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Manipulated and Discarded: The Peculiarities

18 Monday Apr 2022

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Review: The Peculiarities, by David Liss
Tachyon, 2021. 325 pp. $18

London, 1899. Thomas Thresher, twenty-three, nominal scion of the noted banking family of that name, should consider himself fortunate, with a bright future to look forward to. But Thomas feels no hope for anything, present or future. His cruel, tyrannical brother, Walter, the bank’s governor, insists that Thomas serve as a clerk, performing pointless tasks, from which he learns nothing, nor is he meant to, a Dickensian touch. Further, Walter demands that he marry a young woman he’s never seen — a Jewess, no less, an idea that repels him.

But Thomas finds it hard to feel sorry for himself, or to feel much of anything, because Walter has manipulated him all his life and discarded him as worthless — except to do his bidding, as with the strange marriage, for no reason Thomas can fathom. He’s allowed no will or character of his own, and you can see the effects.

What’s more, London itself has changed. Violent fogs that slither like giant, amorphous reptiles bludgeon people to death. Thomas has seen this, but there are other horrors he’s only read about:

The more lurid newspapers published stories of vampires and werewolves, of women giving birth to rabbits, and houses rendered uninhabitable by ghosts. He has read of people possessed by spirits and living men whose own spirits have become trapped in horses, in furnishings, in articles of clothing. There are horrible transformations and mutilations. Things that should not be, if these stories are to be believed, have become not quite commonplace but hardly rare.
Thomas read it all with a fair amount of skepticism until the first leaf sprouted below his right nipple.

These abnormalities and others go by the name of Peculiarities, and in stereotypical British fashion, nobody talks about them. Nobody in polite society, anyway, for the worst afflictions beset the lower classes predominantly, a concept Thomas is loath to accept when his purported fiancée, Esther Feldstein, tells him so.

But you know that Thomas must take her seriously, sooner or later, not least because the bank seems implicated in some way — the impenetrable institution, a Dickensian theme. At the same time, he can accomplish nothing unless he takes himself seriously too, a difficult task when he has been ground under his family’s heel.

His progression makes terrific reading; I’m reminded again of Dickens, say, Pip in Great Expectations. You don’t often see a thriller with such an intricate, forceful character arc, let alone a story that also has enough “no — and furthermore” energy to power a small city. Plenty happens in The Peculiarities, but this is a character-driven novel that explores every emotional transition, and that’s why you care.

Kabbala, a mystical belief system within Judaism, figures in The Peculiarities. Here, a kabbalistic representation of the Tree of Life (courtesy Thomazzo, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

The story invokes magic, as you might have guessed, and the plot revolves around the power it confers. But though characters attempt to cast spells, the magic here, as Liss states in the text and repeats in an afterword, doesn’t operate in defiance of natural laws. Rather, it depends on natural laws “previously hidden or generally unknown.” The distinction will become clearer if you read the novel, which I recommend, but I’ll give you one hint. Thomas was on the way toward becoming a first-rate mathematician at Trinity College, Cambridge, until Walter forced him to quit his studies. The skill comes in handy.

Note too the context of the so-called Peculiarities. That the London fog has become deadly violent, instead of the passive killer known to history, suggests environmental disaster writ large. That it attacks poor neighborhoods more often than others reflects a fact reckoned with today but not during the Victorian Age, and that Thomas at first refuses to accept the evidence rings all too true.

How ironic that he’s turning into a tree, as though the forests are taking vengeance for human depredation. And the births of “rabbit children” represent two themes, natal defects from industrial poisons and the attack on reproductive rights. Surely, Liss intends to criticize capitalism in its unbridled state—consider that the central institution here is Thresher’s Bank.

At once a coming-of-age story, a thriller, and historical fantasy, The Peculiarities has much to offer. The plot twists like an eel, sometimes in melodramatic fashion, with one incredible revelation after another. But the prose is beautiful and lucid, and the characters never strike attitudes, as they might in a full-fledged melodrama. Esther proves more than a match for Thomas, one of several friends with whom he never would have bothered had he not been afflicted and chosen to embark on a journey of discovery.

My regular readers know I avoid historical fantasy, but such is my admiration for Liss’s previous books, most notably A Conspiracy of Paper (capitalism, again), that I grabbed this novel off the shelf. The results confirm my trust, and I suspect they will earn yours.

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

Industrial Murder: The German Heiress

24 Monday Jan 2022

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Review: The German Heiress, by Anika Scott
Morrow, 2020. 357 pp. $17

Two years after World War II has ended, Clara Falkenberg is on the run. Living under an assumed name, on unconvincing fake papers, and with no visible means of support, Clara might be no different from many other Germans who’ve got something to hide. Except she’s the heiress to the Falkenberg mines and ironworks in Essen (a fictive rival to Krupp), and for her wartime activities helping to manage the firm, a British intelligence captain named Fenshaw is on her tail.

