I fumbled with the latch on the barnyard gate. The soft soil in the yard was churned with hoof prints, and flies buzzed around a pile of dung. Water streamed from the chin of the cow that stood at the trough, her unblinking eyes taking note of my every move . . . . I’d never been so close to a cow, and her size was alarming. So, too, was her udder. It resembled a balloon but one that was lined with swollen blood vessels. I hurried past her.

 

Prompted by necessity and Oscar’s patient insistence, Catherine unbends enough to discover hidden sides to him, Andre, and herself. She also reflects on how she must appear to others. Consequently, she grows within a short time, as does Oscar in her view, which further deepens the novel.

My only quarrel is the manner in which, fairly early, she admits her mistakes to herself and realizes her illicit lover wasn’t the man she thought he was. Her shame feels completely real–I connected with her right away over that–but don’t see what prompted these revelations at that moment.

Otherwise, The Promise is absolutely splendid.

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

A Marriage of Convenience: The Undertaking

19 Thursday Mar 2015

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Review: The Undertaking, by Audrey Magee
Atlantic, 2014. 287 pp. $25

It’s autumn 1941, and a young German soldier is so eager to escape the Russian killing grounds of World War II that he weds a woman he’s never met. This gives Peter the privilege to leave the ranks for ten days, whereas Katharina will receive a pension, if he dies, and the right to call herself a married woman. Surprisingly, the pair take to one another, and when Peter returns to Russia, memories of their brief time together will have to warm them over many cold months.

From this bold, startling premise spins a novel in the same vein, spare and unflinching, often as brutal as the war it describes. The way I read The Undertaking, Magee argues that Germans made a marriage of convenience, embracing Nazism out of greed and a temporary advantage that they trusted would be long-lasting. I like novels based on a simple metaphor, and juxtaposing marriage with a hideous, criminal regime is a brilliant concept.

Soviet soldiers at Stalingrad, ca. 1942 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain in the U.S.)

Soviet soldiers at Stalingrad, ca. 1942 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain in the U.S.)

Told largely through dialogue, usually in short sentences, Magee’s narrative packs remarkable punch in few words. I liked the group scenes best, especially the tension between Katharina and her parents, which results not from politics–they’re convinced Nazis, all–but from a young woman’s desire to live her own life. As for Peter and his comrades, it takes awhile for them to emerge as an entity, but some of the later scenes held me, most notably their attempts to help each other survive the battle of Stalingrad.

Even so, dialogue-as-narrative can only go so deep. Not even Katharina, whose portrayal is more complete than Peter’s, reveals an inner life. Magee allows them hardly any memories or associations to whatever they experience, nor reflections about what they’ve done.

This dissociation appears deliberate on the author’s part. Katharina wears jewelry and dresses stolen from deported Jews, and her family’s new apartment was once occupied by Jews. But she has no feelings about this, not even when she meets a starving Jewish woman in a park. Similarly, Peter helps Dr. Weinart, a friend of his father-in-law’s, to raid Jewish homes and deport the inhabitants, beating them if they don’t move fast enough. Yet he doesn’t think twice about it. He rationalizes nothing; he simply resents the evenings spent away from Katharina.

I doubt whether civilian SS officers, as Weinart seems to be, ever led such raids or recruited active soldiers to participate (and they certainly didn’t wear brown uniforms). Nor do I believe how the remarkably ubiquitous, all-powerful Weinart runs Katharina’s family and personifies the entire bureaucracy and social fabric of the Third Reich. For example, no secret police, neighborhood informants, or orchestrated patriotic displays appear, only the evil doctor. But historical fudging or shallow convenience aren’t the greatest flaws; it’s that Weinart’s wealth and promises of advancement have seduced Peter, and we don’t know how or why. Before the war, Peter was a schoolteacher in Darmstadt, like his father, and, up until meeting Weinart, wanted more than anything to resume that career. Why has he changed his mind? I think Magee wants us to believe that he always had his greedy, violent urges, and that marriage gave him an excuse to exercise them.

That conclusion fits her central metaphor, but we have only her word for it, not the characters’ thoughts or actions. Are Peter and Katharina meant to be psychopaths? If so, can a person really become psychopathic from mere temptation, as with the flick of a switch? More importantly, no matter how you label Peter and Katharina, how can a reader feel empathy for characters who have none themselves, who act with so little conscience? Doesn’t that violate the purpose of a novel?

I have to assume that Peter and Katharina are supposed to represent Germany, yet I sense that Magee’s too perceptive to ascribe genocide and a world war to a simple absence of human feeling. Even so, she offers no other credible explanation; by reducing her main characters to moral and psychological automata, she robs them and their actions of the complexity they deserve.

The Undertaking is another nominee for the Walter Scott Prize. It’s a well-written, thought-provoking book, but I wouldn’t put it on the short list.

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

Dare Not Speak

19 Monday Jan 2015

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Review: The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price, Purveyor of Superior Funerals, by Wendy Jones
Europa, 2014. 235 pp. $17

A young man, taught all his life to weigh his words, blurts out a fateful question at a picnic. Wilfred doesn’t mean to ask Grace to marry him–they hardly know each other–but he can’t say what he’s really thinking, which is wondering how she gets into and out of her yellow dress. But before Wilfred can retract his proposal, Grace runs off to tell her parents the happy news.

From this whimsical premise comes a funny, poignant, and painful novel, one that deepens as the characters grow. Wilfred thinks he should be able to reverse his gaffe–in fact, there’s another woman he prefers–and, under other circumstances, maybe he could. After all, it’s 1924, a modern age when such a misunderstanding shouldn’t condemn two young people clearly unsuited to one another. But it’s also a small village in Wales, where everyone has an opinion about everyone else’s business–and Wilfred’s business is burying people, a delicate occupation in which his moral reputation matters.

Countryside, Mid Wales. (Courtesy

Countryside, Mid Wales. (Brecon Beacons National Park; courtesy visitwales.com)

More to the point, Wilfred’s tenuous ability to speak up for himself vanishes under the first blush of confrontation, while poor Grace has even less aplomb. Neither stand a chance against her bullying parents, who force them to the registry office. Wilfred has nobody to intercede for him, because his mother died giving birth to him, whereas his father, a kindly, live-and-let-live type, lacks the fire to push back.

But Wilfred’s not the only one imprisoned. His fiancée, who has been less than forthright, is also trapped, a complication that both evens the score and sets up a serious reckoning. The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price becomes a moral tale about the costs of dishonesty and failure to take responsibility.

Jones renders all this in simple, lovely prose, and her metaphors spring naturally out of everyday tasks, so that you say, Of course. Consider Wilfred’s musing about being “unhappily married for eternity” while–when else?–he’s sanding the wood on a coffin:

Being unhappily married might feel a lot like the dread of doing hours of prep–mathematics prep–algebra and logarithms, inescapable problems with no obvious answer, no solution he could ever find, every day for the rest of his life.

With such artistry at Jones’s command, I’m surprised that Grace’s parents, Dr. and Mrs. Reece, come across like Hollywood types, overdrawn to the point of caricature. They’re emotionally abusive, so they’re a hundred percent unpleasant, each and every moment. They have only one concern, their standing in the community, but with one brief exception, Jones never shows them in it. The doctor, for instance, would have been far more believable had everybody thought what a wonderful man he was, a true servant of medicine, unaware that he makes his wife and daughter miserable.

I wonder whether the author thought she had to make the parents absolutely heartless to bring about a certain (and, I think, dubious) decision at the end. But I’m pretty sure Jones could have had gotten the result she wanted in another, subtler way.

Still, I recommend The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price, an impressive debut from a talented novelist.

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