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Searchers: The Sun Walks Down

27 Monday Feb 2023

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Review: The Sun Walks Down, by Fiona McFarlane
FSG, 2023. 352 pp. $28

September 1883 witnesses spectacular sunsets in South Australia—and in Fairly, a small town in the outback, every parent’s nightmare has just occurred. Denny Wallace, age six, has gone missing, having walked only a short distance from home and apparently become disoriented during a dust storm. The town, and several strangers, sets out to look for him.

This simple premise prompts a tale more about Fairly and the searchers than it does about Denny, who has relatively little to say. A quiet, reserved child, something of an odd duck, he gets drowned out in this novel amid many loud voices. I think that’s the author’s intention—the searchers and onlookers, most of them, act out of selfish motives, which take center stage. Several characters, when they want something, simply take it, a recurring motif.

But even the unappealing characters are unintentionally funny, even hilarious. That makes an unusual juxtaposition with a child at risk, to say the least; the opening chapters of the book led me to wonder whether I was reading a comedy. Throughout, humor is seldom far away—welcome, but occasionally jarring.

Alexander Schramm’s painting A Scene in South Australia (ca. 1850) shows an idealized version of relations between colonials and indigenous people (courtesy Art Gallery of South Australia via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

The characters’ thoughts and actions are meant to recount Australia’s story at that time. The lack of rain makes wheat growing an iffy proposition, and sheep and cattle ranching fare little better. The white community looks upon the indigenous peoples whose land they’ve taken as barely human, certainly not their equals, despite lifetime loyalties to individuals. Their suspicions of outsiders, class consciousness (so much for the democratic frontier), and religious and sexual attitudes come to the fore in the hue and cry after Denny.

McFarlane pays minute attention to social interactions. Take The Sun Walks Down as a panoply of characters revealing themselves, often in subtle ways, and you’ll appreciate its essence. In the author’s hands, even the most mundane actions reveal character, as with this passage about Sergeant Foster, a police officer summoned from a larger town to take charge, and Jimmy, an Aborigine tracker he’s employed:

Finally, the sky turned red and the sun went down and here they are, having made tense camp around a fire built large enough to attract attention, in the hope that the boy might see it and seek them out. Jimmy didn’t like the idea of attracting attention, which is, Foster thinks as he smokes by the fire, typical of natives; their every word and act is directed by some dreadful superstition. The local men produced a supply of rum and offered it around, and Foster refused for both himself and Jimmy. The men objected to this refusal on Jimmy’s behalf, grew boisterous, then maudlin, and are now asleep and snoring—one with a courteous squeal, and the other like a church organ. Foster perches, disgruntled, in the front pew.

The novel contains a raft of people, and McFarlane portrays nearly all of them brilliantly. I particularly like Denny’s fifteen-year-old sister, angry at everyone and everything but more capable than many of the adults around her. Foster, the pigheaded sergeant, takes an outsize role in the narrative and an even larger one in his head.

Minna, newlywed at eighteen, has a good heart but resents Denny for getting lost, because that means her constable husband is called away, and she can’t sleep with him. Two artists float through the story, one English, one Swedish; the locals don’t know quite what to make of them.

However, the one character I don’t get is Denny. He has the delusion that nature is a god that speaks to him, occasionally embodied in various adult rescuers, whose presence he flees. Really? Is he psychotic? Doesn’t seem so otherwise, and though his father scares him—an ill-tempered soul, to be sure—his mother’s tender, and four sisters dote on him. I don’t see great trauma; resilience, more like.

I wonder whether Denny has to avoid his rescuers to let the story go in particular directions, which, if true, makes his visions too convenient. In any case, the novel lacks a coherent plot building to a climax, though many scenes provide tension in themselves.

Then again, The Sun Walks Down offers significant commentary about colonial Australia involving racism, the struggle to earn a living, misogyny, social rivalries, and the influence of religion. McFarlane depicts the landscape beautifully, not least the sunsets—which, toward the end, you learn have come about because of the Krakatoa volcanic eruption.

Just as Denny’s a bit odd, perhaps not entirely believable, so too the narrative in which his disappearance forms the center. If you will, read the novel for its characterizations, descriptions of nature, and as a snapshot of Australia at the time, and you’ll be satisfied.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book through my work for Historical Novels Review.

