Tag Archives: masochism

Happiness in Siberian Exile: Zuleikha

20 Monday Sep 2021

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Review: Zuleikha, by Guzel Yakhina
Oneworld, 2019. 482 pp. $27

Zuleikha Valieva lives an oppressed existence. It’s not because she lives in a village near Kazan, USSR, 1930, and the Soviet regime crushes her, though it’s about to. Rather, her husband, Murtaza, gives her nothing except hard blows and harder words, using her as beast of burden and sex object and haranguing her every move — that is, when he bothers to notice. Murtaza’s mother is even worse. She promises that the fates will punish Zuleikha, who’s a weakling, good for nothing — hasn’t she given birth only to daughters, all four of whom have died in infancy? — while Murtaza, like Mama, is strong, a born survivor.

But prophecy isn’t her chief talent, for the Soviet administration has decided that kulaks — landowning peasants, like the Valievs — are enemies of the state. And when soldiers come for their grain, livestock, and butter to feed the city populace, Murtaza fights back and dies for it.

Seizure of grain from kulaks, Kuban, Soviet Union, 1933. Photo credited to U. Druzhelubov (courtesy Proletarskoe Foto via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Good riddance, you think. But Zuleikha has believed every harsh word ever spoken to her and figures that Allah has marked her for punishment. Scared to death of what will happen next, she doesn’t understand why she must leave her village to go someplace far away; she, like many other kulaks and other “undesirables,” are being exiled, though no one will say where they’re headed. But what Zuleikha and her companions don’t realize is that they’ve just been handed a ticket to freedom. The rest of the novel shows how that happens, to what degree, and how much happiness, if any, they derive from living at the ends of the earth.

Aside from her ability to work her fingers to the bone, because that’s what life demands, Zuleikha has a fatalistic outlook that will stand her in good stead:

Death is everywhere. Zuleikha grasped that back in her childhood. Tremblingly soft chicks covered in the downiest sunny yellow fluff, curly-haired lambs scented with hay and warm milk, the first spring moths, and rosy apples filled with heavy sugary juice — all of them carried within themselves the germ of future dying. All it took was for something to happen — sometimes this was obvious, though sometimes it was accidental, fleeting, and not at all noticeable to the eye — and then the beating of life would stop within the living, ceding its place to disintegration and decay.… The fate of her own children was confirmation of that, too.

Other notable characters include a demented doctor who’s somehow a capable clinician; the camp lickspittle, a truly despicable sort who always bobs up like a cork, no matter who pushes him down; and a couple members of the intelligentsia, city slickers who’ve seen Paris, not just Leningrad or Moscow. The camp commandant, who killed Murtaza and has a thing for Zuleikha’s green eyes, comes to feel for his charges, though he can’t say so or even let himself think it. For all these, banishment to Siberia spares them from worse punishment, for the camp is a backwater, where purges don’t reach.

You just know that these people, had they remained where they were, would have been swept up by the secret police, even—especially—the commandant. For the longest time, he resents his posting, in his pride mistakenly thinking that the bureaucracy has shunted him aside, after all his many accomplishments. The political message comes through loud and clear, though Yakhina never spells it out: Here’s a cross-section of people who, for better and worse, built the Soviet state, receiving no thanks for their pains and, more often, a whip across the face.

Zuleikha has a touch of the fairytale—witness the demented doctor who remembers a remarkable amount of his training—yet reality takes front and center. In fact, when the pain of what he experiences penetrates his consciousness, he has the persistent fantasy that he’s living inside an eggshell, which shields him from the suffering all around and allows him to exist. So even when Yakhina surrenders to gauzy fantasies, she tries to twist them, make them her own.

You won’t recognize Solzhenitsyn’s gulag in her Siberian camp, though many exiles die from the harsh atmosphere and poor food. She’s more interested in the survivors, who find skills or character traits they didn’t know they had. In this, Zuleikha is Exhibit A. Her acquisition of a spine is a marvelous transformation to behold, and Yakhina’s careful not to let her consummate masochist turn into a different person altogether. Nevertheless, at times I wonder whether our heroine would be able to achieve what her creator intends, even less that Zuleikha feels drawn to the commandant, who killed her husband, after all — though, to be fair, her sense of attraction causes her guilt.