Like every other industrial concern, Falkenberg used up and spat out slave laborers by the thousands, which makes Clara an accessory to war crimes, if not a perpetrator. And when she dares attempt to return to bombed-out Essen, hoping to take refuge with a childhood friend, Fenshaw’s thinking right along with her. No matter where she goes, or what she does, he’s never far behind, and there are plenty of people willing to betray anyone for the right price.

706px-Auschwitz-Birkenau_Complex_-_Oswiecim,_Poland_-_NARA_-_305897

U.S. military intelligence photo of Auschwitz-Birkenau, June 1944, which shows the I. G. Farben installation, lower center (courtesy U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

I salute Scott’s authorial bravery in attempting to cast a heroine from a war-criminal mold. I’m not sure she succeeds entirely — or, to be precise, whether she tells her tale with enough moral consciousness, having decided, for obvious reasons, to avoid certain enormities. But The German Heiress nevertheless has a few things going for it, and Scott tries to finesse the moral questions, grounding them in family relationships whose participants may or may not have deluded themselves.

To an extent, that works, though the strategy leaves two unmentioned, outsized elephants in the room — the slave labor program in its conception and practice, and the Holocaust. The Third Reich as a systematically murderous, exploitive regime never quite makes it to these pages, in part because the only visible inhuman act occurs on a relatively small scale and appears, in retrospect, only toward the end.

But approach the novel on its given terms, and you have a vigorous narrative peopled by unusual characters. Clara herself, if perhaps too lightly dealt with from a moral standpoint, has a passion to know the truth about her family, especially her beloved father, now interned as a war criminal. Does he deserve that? she wonders. What did he really think when he saw what was happening, because surely, he must have known? Where does that put her?

Her soul-searching redeems her somewhat, and I appreciate the author’s difficulty here, attempting to make a sympathetic character out of a slave overseer. Clara does have a certain appealing warmth and vivacity, and I like how Scott handles a nascent romance with Jakob, a disabled veteran turned black marketeer. The connection grows slowly, incrementally, with back-tracking and deal-cutting involved.

The storytelling keeps a rapid pace, and the pages turn. The plot revolves around Fenshaw’s pursuit and, more importantly, Clara’s uncovering of ugly family secrets that force her to reexamine her moral position and what she’s responsible for. Whether you can accept Clara’s insulation from stark wartime realities may depend on your point of view, but at least the family loyalty comes through, as does her disillusionment when she learns the truth. As for the narrative as a whole, Jakob’s voice enters abruptly, as does that of a young, disturbed boy who doesn’t believe the war has ended. But these bumps even out as the novel progresses, and Jakob steals many of the scenes he’s in. With him, as with Clara, Scott deploys detail with aplomb:

The stranger caught him, gasped at his weight, buckled and then stabilized. His smell hurtled Jakob back to days he didn’t want to remember. It was the smell of the front, of damp wool and oiled leather, of bergamot and citrus eau de cologne that didn’t quite cover the stink of a soldier’s fear. Whoever it was, he was thin, and he was shaking, and for the few moments Jakob had his arms around him, he felt the stranger’s wildly beating heart.

Two weak links mar the novel. I don’t believe Fenshaw for one second, whether it’s his fanatical pursuit of Clara, his broad-brush character, his fascination with her (which even dates from before the war), or his astonishing security lapses that further the plot. Given all these, the end, the second weak link, seems not only melodramatic but highly improbable.

That said, The German Heiress, a debut novel, is a provocative story, and I like those. And since I’m the type who can’t look at a Bayer aspirin bottle without thinking of the company’s infamous, erstwhile parent, I. G. Farben (disbanded after the war), that I sat still for this book instead of throwing it across the room testifies to the author’s talent for diverting me.

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

Star-Crossed Love: The Glittering Hour

13 Monday Sep 2021

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Review: The Glittering Hour, by Iona Grey
St. Martins, 2019. 468 pp. $29

It’s January 1936, and nine-year-old Alice Carew misses her mother terribly. Mama’s away in Burma with Papa, who has mining interests there, and the family’s Wiltshire estate, Blackwood, feels like a prison to Alice. An artistically precocious child with no head for or interest in reading or mathematics, Alice has no allies in the house save her beloved nanny, Polly, who can’t protect her from Grandmama, as starchy and cold an aristocrat as ever graced England’s shores.

The old lady has never liked her grandchild, censors the girl’s letters to her parents, and even denies Alice the colored pencils Mama bought for her. Good grief. Yet despite her grandmother’s and father’s opinion that Alice has a second-rate mind, the girl sees plenty, including their lack of love for her — but not the reason for it. Therein hangs a tale.