Adoption by Blackmail: The Myth of Surrender

15 Monday Aug 2022

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Review: The Myth of Surrender, by Kelly O’Connor McNees
Pegasus, 2022. 313 pp. $26

Chicago, 1960. Doreen, eighteen, slips out of the house one night and goes to the movies in what her mother would call the wrong part of town. There, she meets what Mother would call the wrong sort of young man, a Black college-bound student; eventually, Doreen sleeps with him. The first time, he uses a condom, but not subsequently.

Meanwhile, Margie, sixteen, works part-time at a jewelry store, and one day, her boss inveigles her to a basement. She has no idea what he’s after, or even how intercourse works, but she does know she doesn’t want it, only she’s not strong enough to repel him.

After these two young women discover they’re pregnant, they cross paths at a maternity home run by the Catholic Church. There, in return for agreeing to give up their children for adoption, they’ll receive free room and board, medical care, and absolute discretion.

Jacob Riis’s photo of Sister Irene and children at New York Foundling orphanage, 1888, about seventy years before this novel takes place (courtesy Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

The prospect of returning to their previous lives as though the shame and burden never happened relieves Doreen and Margie, at least at first. However, if they decide, after all, to keep their children, they’ll have to repay the money spent on their care. As with the other young women there, neither Margie nor Doreen could afford that.

Moreover, the nun running the home, Sister Simon, tells them the same message every day, seemingly intended to make sure nobody becomes attached to her newborn. Each girl there is morally depraved, Sister Simon says, unfit to mother that child conceived in sin, whereas the prospective adoptive parents deserve their good fortune and will raise the child better than the sinful girl ever could. Young, frightened, without family support, and impressionable, the expecting young mothers tell themselves all this must be true, and they wouldn’t have things any other way.

Margie and Doreen strike up an unlikely friendship, the younger girl a goody-goody afraid of her own shadow, the elder having practiced a different sort of life.

Whether she was eager or trying not to be, Doreen thought, the result was the same: the trying. Margie tried so hard at everything. Her whole life seemed calculated for the sake of the judges she imagined sat on a dais she dragged with her everywhere she went. But the score never came in. The reward for all that trying was simply getting to do it all over again the next day.

But we’re not talking about doormats here. McNees has several twists in store, all credible, which kick the narrative into higher gear. For the two protagonists, their stay at the maternity home shows them, in ways they can’t ignore, how powerless they are. (A telling example is the “expert” medical care they receive, from a sadistic brute of a doctor who begrudges them every second of his time and who leaves no doubt of his contempt for them.) How Doreen and Margie handle their powerlessness enlarges the narrative beyond a poignant moral tale into a struggle for freedom.

Also trailing them into their futures are the secrets both guard with their lives, including, but not limited to, the identity of their babies’ fathers — and recall that Doreen’s lover is Black, therefore unacceptable to her family. But the greatest lie that Sister Simon tells them concerns the children they’re supposed to forget and whom they’re forbidden by law to trace. The assurance that accompanies such falsehoods doesn’t go entirely unquestioned, however. One young woman actually dares ask, “How would you know?” a rare instance of backtalk, for which she’s immediately punished.

Consequently, from a shameful problem as old as our alleged civilization, The Myth of Surrender spins a potent story that grabs you from several directions. Heightening the effect, McNees shows her terrific eye for mother-daughter relationships and family life in general. If either young woman ever thought passing through the maternity home would spell the end of their problems, they are sorely mistaken.

I do think Sister Simon makes an over-the-top villain, just as Sister Joan, another nun, plays good cop to the other’s bad one. I’d have liked a subtler, more artful approach there. I also think McNees could have omitted the brief sections titled “We” between those chapters narrated by her protagonists. They’re essays, and though I have no quarrel with what’s in them, they’re not part of the story, which speaks loudly enough.

But these are quibbles. The Myth of Surrender is a terrific novel, based on an astounding fact the author cites in an afterword: Between 1945 and 1973, the year of Roe v. Wade, 1.5 million pregnant girls and women gave up their children for adoption at maternity homes run by various charities. This may be an old story, but McNees’s interpretation of it is as timely as ever.