Overall, however, Zuleikha is an excellent novel, a first novel, surprisingly, full of rich, evocative prose, sharp political commentary, and a story cast against type. I recommend it.

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

Sister, Friend, Rival: Shanghai Girls

28 Monday Jun 2021

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Review: Shanghai Girls, by Lisa See
Random House, 2009. 336 pp. $17

Pearl and her sister, May, live the good life in Shanghai, in 1935. They earn money posing for an artist friend, who puts their faces on commercial calendars, so they are known as “beautiful girls.” They get good tables at clubs and restaurants and party at all hours, hardly noticing the vast ocean of poor surrounding them. Pearl, elder by three years, feels herself the less favored sister, though she’s gone to college, and May won’t ever. Their parents, traditional and strict, dote on the younger, prettier, daughter, to the point that Pearl doubts they even notice her, except to criticize, which her father does constantly. May’s not above using her favored position to twist him around her finger.

However, all that’s about to become irrelevant. To the sisters’ shock, their father says he’s had severe financial reversals. Not only does that mean the party’s over, he’s arranged marriages for them, to sons of his most important creditor, who lives in Los Angeles. After the wedding, a ceremony that pleases nobody, May and Pearl are to sail to Hong Kong, after which they’ll rejoin their new husbands in the United States. That’s it; no argument.

Needless to say, the sisters hate every part of this, and they tell each other they’ll do what no Chinese daughter ever does, disobey their father. They have no intention of leaving Shanghai. Their husbands are ridiculous matches for them, especially May’s groom, who’s only fourteen and seems not all there. But their father hasn’t told them the hardest truth, which is that he’s flat broke and in debt to loan sharks, who’ll throw the family onto the street in a couple days. As if that weren’t enough, May and Pearl don’t even have time to plead, because the Japanese attack. Leaving Shanghai now becomes a necessity as well as a chore.

The bombing of Shanghai, August 1937. This image captures the scene outside the Palace Hotel (courtesy Institut d’Asie Orientale, Lyon, France, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

You may wonder, as I did, how traditional Chinese parents—the mother binds her feet—have raised two daughters most people of that time and place would have called libertine (and only if they were being polite). But never mind. See writes with the force of gravity, and when the worlds she creates collide, the shock waves are enormous. Not only that, duty and tradition versus modernity and independence poses a crucial conflict, embodied in the sisters, so if their relative freedom seems a trifle convenient, See keeps returning to that struggle. Pearl feels that May is impetuous, selfish, self-centered, and brazen; May believes that Pearl is staid, masochistic, and too accepting by half. They’re jealous as hell of each other, and they’re both right.

But there’s a cultural context to every action or feeling, whether having to do with being female in a society that worships sons and despises daughters; having to obey a male authority, no matter who or how weak; and what money means. See spares no detail, sanitizing nothing, excusing nothing, and the cruelties of life are ever-present:

The Whangpoo River slinks past us to our left like an indolent snake, its grimy skin writhing, pulsing, slithering. . . .Sampans—hung with ropes, laundry, and nets—cluster together like insects on a carcass. Nightsoil boats jostle for right-of-way through ocean liner tenders and bamboo rafts. Sweating coolies stripped to the waist clutter the wharves, unloading opium and tobacco from merchant ships, rice and grain from junks that have come upriver, and soy sauce, baskets of chickens, and great rolls of rattan matting from flat-bottomed riverboats.

Many horrors happen to the sister, involving violence, heartache, bigotry, and degradation, whether as women, as Chinese, or as the newly unfortunate. Throughout, See dwells on the sister bond in which love, jealousy, protectiveness, and resentment reside as uneasy partners. As such, the author explores, again with unflinching focus, what it means to be Chinese, and how Pearl and May struggle to reconcile what they want for themselves with what their culture demands, which in turn must be regulated because of public pressure and the threat of censure or disclosure. What a bold, searing depiction.

I have doubts about Pearl, particularly some of her doormat moments, which I’d think her experience might have led her to rise above, at least on occasion. That question arises most particularly because she’s astute enough to recognize how Chinese women know how to endure without falling apart, whereas men seem more fragile, having to spend so much energy shoring up their stoic facades. Why, then, doesn’t Pearl try to move beyond the role she’s accepted, at least outwardly?