However, all this is prologue to Mama’s back story. Selina Carew, née Lennox, was a Bright Young Thing in the Twenties who burned the candle at both ends. With a passion for expensive amusements and a horror of boredom, Selina and her blue-blood friends cut a swath through London at breakneck speed, awash in champagne and jewels, tossing out arch bon mots and trying to decide whether this or that costume party or dance will be too unbearable; really, isn’t there anything better to do? To her family’s horror, the scandal sheets eat this up, from which Selina derives some satisfaction.

Selina’s no airhead (though I reserve judgment on her friends), because if she were, The Glittering Hour would have a flat, spoiled-brat heroine and require a seismic change from her that would strain credulity. Rather, she has deep conflicts, from which she’s trying to hide. She represents the upper-class cohort that survived the Great War and who dash from party to party so as to conceal the pain of loss. But Selina feels it, can’t help it; like so many women of all social classes, she lost a beloved brother at Passchendaele. What’s more, much as it hurts, she refuses to believe that all joy must end, though admittedly, she overdoes it. Worse, none of that may be spoken of:

Seven years on from the armistice and the scars of the war were still visible everywhere. One got adept at looking past them, or through them, or pretending they weren’t there at all. One got on with things in the best way one could; there was always someone worse off, like the man selling matches, or Lady Renshaw, who had lost all three of her boys… One could never complain about one’s own loss. Selina understood why her mother had buried hers in the deepest recesses of her heart and hardened her face against the world. It was her way of coping, of Getting On. But it was a sad legacy for a boy whose smile could light up a room.

Selina meets Lawrence Weston, an artist who makes his living painting portraits based on photographs for war-bereaved families, but whose real passion is photography — which few people consider an art form. Little do they know. For extra money, Lawrence takes pictures of the rich and famous making public nuisances of themselves — he knows about Selina Lennox before they meet — but he prefers photographing miners, the men selling matches, whatever social commentary his lens seeks out.

William Monk’s 1920 engraving of the Cenotaph in Whitehall, a memorial to the war dead. The wooden structure was later replaced in stone (courtesy http://www.abbottandholder-thelist.co.uk/ via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

I understand what Grey’s trying to achieve by starting with Alice, but that approach has its flaws. Though Alice’s predicament squeezes my heart, as it’s meant to, that’s not where the richest material lies. I prefer Selina’s inner struggle as a Bright Young Thing and her relationship to Lawrence, which has so many social markers, the pair might even inhale and exhale differently, for all I know. The class barrier to romance is hardly new, but Grey’s rendering takes on particularity, because she grounds it so thoroughly in active physical detail. It’s not just Lawrence’s shabby clothes or Selina’s accent that set them apart, though those matter and are what onlookers see and hear; it’s how the physical details reveal these two characters’ different worldviews.

On the minus side, the story hinges on two secrets, neither of which is particularly hard to discern, and the narrative has its melodramatic moments, especially toward the end. I wish Grey didn’t resort to telling, rather than showing, emotions in certain key moments— what a shame, for such an astute observer — and the resulting shorthand phrases sometimes go thump. Further, though Grandmama’s portrayal will curdle your blood, she’s that real, Alice’s father seems like a shirt stuffed with papier-mâché.

Even so, The Glittering Hour finds something new to say about the decade after the Great War, and Selina and Lawrence are appealing characters. It’s worth reading for that, if not for more.

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

If Music Be the Food of Love: Simon the Fiddler

08 Monday Jun 2020

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Review: Simon the Fiddler, by Paulette Jiles
Morrow, 2020. 337 pp. $28

Simon Boudin, though a Southerner by birth, doesn’t care about the Civil War, nearing its bloody end in March 1865. An itinerant fiddler who lives by and for music, he plays at weddings, garden parties, and, when he has to, saloons, staying one step ahead of the Confederate conscription men. But a bar brawl makes him a captive, and he’s quickly hustled into a ragged butternut uniform and sent to Texas. Nominally part of a regimental band, he’s nevertheless involved in a firefight in May — a month after Appomattox — because of a vainglorious Union colonel named Webb. But afterwards, Colonel Webb gives a party, and who should the hired musicians be but Simon and his friends?

It’s a dangerous assignment, because these men have no discharge papers, and the martial law that obtains in these parts treats such wanderers unkindly. Not only that, Colonel Webb treats everyone unkindly and seems to enjoy it. Nevertheless, he has also engaged an Irish governess for his daughter named Doris Dillon, for whom Simon falls, hard. Based on the limited communication that passes between them, he believes — hopes — that she feels similarly. That does it: From that moment, he resolves to woo her. However, he’s conscious of who he is and what he has to offer. Without land or a promising future, he believes he has no chance with her, so he sets out to make himself respectable.