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

Convent Under Siege: The Maiden of All Our Desires

20 Monday Jun 2022

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Review: The Maiden of All Our Desires, by Peter Manseau
Arcade, 2022. 327 pp. $27

Somewhere in midfourteenth-century England, the plague ravages the populace, as it does elsewhere in Europe. A remote convent, deliberately secluded to discourage visitors, secular or ecclesiastic, is under siege—from the threat of infection, yes, but two other forces as well. One is a snowstorm the like of which nobody can recall seeing, and which feels and looks apocalyptic. The third threat, perhaps the most serious, arrives from above in a different sense: The bishop, having heard rumors of heresy at the convent, is coming to investigate.

Nobody dares talk about the danger, and the abbess, Mother John (many of the nuns have taken masculine names, according to which religious figures inspire them), seems to deny any peril at all. But around her lurks the fear that wherever a bishop looks for heresy, he’ll find it. Moreover, he may not have far to look, for the convent, especially Mother John and those she influences most strongly, puts much faith in the sayings of the previous abbess, Ursula. For instance: “Birds see all but say nothing we can understand, which make them a perfect symbol of the divine.”

You see the problem here: Since when is a woman’s philosophy meaningful, particularly if it replaces standard (read: created by men) dogma? Mother John would object to the accusation of replacement, arguing that her beliefs coexist with those of the church. However, her outlook, though scrupulously devout, seems based on common sense — rather refreshing, if you ask me, and perhaps most modern readers would agree.

But nobody’s asking us, or anyone else, for the spirit of inquiry is precisely the problem. A good fourteenth-century Christian is supposed to obey, not think, let alone question. And the manuscripts of Ursula’s that Mother John refuses to get rid of could send her and many others to the stake.

Consequently, The Maiden of All Our Desires deals with where faith comes from, what it means, and how the earthly world gets in the way. The Department of Earthly Delights has its ambassador in Father Francis, the priest who hears the women’s confessions and performs other necessary sacraments, but who might have preferred to follow wood carving as a career, and who has known forbidden pleasures. That means he has secrets to keep and sins for which to atone.

A working water mill in Lyme Regis, UK. An ingenious mill wheel figures in the novel (courtesy Zephyris, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

The novel purports to unfold over the course of one day, divided into the various prayer services–matins, lauds, prime, and so forth. Umberto Eco followed a similar framework in The Name of the Rose, though at greater length and with greater coherence. In Manseau’s novel, it’s not always immediately clear when events happen, the day of the snowstorm or in the past, but bet on the latter, and you’ll be right most often.

Back story rules, which can be difficult to sort out, but stay with it. There’s much here to enjoy. A different literary conceit, from the publisher (not the author), invokes Matrix and Hamnet, among other comparisons, which proves, once again, that the publicist’s favorite game provides the surest way to minimize in glibness each book’s essence or meaning. What else would you expect from a soundbite?

That said, having loved both those other books, I see a resemblance, though not because Matrix involves an abbess. It’s the tactile prose.

She reached out timidly to touch the crucifix, to be certain of what she saw. With two cracked, scratching fingers, her hands shaking like a bride’s, she moved down the leg from knee to ankle. The wood was cold and smooth, carved perfectly. She traced her fingers along the rounded line that joined the legs, and felt the angles that made its curve: numberless angles, like a tiny and perfect mountain range; peaks formed meticulously by a skilled hand and the finest of edges, undetectable by sight, but so apparent to the touch. She felt too the grain of the wood and the remnants of rings, the signature of the tree this once had been.

A typical passage, this. Throughout the novel, Manseau’s descriptions reveal inner life, setting, and conflict. It’s reason enough to read the book, but consider also the story, which, despite the occasionally confusing time frames, keeps you riveted and offers a satisfying ending. As for characters, Mother John and Ursula come through, but I would have liked more differentiation among the nuns, other than their petty rivalries.

Further, it’s curious how Father Francis commands an outsize presence in this community of women, though perhaps that results from the necessities of plot and the importance to it of earthly desire. Nevertheless, Manseau, curator of religion at the Smithsonian Institution, knows his ground thoroughly and has written a thought-provoking, engaging, and entertaining novel.