But if that’s a weakness in Shanghai Girls, a necessity to maintain the sibling conflict throughout this narrative and the next—there’s a sequel—it’s a small price to pay. Shanghai Girls is a terrific novel, one that will stay with you.

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

No Novocain Required: Bowlaway

22 Monday Apr 2019

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Review: Bowlaway, by Elizabeth McCracken
Ecco, 2019. 373 pp. $28

Around the turn of the last century in Salford, Massachusetts — don’t bother to search your atlas — two men discover a woman lying aboveground in a cemetery. A bag beside her contains a corset, a small bowling ball, a candlepin, and fifteen pounds of gold bars. When Bertha Truitt wakes up (for she was asleep, not dead), she sets eyes on Dr. Leviticus Sprague, one of her discoverers, and decides to marry him. She hires the other, Joe Wear, for the candlepin bowling alley she opens.

No one knows how Bertha got there, where she was before, or who she is. But that doesn’t prevent the townsfolk from making myths about her, and not all are complimentary. Her marriage to Dr. Sprague, who’s African-American, causes tongues to wag, as does her bowling alley’s approach to the sport — all welcome, men and women together, which can hardly be ladylike. But the young women Bertha cultivates like it fine, and the alley and its owner become town icons.

A postcard, ca. 1910, of the Windsor Club candlepin lanes in Windsor, Vermont. The signs prohibit players from stepping or sliding into the lanes. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Bowlaway resists classification as a historical novel, except in the most inclusive sense, for few outside events intrude on the alley and its denizens, though common social attitudes do. I suspect that McCracken chose her time and place because that’s when candlepin was popular in New England, “a game of purity for former puritans.” But as she says in her acknowledgments, “This book is highly inaccurate, even for a novel.” And that’s what Bowlaway is, really, a kind-hearted, whimsical musing about the eccentricities that permit (but more often inhibit) love. The prose is literary, yes, but to engage the reader, not call attention to itself.

On principle, I dislike quirky. I must be one of the few readers of literary fiction who can’t abide Anne Tyler; putting up with her asylum of self-destructive masochists makes me feel as if I’m having a tooth drilled. Pass the Novocain, please. But Bowlaway needs no painkillers. Maybe it’s because the characters sense that they’re lost and therefore can’t take themselves too seriously or fool anyone else into doing so. They’re just trying to figure out which front to put up, an internal shell game that makes them more recognizable, for all their madness.
A narrative that depended on cutesy plot twists in which to display these weirdnesses would quickly wear thin.

McCracken goes the other way, relying on character through physical description. Her great gift here involves the expansion of consciousness to include perspectives that are unusual, to say the least. For instance, I’ve never read a paragraph about a child in utero who has the advantage over her mother, because, like a scientist, “she had known Bertha’s literal depths, had elbowed her organs and heard the racket of her various systems.” I have to laugh at that; I laughed often, reading Bowlaway.

How many books do you read in which the author can launch a perfect metaphor that’s equally funny and painful, like this: “Her relatives were doomed stocks in which she had better not invest, but she had come into love like a late inheritance.” Or descriptions that reveal an emotional atmosphere, so that a bowling alley becomes a character:

Nobody stands behind the wooden counter at the front — a large oak structure like a pulpit, with a spectacular cash register that looks ready to admit steam-powered music, a calliope of money. Nobody sits at the bar along the other wall, though the jar of pickled eggs glows like a fortune-teller. The tables and chairs in the middle of the room await lollygaggers. The ceilings are warehouse high, so that the eventual smoke coming off all those eventual people (cigarette, cigar, desire, effort) might be stored aloft.

To be sure, not everyone in this absurd candlepin universe pleases the heart or soul. Two important characters in particular are extremely irritating, whether because of selfishness like an art form, bad faith, or the sort of masochism that just isn’t funny or winning, no matter how you look at it. Maybe that’s the trouble with a novel that rests on good-heartedness; since the outliers don’t really belong, they test the boundaries of that place and, perhaps, the reader’s patience. Still, as a tale of a star-crossed family over several generations, with its legends, secrets, and resentments, Bowlaway will make you laugh and think.