The obstacles are enormous, and setbacks, even tragedy, befall the group of musicians. But Simon is nothing if not resourceful in his single-mindedness, and he expects the path to true love to be bumpy. “No — and furthermore” lives here, and the story sails along; but no matter how rough the water, Simon keep swimming. His hard-working character and determination are part of his charm, but without music, he’d be lost:

Music is clean, clear, its rules are forever, another country for the mind to go to, and so this search for employment among the drinking places of Galveston did not bother him. To Simon, the world of musical structures was far more real than the shoddy saloons in which he had to play. Nothing could match it, nothing in this day-to-day world could ever come up to it. It existed outside him. It was better than he was. He was always on foot in that world, an explorer in busted shoes.

Music and such prose are two pleasures of Simon the Fiddler. Jiles knows folk music the way she knows Texas of that era, which is to say, inside out. Many songs that Simon plays have faded from popularity or current memory, but the author builds scenes around a couple I love, like “Shenandoah” and “Red River Valley,” so that the music itself becomes a character.

I wish I could say that Simon the Fiddler equals Jiles’s previous novel, News of the World. I’m reminded of the old baseball joke about the Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher who insisted he didn’t want to win twenty games in a single season, the mark of excellence, because then everybody would expect him to do it again. So I don’t mean to carp when I say that to me, Simon never achieves the breadth or depth that Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, the protagonist of News of the World, does. (Interestingly, Kidd appears here too, in a cameo.) Where Kidd has flaws and edges, born of experience, observation, and crotchets, Simon just has a bad temper, the only blemish to his otherwise sterling character — and, as it happens, a plot device.

As for Doris, she’s perfect — beautiful, sweet-natured, strong, witty, passionate, a young man’s dream. She may be a bit vain, hating to wear the eyeglasses she can’t see without, but that’s hardly a serious complaint against such a paragon.

Meanwhile, Colonel Webb has no redeeming features, and to craft her villain, Jiles has ticked every box. He’s a lech who makes known his intent to have Doris; a ranting alcoholic; a vicious, controlling husband and father; a liar; and, it’s suggested, involved in graft. Webb’s villainy increases the pressure on Doris, and therefore on her white knight. But it also feels melodramatic, weakening the novel, even as it motivates Simon to move faster. What price page turning?

News of the World is a more fulfilling, memorable book. But Simon the Fiddler makes a good yarn; and, after all, the world loves a lover. Take it for that, and you’ll enjoy it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher; this post previously appeared in Historical Novels Review in different, shorter form.

Big Pharma, 1899: Deadly Cure

24 Monday Jun 2019

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Review: Deadly Cure, by Lawrence Goldstone
Pegasus, 2017. 295 pp. $26

As the nineteenth century lurches to a gaudy, jingoistic close, Brooklyn physician Noah Whitestone has much to hope for. He has a busy, satisfying medical practice in partnership with his father, a fiancée as intelligent and independent-minded as she is devoted to him, and a cause to inspire him: preaching against patent medicines, which kill as often as cure, usually through appallingly large doses of opiates.

Still, Noah carries the scars from the death of his stillborn son and first wife, and worries that though he admires his fiancée, he feels no passion for her, beautiful and vivacious though she is. He’s also piqued that his father and he have to run themselves ragged to earn a living, while Noah’s hoity-toity neighbors consult Dr. Arnold Frias, an unctuous glad-hander far more gifted at politics than medicine.

That envy causes Noah no end of trouble, for when Dr. Frias is busy hobnobbing with Admiral Dewey and other military heroes recently returned from the Spanish-American War, one of said hoity-toity neighbors sends for Noah. Her five-year-old son, just getting over a cough, has taken a sharp turn for the worse. Dr. Whitestone suspects opiate poisoning, but he must stabilize the child’s respiratory difficulties first, and does so with two drops of laudanum, a dose too low to hurt the boy. When Noah returns a few hours later, however, the child is dying, beyond help.

Noah’s convinced that Frias must have prescribed too much dope to cure the boy’s cough; or someone else was concurrently dosing the lad with patent medicines; or both. But such is Frias’s social position that Noah’s left holding the bag. He’ll be lucky not to face prosecution for murder, while revocation of his medical license seems likely.

Papaver somniferum, the opium poppy, as it appeared in Dr. Otto Wilhelm Thomé, Flora von Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz [Flora of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland] 1885, Gera, Germany (courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Moreover, a reporter for a radical newspaper buttonholes him and claims that the boy’s death is one of many such, victim of experimentation by unscrupulous doctors testing the effects of heroin, a new morphine derivative. Noah finds that hard to believe, and the reporter’s general political outlook, highly critical of American military atrocities in the Philippines, leaves him skeptical as to motive. But as the trail to discover what killed the boy leads to German drug companies and the deaths of whistleblowers, the good doctor doesn’t know whom to trust.