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

Starting Place: The School of Mirrors

13 Monday Jun 2022

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Review: The School of Mirrors, by Eva Stachniak
Morrow, 2022. 399 pp. $17

The year, 1755. Thirteen-year-old Véronique Roux lives in a squalid Paris apartment with her mother, who scratches out a living mending old clothes, and three younger brothers. One day, Maman tells Véronique she’s to go into service for a wealthy nobleman, and just like that, the girl’s shipped off to a splendid home a brief carriage ride from Versailles, where Louis XV holds court. Naturally, her mother receives certain financial considerations.

Told that her patron is a Polish nobleman attached to the court, Véronique is groomed for her upcoming service to him. She’s given plenty to eat; her skin and hair cleansed of lice and treated for various ailments common to poor children; she’s taught penmanship, posture, and comportment; to improve her singing and recitation; and, most important, instruction, religious and secular, stressing modesty, restraint, and obedience. In other words, qualities foreign to the French monarchy.

The emotions had to be controlled at all times. Anything vulgar had to be strictly avoided. Eating fast and too much, running, jumping, stomping our feet, shouting, cursing, showing either sadness or joy. ‘News of a death or a proposal of marriage… must be met with equal composure. Always smile, whether you are happy or not. Make your eyes sparkle, no matter what you are thinking of.’

Meanwhile, the narrative also recounts life within the palace at Versailles. In particular, we learn how the king, jaded and bored with his caged existence, longs for pleasures to lift his heart (and another part of his anatomy, which seems to rule his moods). He can’t stand dealing with matters of state, which include a war that’s going badly, so he spends as little time on these as possible. How droll.

Rather, everyone close to him, most especially his former mistress and closest advisor, Madame de Pompadour, do their best to divert him with gossip, prop up his flagging ego, and provide tender flesh to interest that other, significant part of him. Practically from the get-go, the reader understands what Véronique doesn’t: what her “service” will entail, and who her patron really is. She’s a bit dense for a Parisian girl, especially a beauty who’s endured advances from strange men and whose mother has all the tenderness of a brick, therefore the embodiment of hard lessons.

Charles André Van Loo’s portrait of Mme de Pompadour, née Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, ca. 1755 (courtesy Petit Trianon, Palace of Versailles, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Suffice to say that the “Polish nobleman” takes a shine to Véronique, and her subsequent pregnancy gets her expelled from paradise. Her child, Marie-Louise, is taken from her, while Véronique’s packed off to marry some grain merchant.

That I haven’t yet recounted the main premise of the novel tells you the major weakness of The School of Mirrors: The story really picks up steam seventeen years and 175 pages after it begins. Marie-Louise’s life in Paris, apprenticeship to a midwife, and ringside seat at the revolution and its excesses form the core of the book, and I like this part. So do we really need to know, in meticulous detail, how despicable the Bourbon monarchy was under the previous, fifteenth Louis?

Stachniak seems to want to reveal the precise depth of sexual abuse, misogyny, and moral corruption, and what a gruesome, ugly tale it is. I don’t think that justifies its presence, and I suspect that if you began reading at page 175, you’d understand almost everything you need to know to appreciate the novel. Well-chosen back story could have filled in the rest.

The first half of the book does offer a few noteworthy characters. I like the portrayals of the king, his chief procurer, and Madame de Pompadour. The descriptions give a vivid picture of court life — the author knows her ground — though I’d have liked them better had they struck an emotional chord. Some feel merely decorative, static.

But there’s no comparing with the second half of the book, where conflict spins more rapidly, and the revolutionaries turn out to be just as corrupt as the monarchy they toppled, if in their own way. Marie-Louise has more to her than her mother, and the narrative feels more intimate, therefore more compelling.

I wonder whether Stachniak has two novels here; she’s got two stories, certainly. Her desire to connect the two and derive surprise lacks the impact she may have hoped for, but that strategy’s apparently a trend, these days: try to shock the reader, at any cost to narrative flow or plausibility. At least the author doesn’t withhold information the way some do — she’s too generous for that — but I’ve never understood the fascination with connecting multiple disparate narratives. Seldom does it work out as intended in artistic terms, so it must sell books.