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

Escaping a Predator: The Widow Nash

23 Monday Jul 2018

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Review: The Widow Nash, by Jamie Harrison
Counterpoint, 2017. 373 pp. $26

It’s 1904, and Leda Cordelia Dulcinea Remfrey has just buried her grandmother in the East and wants nothing more than to retrieve her bearings. But a summons comes from Seattle, one she can’t ignore: Her father, Walton, is losing his mind to tertiary syphilis, likely dying. More importantly to the two men who send for her, Walton has misplaced or hidden or spent a fortune reaped from the sale of African mines, and part of that money is due them. Dulcy, as she’s known, is essential to the task of deciphering Walton’s notebooks and figuring out what he did with the money, for she’s traveled the world with him and knows his secrets. Or so they believe.

Their conviction brings much misery to Dulcy, and here lies the biggest flaw of this often splendid, engaging novel. Victor Maslingen, her former fiancé, imprisons Dulcy in Seattle, and his henchman, Henning Falk, immediately welches on the promises he made to keep Victor in check. Surprisingly, Dulcy never even protests, only sets out to care for her father, living up to her second name, Cordelia.

Moreover, if she’s ever regretted breaking her engagement, all you need to know is that Henning has furnished Victor’s office with objects that don’t break if they’re thrown. Unfortunately, people aren’t as sturdy; and Dulcy’s first name, Leda, suggests what Victor has done before and keeps threatening to do again. In fact, Victor is such a completely unappealing, unbalanced character, he could fill a page in the DSM by himself. And the strange part is, nobody who knows him (other than Henning) can understand why Dulcy threw him over. To a degree, her reticence to share the story is quite understandable. As Harrison shows, a woman may be the soul of virtue, but society will still condemn her for lodging such an accusation.

Nevertheless, the central conflict of this novel results from two clichéd characterizations, a masochist and a sociopath, and during the long Seattle narrative, little changes. We get Dulcy’s sufferings and discursions into Walton’s past life and travels with his daughter, some of which is interesting, much of it simply appalling, as when Walton carelessly and unconscionably passes his syphilis to his wife, killing the children she bears subsequently and later, herself. Meanwhile, the main narrative treads water while Dulcy works up the courage to escape, and you may be forgiven for wondering when she’s going to get it.

Yet The Widow Nash is about running away, and round about page 120, Dulcy manages to rescue herself and the novel. Unfortunately, Harrison wants you to believe that Victor will pursue Dulcy if he ever traces her — that’s why he has to be a sociopath, I suppose —and that Henning, who’s far more practical and therefore more dangerous, will help. Or maybe he won’t, because he has a soul and a conscience when the narrative absolutely requires. That’s the trouble with over-the-top characters; they can’t bend, so everyone else has to, even in illogical directions.

Henry Wellge’s 1904 photo of Butte, Montana, population 60,000 (courtesy Library of Congress)

When Dulcy settles in a Montana town, assuming the name Mrs. Nash and declaring her widowhood, the novel settles in too. How she keeps her secret from the nosy matrons makes a wry, entertaining narrative, and though predators flourish here — most especially the chief of police — there’s good-heartedness that Dulcy drinks in and wonders whether she’s dreaming. Most fiction about the American prairie that I’ve read stresses how plain and boring life can be, but where Dulcy lives, there’s never a dull moment.

One reason Harrison can get away with a few mistakes and still come out with a good novel is that her prose evokes not just a setting, but a way of life:

Walton packed an India rubber bath, which liked to collapse suddenly, and his medicines often shattered, the fumes poisoning fellow travelers. Travel meant being wet and cold or dry and hot;… Pushy, mustachioed men in uniform, demanding imaginary paperwork at sudden borders; dusty telegraph offices and banks with wayward hours and false coinage; mysterious meat, leathery fruit.… insects skittering over mattresses or rappelling down at high speed from dark ceilings, the flutter of bats and whisper of mice.… He’d opened the wide world for her but sluiced away her joy.

And though the world of this novel is a very violent one, the people Dulcy meets in Montana have a zest for life, or many do, and that’s just what she needs, having been beaten down so long. I think that Harrison could have gotten to that point much sooner and more directly, and if that meant jettisoning discussions of Walton’s pseudoscientific theories about volcanoes and earthquakes and the interconnection of all human events, so much the better. I think the themes of The Widow Nash are well established without that. But if you can get past these excesses and the clunky narrative machinery before Dulcy’s escape, the novel offers rewards.