Having recently read Lucy Inglis’s Milk of Paradise, a rambling, informative history of opium, I learned that the German chemist credited with deriving heroin from morphine was looking for a cough suppressant powerful enough to help even consumptives, yet would not be addictive. Medical science believed that he had succeeded, a persistent, misguided theory that matters here. So does the chemist’s other claim to fame, the synthesis of acetylsalicylic acid, soon to be known as aspirin (a discovery he made the same week as that of heroin, by the way).

The political and medical contexts of these two drugs therefore shape the narrative, with patents and royalties as a possible motive for mayhem. But Noah, who falls easy prey to moral certainties, learns that with lives and money at stake, right and wrong become more difficult to distinguish, so that he winds up doubting himself, his father, and cherished beliefs. The potential involvement of Big Pharma in nefarious activities could be today’s headlines, as could the debate over American behavior in a colonial war.

Goldstone excels at period detail, especially that of medical science, and his authorial voice carries authority. When he writes that Frias’s Benz automobile, specially brought over from Germany, costs a thousand dollars, I’m sure it does, and that it looks exactly as described. Some authors might suggest rather than state, saving themselves the trouble of knowing absolutely everything, but Goldstone sweats these details. When two doctors discuss a diagnosis, for instance, they’re utterly believable as medical colleagues — to this layman, at least. The only slip I noticed was talk about allergies, a word that hadn’t yet entered the language. But overall, he creates a pretty impressive effect.

At times, that zeal for minutiae leads to information dumps, but mostly, the atmosphere keeps you turning the pages — that, and the “no — and furthermore.” Whether it’s new evidence that challenges Noah’s perceptions of truth, or unexpected obstacles that make him stumble, the path to the resolution remains properly bumpy until the very end. Along the way, Goldstone offers priceless dialogue, especially for Maribeth, Noah’s fiancée, and her brother, a medical colleague of his whose iconoclasm made me laugh.

Where Deadly Cure falls short is the absolutely improbable derring-do of the last few chapters, the cartoon villains, and the melodrama that results. Sometimes, when a writer is so convincing about the troubles the protagonist faces, there’s no believable solution. But if you can suspend your doubts, Deadly Cure is an entertaining thriller and a reminder that controversies involving industrial medicine go back a long way.

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

Playing Favorites: The Wartime Sisters

17 Monday Jun 2019

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Review: The Wartime Sisters, by Lynda Cohen Loigman
St. Martins, 2019. 285 pp. $28

Talk about sibling rivalry. From the moment Ruth Kaplan’s younger sister, Millie, first breathes oxygen, the older girl ceases to exist. No one sees her, pays attention, listens, or thinks she has any talents a girl needs. Oh, sure, she’s bright, bookish, and well organized, but since when have those qualities attracted a husband? Not in Brooklyn in the late 1930s, at any rate, when Ruth comes of age, as a serious young woman studying accounting at college. And not so long as thoroughly modern Millie’s around, cheerful, pretty in a way that turns heads, and easygoing.

Do Mama and Papa Kaplan try to balance the rivalry or combat it in any way? On the contrary; they do their best to create and perpetuate it:

Though Ruth’s tiny transgressions were few and far between, they never seemed to escape her mother’s notice. Any misstep Ruth made was a short, shallow wrinkle on an otherwise smooth and pristine tablecloth. Millie’s slipups, by contrast, were like a full glass of burgundy tipped over onto clean white damask. To their mother’s discerning eye, Ruth’s wrinkles were conspicuous. But her sister’s stains were overlooked and hastily covered — anything so that the meal could continue being served.

What a chilly portrait Loigman has created, a premise so simply elegant, with so few moving parts, that there should be no heavy machinery required to create power, poignancy, or depth. Ruth escapes Brooklyn, marrying Arthur, a decent guy, supposedly as dull and plodding as herself, a whiz kid who, in the war years, gets posted to the federal armory in Springfield, Massachusetts, to do weapons research. Millie’s no-good boyfriend, handsome and dashing but worthless to all eyes but hers, marries her and enlists after Pearl Harbor, also leaving behind a young son, Michael.

The Springfield Armory’s experimental workshop, 1923. In the right background, wearing a lab coat, stands John Garand, inventor of the rifle that became standard army issue in World War II (courtesy National Park Service via Wikimedia Commons)

I like this part of the story best. Told in flashback, the narrative shows how the sisters’ estrangement only hardens with time. Kaplan mère is quite a piece of work, vicious and controlling. Love is sweet, she says, but it tastes better with bread, and she preaches to Millie the unalterable fantasy that the girl will marry a fabulously rich man who takes care of all her wants, every single second, smitten by her beauty and charm. My grandmother’s version was, “It’s just as easy to marry a rich girl as a poor one,” which led her to campaign, hard, against my father choosing my mother. So I’m right there with Loigman in all this.