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

Tragic Destiny: Four Treasures of the Sky

02 Monday May 2022

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Review: Four Treasures of the Sky, by Jenny Tinghui Zhang
Flatiron, 2022. 336 pp. $28

The first, arresting sentence of this utterly compelling novel refers to a kidnapping, but the story’s much larger than a single person. It’s a tale of good versus evil, mostly the latter.

Despite being named for a tragic heroine of legend, Daiyu has a happy childhood in 1880s China. Growing up in a fishing village six days from the port of Zhifu, she has firm but doting parents who teach her to love nature and respect others, and to expect such respect in return. With that nurturance to guide Daiyu, life holds great promise:

Our village sat next to a river that fed the ocean and in those early years, I walked along the riverbank often, following the black-tailed gulls until I reached the ocean’s mouth. I hugged the water’s edge, counting the riches that it held: life, memory, even doom. My mother spoke of the sea with romance, my father with reverence, my grandmother with caution. I felt none of those things. Standing beneath the gulls and swifts and terns, I only felt myself, one who held nothing, carried nothing, and offered nothing. I was simply beginning.

Unbeknownst to Daiyu, these are dangerous times, and one day, her parents flee without warning, leaving her in her grandmother’s care. Soldiers come looking for the fugitives, which bewilders Daiyu; what could her parents have done wrong? And soon, it’s too dangerous for Daiyu to live in the village, whereupon she’s sent to fend for herself in Zhifu.

Perhaps that seems improbable, but what follows is all too nightmarishly real. For a while, she finds comfort and stimulation as a servant at a calligraphy school, and in learning that art, she learns about life. In that way, you might call Four Treasures of the Sky a coming-of-age novel, though it’s different in tone from any I can think of.

Her kidnapping interrupts her education and self-discovery, and much else. Kept for a year in captivity, where she’s taught English, she’s sent overseas to a brothel in San Francisco. The author may pull a punch once her protagonist arrives in America, but rest assured, Zhang doesn’t protect her characters. Daiyu also has further misadventures in Idaho, where she tries to pass as a man. Throughout, she experiences or observes the brutalities women suffer at the hands of men, or each other.

Frank Leslie’s illustrated newspaper ran this cartoon in April 1882, commenting on the Chinese Exclusion Act of that year (courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

But dressing and acting as a man offers only a veneer of protection; as a Chinese person, she’s subject to constant harassment, insult, degradation, and violence. “No — and furthermore” thrives here in full force, so that whenever a hint of kindness, generosity, or warmth reveals itself, you have to wonder how long it’ll last.

To survive, Daiyu, now called by other, invented names, retreats within her tragic alter ego, or, to be precise, literally and figuratively swallows her and holds her inside. What a remarkable metaphor, an attempted antidote to the bitterness that life forces down her throat. But the alter ego also represents the self that Daiyu may never show anyone, for fear of exposure and punishment. As a result, she won’t let herself trust or love, so that dreadful as her physical sufferings are, the emotional deprivation is that much worse.

Zhang’s prose, as quoted above, penetrates surfaces to illuminate the shadows or currents beneath, one pleasure of Four Treasures of the Sky. Besides the passages on calligraphy, I enjoyed one describing the differences between Chinese and English; the latter, soft-pedaling unimportant words while emphasizing others with vigor, “is a matter of timing and chaos.” Another passage precisely links male power to physicality, reflected in how men move and carry themselves. Like so many parts of the novel, it’s beautifully observed without a hint of self-consciousness.

Mostly, though, Zhang wants to redeem the largely forgotten history of American bigotry and violence against Chinese. In that, she performs a great service, in general and particular. In her afterword, she says that Trump’s lies blaming China for COVID energized her, in part, to write her story.

I warn you, however, that if you read this brilliant, disturbing book, be prepared to see humans at their worst. All the white characters are racist, and few of the Chinese have much to recommend them, either. Yet Daiyu’s constant struggle over whether to live fully, and how, prevents Four Treasures of the Sky from becoming a polemic or a tract. To me, the social and political observations feel integral and crucial to the narrative.

This is an important book.