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

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.

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.

Self-Flagellation As an Art Form: The Photographer’s Wife

15 Monday Feb 2016

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Review: The Photographer’s Wife, by Suzanne Joinson
Bloomsbury, 2016. 334 pp. $26

Eleven-year-old Prudence Ashton has been dragged by her self-absorbed father, Charles, to Jerusalem in 1920, with no thought to her happiness, formal education, safety, amusement, or social isolation. (Prue’s mother is somewhere back in England, perhaps institutionalized; Prue fondly remembers her storytelling, though also her brutalities.) But to Ashton, Prue’s a nuisance, an encumbrance. The only thing that matters is his lunatic scheme to remake the ancient city along British lines, blowing up whatever’s in the way, to create parks, green spaces–desert? What desert?–and orderly neighborhoods. His colonial nightmare might be funny, if people weren’t dying because they oppose the regime that dreamed it up.

British soldiers search Arabs during anti-Jewish pogroms, April 1920 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

British soldiers search Arabs during anti-Jewish pogroms, April 1920 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Meanwhile, Prue roams the city almost at will, lonely but fascinated. Jerusalem’s sights, sounds, colors, smells, and myriad faces draw her in, and she understands the city better than any of the English trying to bulldoze it. Prue’s only companions are Ihsan, a kindly man who tutors her in Arabic (for which she has a knack), and Eleonora, a beautiful, severely depressed Englishwoman. Like Ihsan, Eleonora’s husband is an Arab nationalist, which pulls Prue into witnessing and unwittingly participating in underground political activity, for which people are being butchered like cattle.

A pilot shows up to work for Ashton, but his real motive is to pry Eleonora away from her “mixed-race” marriage, which to him is “wrong.” Like the other Englishmen in this novel, he’s completely out of touch, expecting Eleonora to agree and takes it hard when she doesn’t. On the other hand, her husband stays away from her for weeks at a time, photographing British brutalities. He wants a child, but she’s too scared to have one; her mother died giving birth to her.

If you’re thinking these people are a dreary, listless bunch, you’re right, and then some. What kept me going were Joinson’s terrific prose and her enviable gift for creating character. For instance, here’s the pilot, recalling his school days:

Willie had experienced a series of vivid fantasies in which a man, for some reason Italian, would magically arrive at helpful moments and offer to be his intermediario. This middle-man, a fixer or wizard, would plant himself between Willie and the rest of the world and sort everything out. He charmed the loathsome housemaster, tricked bullies, coaxed his father back from his ships, and then, when his father’s presence was altogether too much, cast him away again for four years and a day.

But, like Willie, I find nothing to hold onto in the world of this novel, much of which takes place in England in 1937, when Prue has her own child to ignore.

I sometimes believe that we are designed to betray the people we love, just as sometimes we hand everything over, like a bright unclipped purse, or a secret part of our body, to a stranger

I disagree with Prue. I don’t think her life illustrates betrayal. Rather, I see criminal neglect, sadism, manipulation, and craven silence, perpetrated by monsters with whom I can’t identify. As the chief victim, Prue’s a born masochist, which gets very tiresome–Say something, damn it–but of course, she doesn’t. Masochists don’t. But after a while, when all she gets is more and more punishment, to which her silences grow longer and longer, I want to scream. Philandering, abusive husband, jealous of her artistic success as a sculptor? Sure; why not? Government agents pursuing her for reasons they refuse to divulge, in ways that seem flagrantly illegal? Oh, all right.

The Photographer’s Wife claims to be about politics, but I’m not sure what the message is. Part of my confusion comes from the narrative style, which chops the story into irritatingly unfinished bits set in different decades, so that it’s hard to get a coherent picture. Maybe Joinson adopted the mixed-up order to keep a secret, but if so, it’s a gimmick that doesn’t work. The secret seems decidedly weak and anticlimactic, yet the narrative uses it to take an unearned about-face. Even odder is that this turnabout has to do with German persecution of Jews in the late 1930s, when the novel fails to mention its Arab counterpart in 1920. But maybe the real problem politically is with Prue, who’s a total airhead about anything except art. Just as in 1920, she understood nothing of the dangerous currents wracking Palestine, in 1937, she neither knows nor cares what’s happening to the world–except she’s no longer a child, and so has no excuse.