Indeed, when Loigman lets character drive her narrative, which she does until about the halfway point, The Wartime Sisters packs a punch. After that, however, the contrived story takes over. The sibling rivalry, though still essential, gets diluted by the presence of too many other voices, and the narrative descends into predictable melodrama. Loigman might have redeemed this had the sisters confronted one another properly, with a knockdown, drag-out fight that’s been brewing all their lives. Instead, when their obligatory battle arrives, it peters out much too soon — and, even worse, I get the impression that the author has played favorites, tipping the scales. One sister apologizes; one doesn’t, pleading that she wasn’t responsible. Baloney. It takes two to tango.

The prose style reads almost like nonfiction, practically devoid of metaphor. However, I like the dialogue very much, and the author uses it to create short, powerful scenes. The best concern the sisters and, later, Lillian, wife of the commanding officer at the armory, whose upbringing was even more harrowing than theirs and forms a point of comparison. But too many characters seem vacant, whether Ruth’s daughters, the nasty, bigoted busybody wife that probably every military installation must have, or the caricature of Mama Kaplan, a dreadful person with no apparent redeeming features.

Strangely, The Wartime Sisters might have worked had Loigman merely let the sisters slug it out. But once a subplot takes over, the sisters have no chance to get at one another, and the narrative follows the expected route. Ironically, making those extra pieces fit probably demands more work, when filling out the characters already present might have sufficed. It’s too bad; The Wartime Sisters has its moments. I just wish there were more of them.

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

St. Peter, Don’t You Call Me… : The Widows

01 Monday Apr 2019

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Review: The Widows, by Jess Montgomery
Minotaur, 2018. 317 pp. $27

When Lily Ross’s husband, Daniel, sheriff of Bronwyn County, Ohio, is shot to death in March 1925 under circumstances that beg for investigation, the widow undertakes to learn the truth. Though the bereaved spouse/lover detective is by now a trope, you couldn’t ask for a more compelling premise than Montgomery provides. Not only does Lily quickly learn that Daniel led a secret life with another woman — again, something we’ve heard before — but that woman, Marvena, is recently widowed herself and a union organizer. Bronwyn County is coal country, and the mine owners’ exploitative practices loom large — wages paid in scrip instead of cash, the company store, yellow-dog contracts, Pinkerton thugs; the whole nine yards.

“Keeping Warm,” a cartoon appearing in the Los Angeles Times in November 1919, reveals a common attitude of that time about mine labor disputes (courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

The miners’ cause lends potent substance and background to Daniel’s death and Lily’s investigation, not least because Daniel’s half-brother, Luther, owns the mines. Accordingly, the story involves many more deaths, beatings, and threats of violence, whether from mobs or individuals, authentic to labor history in the coalfields. Montgomery makes Daniel a violent man too, an erstwhile prizefighter capable of great rages. Lily’s least pleasant discoveries concern aspects of his past that show how he hid his violent side from her.

Much of this she learns from Marvena, who shares the narrative point of view. Though the story wouldn’t work without her, Marvena’s a weak link. She’s an admirable person who has suffered for her beliefs, but maybe that’s the problem — either she’s too earnest, or Montgomery was in creating her. Marvena plays two notes, over and over — whom can I trust? how can I keep the miners together when the union-busters have all the power? — and you can’t argue, but she needs more. Marvena’s emotional world feels too narrow, despite a passage or two about what her two daughters mean to her. What the miners endure is absolutely heartbreaking, and the way management maintains power at all costs reads like a combination of serfdom and three-card Monte. Nevertheless, to me, Marvena remains a symbol, an icon of resistance, rather than a complete person, and if she had a flaw other than the suspicious nature she has honestly earned, I’d believe her more readily.

Lily needs flaws as well. Men call her stubborn and foolhardy, but they would. Though she suffers from Daniel’s silences when he’s alive, she never regrets having married him, and though she briefly resents him for having died, that doesn’t stick. Why the whitewash? Even so, she comes across more fully than Marvena, particularly in passages like the following, a flashback to her courtship of Daniel — in a delightful switch, she’s the aggressor — when she spies on him training for a fight:

She took in every bit of him with her gaze — the bow of his head as if he worshiped at the swing of the bag, the pull and stretch of his muscles with each wrathful thrum, thrum, thrum of his fists against the bag. She felt in that beating rhythm his intention to keep going until mind and memory and muscle all melted to mere spoonfuls of sopping grayness.

Montgomery writes well, if unevenly— occasionally, her dialogue dumps information — but I wish she had more confidence in her skill. I want especially to see more emotional moments like the one quoted above, in which her protagonists’ inner lives expand to take in what they love, hate, or dream of. Instead, the author focuses on action-reaction moments, in which Lily or Marvena take in what they’ve learned or experienced and wrestle with it, often posing rhetorical questions, a device that easily wears thin. They’re strong women, and they have dreams, so why are they so tightly bound to what’s in front of them?