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

What Makes a Conspiracy Theory: Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

23 Monday Aug 2021

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Review: Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch, by Rivka Galchen
FSG, 2021. 271 pp. $27

Life feels fragile in the German Duchy of Württemberg, for it’s 1618, and not only does plague stalk the land, the Thirty Years War brings the passage of armies and their attendant depredations. But in the village of Leonberg, these afflictions only lap around the edges. What really matters is that Katharina Kepler is accused of witchcraft.

Katharina is an old woman, a grandmother who puts more faith in her beloved cow, Chamomile, than in people, young children excepted. Known for herbal remedies and her strange way of talking — she seldom answers a question directly, and asks in turn those that nobody else would dream of — she’s a busybody. She thinks nothing of bursting into someone’s house, whether to bring a gift or tell them how they should be living. The Yiddish word nudnik comes to mind.

She’s the sort who has an opinion about everything, and if you’re really lucky, you’ll get to hear it. She has a way of summing people up in insulting terms: “The crowd of them looked like a pack of dull troubadours who, come morning, have made off with all the butter.” Finally, her son, Johannes, is Imperial Mathematician, and Katharina’s neighbors are always asking her if he’ll cast their horoscopes. Apparently, he knows things about the heavens and writes books. These are suspicious activities, especially if the desired horoscope isn’t forthcoming.

Johannes Kepler, who framed the laws of planetary motion, in 1620, portrait artist unknown (courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

From this eccentric yet harmless profile emerges the most incredible folklore. The good citizens of Leonberg believe, or come to believe, that Katharina has the power to poison, make people lame, pass through locked doors, cause livestock to sicken and die, and consort with the devil. How they arrive at these fancies — and why — makes a brilliant narrative, at once chilling and hilarious, absurd, yet with the ring of absolute truth.

In a novel like this, especially in the first-person narratives Galchen deploys, voice matters greatly. Here’s Katharina’s, on one of her favorite subjects, the failings of the local authorities:

I know you’ll think it’s not wise… but I’d like to say something about Ducal Governor Einhorn, whom I prefer to call the False Unicorn. He’s not from this area. He was brought in by the marvelous Duchess Sybille, may she rest in peace. The False Unicorn was to defer to Sybille’s judgment in all matters. Then Sybille died so suddenly. The Duke was distracted — with counting soldiers, signing treaties, commissioning lace shirt cuffs.… and so the False Unicorn usurped powers that should have reverted to the Duke. He began to puff up, Einhorn did. He wore his hair longer. He had a new collar made.… I will say that the False Unicorn looks like an unwell river otter in a doublet.

You might suppose, as I did at first, that Galchen owes a debt to Kafka. Not quite. In Kafka’s bureaucratic nightmares, the hand that wields power remains obscure, sometimes invisible. Here, you see the workings, or many of them; more importantly, you see their paranoid, angry underpinnings. Kafka is said to have read his work out loud to friends, causing general laughter. I’ve never laughed at Kafka — maybe that says something about me — but I did at Galchen. Until, that is, the accusations gather steam.

Everyone Knows is a feminist statement, for we have a free-thinking woman blamed for heresies, mostly by other women, interestingly. It’s as though they resent her for doing what they’ve never let themselves even think of. But though misogyny, including the self-inflicted variety, has historically fed attempts to suppress witchcraft, there’s much more here. Galchen has delved into the paranoia that produces conspiracy theories, and her reconstruction of their origins is spot on. Life has disappointed them, hasn’t granted what the conspiracy theorist assumes he or she deserves and, by God, someone will pay. If that’s not a diagnosis of a sickness that threatens this country’s social, cultural, and political fabric, I don’t know what is.

Some readers will find that this novel ends abruptly, and maybe it does. But that doesn’t trouble me. Galchen’s less concerned with what happens than its origins and legacy; she’s not so focused on the plot, and I accept that. More bothersome is the language, entirely brilliant, yet with occasional lapses in diction. Images like troubadours stealing butter or an otter in a doublet strike my ear perfectly, so I’m not prepared for modern idioms like okay, open up, be fine with, or share your story. If Galchen, a careful writer, is trying to suggest that these seventeenth-century Germans are just like us, she’s proven that in other, deeper ways.

And it is precisely those ways that make Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch required reading.