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

A Founding Father’s Love Triangle: Benjamin Franklin’s Bastard

13 Monday Apr 2015

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Review: Benjamin Franklin’s Bastard, by Sally Cabot
Morrow, 2013. 353 pp. $26

Among other things, this first-rate novel shows another, selfish side to the scientist, bon vivant, and wit who helped make the American Revolution. As a printer’s apprentice in 1720s Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin has already been marked as an up-and-coming young man when he seduces Deborah Read, the teenage daughter of the house where he lodges. He heads off to London, promising to be faithful, then fails to answer her letters. Deborah’s mother, who never thought much of Franklin anyway, pushes her into a marriage with another man, who disappears with her small dowry, leaving behind only debts.

Portrait of Benjamin Franklin/i>, by Joseph-Siffrein Duplessis, ca. 1785, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Portrait of Benjamin Franklin, by Joseph-Siffrein Duplessis, ca. 1785, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

On Franklin’s return, he seduces Anne, a tavern maid, who bears his child. Having taken up with Deborah again–they now live together–he asks Anne to give up her infant son, William, to him, and asks Deborah to accept William as her own. Each woman hesitates, but as they see it, they have no choice. Anne lives in desperate poverty, and she sells herself to make ends meet. Her mother already has more children than she can feed–Anne’s father has died, after a long illness–and William may not even survive childhood, if Anne keeps him. Franklin has promised to educate and protect the boy, and he has the money to make good. As for Deborah, she worries that she has little emotional hold on Franklin, and no legal claim until they’ve lived together seven years. Having William under their roof is her best chance to bind Franklin to her.

Naturally, the arrangement causes as many problems as it solves, and Franklin’s the one who comes out ahead. Cabot makes the most of this deceptively simple premise. The women suffer endless torture, some of it self-inflicted, and there’s the rub: They blame one another rather than the man in the middle. The stakes couldn’t be higher, and as the women try to exert their pull on him (and on William), the tension feels ready to explode at any moment. There’s everything here: blood, reputation, passion, fear of abandonment, loyalty, insane love for a child. These are timeless themes, but Cabot has entered her characters’ heads so deeply that I never questioned for a second that they lived during the eighteenth century. Their poignant, often fruitless, efforts to fight for the justice a woman can’t get in a man’s world needs no gloss to contrast with what men talk of, freedom from British tyranny.

Despite all this brilliance, I wonder about her portrayal of Franklin the seducer. He has a gift for making a woman think he’s entirely present with her, a poisonous trait for Deborah and Anne, who’ve never earned anyone’s attention before. But they’re attracted even before they have the chance to bask in his gaze. Moreover, they stay attracted to the point of obsession, even when they’ve learned how restless and self-absorbed he is. The dynamics make sense–Anne and Deborah crave his emotional warmth and chase it all the harder when he withdraws–but I’m not convinced that he should have hooked them so easily.

This reminds me of Cathy Marie Buchanan’s novel, The Painted Girls (reviewed February 26), in which the author narrated to chilling perfection how a self-destructive love affair played out but failed to convince me it should ever have started. That kind of attraction is no easy thing to bring off in fiction. I think Somerset Maugham succeeded in Of Human Bondage, because Philip, the infatuated young man, somehow feels more complete with Mildred, though he also knows she’s not for him. It’s that sense of completion the other two novels needed to convey.

I’m also puzzled how, in Benjamin Franklin’s Bastard, Anne mellows with the years, given how bitter her life has been. She’s more credible as a young mother, crazed for love of the child whom she can’t keep, and as a prostitute who enjoys her sexual power over men. Cabot’s trying to contrast her later-in-life calm with the more rigid, less tolerant Deborah, but I think it’s a stretch.

My review wouldn’t be complete, I suppose, without mentioning pet peeve numero uno: telling the reader how a character feels. In fairness, Cabot does this rarely, but she’s too subtle and masterful a writer to do it at all, and those instances mar what’s otherwise a superb (and eye-opening) novel.

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