That approach may result because of the many, many plot twists, which, though they keep the reader guessing, hurt the narrative in the long run. It’s not that Montgomery ignores her characters’ inner journeys, exactly, but she seems less sure of herself with them, which leads me to suspect that she’s more comfortable twisting the story. But that’s not where real tension lies, and the plot turns sometimes seem improbable; more than a couple ooze melodrama. Likewise, had the villains occupied fuller characters than plain villainy, they would have felt truer to life.

All the same, I like The Widows, which features two female protagonists who don’t wait for men to rescue them, a feminist perspective that remains consistent. And as the grandson of a staunch union man, I applaud this narrative, a reminder of an ugly chapter in our nation’s history.

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

East African Gothic: Leopard at the Door

06 Monday Mar 2017

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Review: Leopard at the Door, by Jennifer McVeigh
Putnam, 2016. 385 pp. $26

Ever since her mother died, and her father sent her to live with her grandparents in England, Rachel Fullsmith has dreamed of returning to Kenya, where she was born. Now, at age eighteen, against her father’s advice, she has spent her meager savings for her passage to Mombasa. As Rachel quickly learns, she finds hostility rather than fond memories of what she loved as a child.

That hostility comes in two forms, personal and political. The year is 1952, and the independence movement known as Mau Mau has been gathering force. Thus far, the Mau Mau have refrained from attacking white residents, though they have murdered and mutilated Africans who refuse to swear their loyalty oath. But as the violence and British countermeasures ratchet up, Rachel will have excruciating choices to make.

A detachment of the King's African Rifles, on patrol against Mau Mau forces, ca. 1952-56 (courtesy Imperial War Museum, London, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

A detachment of the King’s African Rifles, on patrol against Mau Mau forces, ca. 1952-56 (courtesy Imperial War Museum, London, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

As the opening scenes make clear, the instincts her mother taught her stress compassion toward fellow humans over race loyalty and its inherent prejudice. Right off the boat, she’s delighted to realize that she still speaks good Swahili, and that the port of Mombasa looks and feels like heaven, despite the filth and bad smells. Her father’s Kikuyu foreman, who meets her and drives her upcountry, calls her Aleela (“she cries”), a pet name she had as a child, which touches her. But her father hasn’t come to greet her, and when Rachel reaches the farm, she sees another woman there, Sara, whom he never mentioned in his letters. It takes no time for Sara to let Rachel know that she shares her father’s bed, runs everything (including him), and plans to marry him. And rather than ease the shock, Sara takes the first chance to ask Rachel privately, “Why did you come?” Aleela will be doing a lot of crying, it seems.

I love McVeigh’s premise and the way she sets it up, with potent economy and subtlety. She knows how to spin a riveting narrative so that the tension never flags, and she devotes this skill to advance her political themes, embodied in Sara, who grew up in Nairobi, hates rural Kenya, which she calls “barren,” and holds herself distant from and superior to anything African. That makes her as different as she could be from Rachel’s mother, and the young woman pays the price, both in what she’s lost and her putative stepmother’s authoritarian regime. Sara forbids her to spend so much time outdoors on the land, urges her to dress in a more “feminine” way, and openly questions whether Rachel’s absence of fear or hatred for Africans means she’s been spoiled or tainted. McVeigh wants you to see that colonialism exists because of people like Sara.

Since I’ve spent time in Africa myself, though never had the good fortune to visit Kenya, I was delighted to read descriptions like this, of Rachel’s impressions of Mombasa:

Bougainvillea tumble over white walls, purple, orange, crimson red, amidst the trumpets of white datura flowers and clusters of pink hibiscus. Dhow captains spread their intricately woven carpets on the street for sale, beating out the dust in thick clouds. Porters in bare feet and white lunghis pad across the hot cobbles between piles of old newspaper and fish bones, past the Arab men dressed in white robes, who sit on low wooden stools drinking tea.

Despite all this brilliance, however, the characters ring false. Sara has no redeeming qualities whatsoever; at one point, Rachel even wonders why her father would have her around and ascribes it to sexual power. But that’s never developed enough to seem real. Moreover, making such a hateful, disagreeable person the mouthpiece for colonialism undermines takes the low road to simplicity and undermines what the author’s trying to say.

Ditto Steven Lockhart, the corrupt, abusive district officer who likes torturing Africans and warns Rachel that he’ll rape her one day. Of both Sara and Steven, I kept thinking, “They’re not really going to say or do that, will they?” only to slap my head when they really do. What’s more, for these characters to be as vicious as they are and get away with it requires Rachel and her father to be as passive as bricks. Not only don’t I believe that–each has taken bold steps in life–I find passivity uninteresting as a literary device.

What that means is that Leopard at the Door must sustain the tension via melodrama. I won’t go into the perils that McVeigh unleashes, which are truly terrifying. Even so, the novel’s Gothic aspects make it less powerful than it should be. That’s a terrible shame. As McVeigh notes in a postscript (and contrary to widely held belief), the facts suggest that the colonial administration wielded far more terror than the Mau Mau did, and in a manner flagrantly belying the rule of law the British pretended to uphold as a “civilizing” mission. I only wish this book had set the record straight in a more nuanced, three-dimensional manner.