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

Of the Minotaur, and Men: Ariadne

10 Monday May 2021

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Review: Ariadne, by Jennifer Saint
Flatiron, 2021. 304 pp. $22

You all know the myth. Minos, king of Crete, keeps a monster, the Minotaur, in an impenetrable labyrinth that kills and eats humans. Every year, Athens sends young men and women as tribute, to be fed to the Minotaur. Except one year, Theseus, prince of Athens, takes his place among those chosen to die. And with the help of Ariadne, Minos’s elder daughter, he succeeds, against all odds. But once the hero has achieved his coup, which will grant him everlasting fame, what happens to Ariadne—and Phaedra, her younger sister—is another matter.

The Theseus-Minotaur myth offers a rich vein to explore, as Mary Renault did in The King Must Die. But Saint, as her title declares, focuses on the women—not just Ariadne but Phaedra; their mother, Pasiphae; and their sisters everywhere, whether abused wives, daughters forced into grotesque marriages, or victims of war and invasion.

Titian, Bacchus and Ariadne, ca. 1520-23 (courtesy National Gallery, London, via Wikipedia; public domain)

Ariadne’s greatest virtue, I think, is Saint’s concept behind the characters, especially the two principals. She portrays Theseus as a man of physical presence and fearlessness utterly lacking in empathy or any feeling other than a thirst for adoration. He exists solely for glory, but as soon as he earns one trophy, he gets bored and goes off seeking others. Consequently, he imitates the gods, who have no empathy either, and who care only for how many worshipers they have and gifts they receive compared to their Olympian brethren. With that reinterpretation, Saint turns whole heroic ideal on its head, shows it to be a narcissistic lie. Brava.

But the years before Theseus comes to Crete, Ariadne has lived in terror and shame as sister to a monstrosity born of divine rape—Poseidon, having heard Minos brag about Pasiphae, impregnated her and made her a laughingstock. (Men indulge their pride; women suffer for it.) When her half-brother is still little, Ariadne tries to show him love and attention as best she can, and to reach her mother, who’s retreated into herself, failing at both. Saint excels here too, reimagining this relationship.

These are terrible burdens for a young girl to bear. Ariadne’s greatest—only—release becomes dancing:

I wove a complicated pattern across the wide, wooden circle, winding long red ribbons around my body. My bare feet beat out a wild, frantic rhythm on the polished tiles, and the long red tails swooped through the air, intertwining and dipping and swinging in time with me. As I danced faster and faster, the pounding of my feet grew louder in my head and blotted out the cruel laughter I heard tinkling behind me wherever I walked. I couldn’t even hear my brother’s low, guttural howls or the pleading cries of the unfortunates who were forced between those heavy, iron-bolted doors with the labrys etched deep into the stone above.

But Ariadne falls short in the telling. One passage may soar, sweeping you away, while the next may drop you into the trite or generic. Too many key moments involve long series of rhetorical questions to express moral or emotional confusion—a weak, overused device—and random descriptions or narration repeat words or phrases for no perceivable reason. Ariadne’s voice and thought process occasionally wanders from the ancient to the modern, rational world, particularly jarring because we’re dealing with a theocentric universe that knows nothing of Descartes or Bacon. Similarly, idioms like “I was floored” sit poorly on the tongue of an ancient Cretan princess. As for Phaedra, though well distinguished from her older sister, she seems to grow up almost overnight at age thirteen.

Halfway through, the narrative takes a momentous, exciting leap, as every novel should (and since I didn’t know that aspect of Ariadne’s myth, I won’t reveal it here, because the surprise element works beautifully). Suffice to say that Saint makes good use of these sections, some of my favorites in the book, to deepen the themes she introduces earlier.

As that part progresses, though, I get an uncomfortable feeling that, in Ariadne’s universe, everything men touch will invariably crumble, die, or rot from within. Only women have the capacity to nurture, speak and act honestly, or remain loyal. Men will always fall victim to glitter and glory; women won’t. This one-sided portrayal makes me roll my eyes, but it’s also a surprise, considering the psychological subtlety behind the premise and the main characters.

Ariadne will make you think, but as a novel, it’s uneven and inconsistent.