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

Cowboy Ethics: As Good As Gone

19 Monday Dec 2016

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Review: As Good As Gone, by Larry Watson
Algonquin, 2016. 341 pp. $27

To an outsider, it might seem as if little of the 1960s have touched Gladstone, Montana. But to Calvin Sidey, an aging, tough-minded cowboy who withdrew from the town years ago to live alone on its outskirts, the world of 1963 has taken over. Even on a brief drive through, he recognizes few landmarks, and mentioning the names of people he once knew raises puzzled looks or brings the news that this one has died, while the other lives in a nursing home.

Bozeman, Montana, city hall, fire station, and opera house, built 1890, demolished, 1966 (Courtesy Historic American Buildings Survey, National Park Service, via Wikimedia Commons)

Bozeman, Montana, city hall, fire station, and opera house, built 1890, demolished, 1966 (Courtesy Historic American Buildings Survey, National Park Service, via Wikimedia Commons)

Calvin wouldn’t have ventured into Gladstone at all, if his estranged son, Bill, hadn’t asked him to watch over the grandkids while Bill and his wife, Marjorie, go to Missoula so that she can have an operation. Nobody likes this arrangement. Bill resents Calvin for abandoning him and his sister after their mother died; Marjorie doesn’t trust Calvin to fulfill his responsibilities; and Calvin would rather bite the head off a rattlesnake than stay in Gladstone or, worse, have to talk to his son. Then again, Calvin hates talking to anybody.

Naturally, plenty will happen during Bill and Marjorie’s absence, putting Calvin and everyone around him under pressure. As Good As Gone would have been better had much less happened, but I like Watson’s premise, which gives his protagonist plenty of scope. I also believe the look and feel of Gladstone, from the dive bars to the stores, the weather, the cooking, the small-town atmosphere, and the social attitudes, the latter rendered with a light touch. The characters sense that they should be more tolerant, but they can’t bring themselves to act that way, and whatever’s happening in the world–civil rights marches, protests–is all Out There someplace, lurking on the edge of consciousness.

While Bill and Marjorie are away, Calvin charges at conflicts rather than step aside, because that’s who he is. When a neighbor’s dog gets into the garbage cans and strews litter all over–a chronic problem, he hears–Calvin tells the neighbor that if it happens again, he’ll shoot the dog. Such is his reputation that the neighbors pick up the trash and keep the dog leashed. Calvin also rushes into action when an irate tenant (Bill’s a real estate agent who owns rental property) barges into the Sidey home to scream about an eviction notice. I don’t have to tell you that the young man stalking Calvin’s beautiful, seventeen-year-old granddaughter, had better watch his step; that confrontation is set up almost from the get-go.

There’s more–the widow next door who takes a fancy to Calvin; his sensitive grandson, Will, bullied by his so-called friends; Marjorie’s operation (a hysterectomy), which goes wrong, or appears to; and Bill’s ache for the father who’s remained out of reach. Six narrators tell this story, of uneven range and strength; except for the widow, the women’s voices seem insubstantial. Moreover, the presence of six narrators implies many subplots to keep spinning, two of which have little or nothing to do with the main narrative.

The myriad threads obscure the fabric of what matters most: Calvin’s grief over his dead wife, which led him to abandon his kids, and how Bill feels about that. Part of the problem is that Watson can’t seem to decide which to focus on, Calvin’s character or Bill’s loss of him. But either way, though the narrative mentions what these men feel and describes them having the feelings, they abruptly leave off grappling with them, and each other. Rather, events represent emotions, and only in that way do the characters take them in.

For instance, Bill fears for Marjorie’s life, and that his mother’s death will be repeated. His fear is irrational, and he knows it, but that’s how deeply he’s been scarred. Life feels fragile to him, and everything he has can be swept away. Unfortunately, Watson fiddles with this very human paradox, as if he can’t bear to let a rational man have an irrational fear; my God, what will the reader think of him? So melodrama takes over: Marjorie slips into a brief coma, and it appears, for awhile, that she might actually die.

In fact, melodrama undoes much fine work in As Good As Gone, for many chapters end just before impending violence, a cliff-hanger technique that resembles the Westerns whose myths Watson wishes to debunk. Calvin’s courage and willingness to act are admirable, but his stubborn refusal to listen to anyone else, his code of vigilante justice, and the way he equates softer, human feelings with weakness leads to trouble. These are compelling themes, and as I read, I couldn’t help thinking of Lonely Are the Brave, a terrific 1962 film starring Kirk Douglas. I only wish that Watson had used his gift for economy to better effect, much as the movie did.

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