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

Don’t Trust Him: My Notorious Life

23 Thursday Jun 2016

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Review: My Notorious Life, by Kate Manning
Scribner, 2013. 435 pp. $27

Early on in this superb, unflinching novel, its protagonist, Ann “Axie” Muldoon, learns never to trust a man who says, “Trust me.” It’s a lesson she has cause to remember many times, not least because she sees what happens to other women who fall for it.

Axie grows up in 1860s New York, in the most squalid tenement imaginable:

. . . the cabbage cooking and the piss in the vestibule, the sloppers emptied right off the stair. Mackerel heads and pigeon bones was all around rotting, and McGloon’s pig rootled below amongst the peels and oyster shells. The fumes mingled with the odors of us hundredsome souls cramped in there like matches in a box, on four floors, six rooms a floor. Do the arithmetic and you will see we didn’t have no space to cross ourselves.

But the one thing she has is her family, which consists of her mother, younger sister, and toddler brother. They’re devoted to one another, proud of their Irish origins, ready to laugh when they may, and careful not to provoke evil sprites through a misstep. But when trouble brings about the family’s dispersal, Axie discovers what real suffering is, and you just know there’ll be no magical ending.

New York City's Broadway in 1860 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

New York City’s Broadway in 1860 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

However, Axie’s not the type to give up, and she finds her feet with a married couple named Evans, both doctors, and their kind-hearted housekeeper, Mrs. Browder. At first, Axie has no idea what kind of medicine her benefactors practice and is content to learn the domestic skills that Mrs. Browder is all too happy to teach her. Gradually, however, her curiosity leads her to the Evans’s library, and to understand the medical texts she finds there, she learns to read better. I like how Manning handles Axie’s discoveries, evident to the reader long before the girl herself figures out that Mrs. Evans is a midwife and sometime abortionist. You sense right away that Axie will learn and practice these skills and that she’ll never turn away an unfortunate woman who seeks her help.

Meanwhile, though, a boy she once knew has crossed her path again–Charlie, an orphan like herself. Daring, charming, born with the gift of gab, Charlie sweet-talks her, urging Axie to trust him. That in itself is a red flag, of course, but Axie can’t always help herself. Their scenes together provide ample evidence of how even women who know better can betray their common sense. Something tells Axie that Charlie may not be a scoundrel after all, but, without giving anything away, let’s just say that he tests that hope.

If you read My Notorious Life, and I heartily recommend that you do, skip the jacket flap until you’ve finished the book. I’ve made that a habit these days, sampling just enough to get the premise, and then only if I haven’t learned it from another source. And in this case especially, I’m glad I skipped it. Scribner’s publicist did Manning a tremendous disservice, telling far too much, and, if you ask me, not always accurately.

For similar reasons, I once again have to ask why an author as talented as she, in such command of voice, character, wit, language, and sheer storytelling, should settle for a prologue and chapters that jump ahead when she could have narrated My Notorious Life in sequential order and done just fine. Most men Axie meets are ignorant hypocrites when it comes to female sexuality, and most women accept their judgments as truth, even if they should know better. So it’s no secret that if Axie persists in her newfound calling, she’ll run into trouble. I see no reason to foreshadow that.

That said, however, I can’t praise My Notorious Life enough.

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

Paying the Price: Terrible Virtue

04 Monday Apr 2016

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Review: Terrible Virtue, by Ellen Feldman
HarperCollins, 2016. 260 pp. $26

It’s a truism that very accomplished people make their families miserable. Such was the curse of Margaret Sanger, to whom the world owes a huge debt, but who scarred her husband and children, and whose character made her impossible to live with or work with. Ellen Feldman has tried to render this complex, great woman in fictional form, and she mostly succeeds.

Born in 1879 to an upstate New York family of thirteen children, of whom eleven survive, young Margaret realizes early on what has ruined her mother’s dreary life and decides she’ll grow up differently. She trains to become a nurse, and, while serving a largely immigrant New York City population, she repeatedly hears the same question from distressed, beaten-down women: How can I stop having more babies I can’t feed? But birth control is illegal–it’s just before the First World War–and giving advice about it through the mail is also a crime. Nevertheless, Sanger distributes pamphlets and magazine articles, and is duly arrested.

Margaret Sanger and her sons Grant and Stuart, around 1919 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

Margaret Sanger and her sons Grant and Stuart, around 1919 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

Naturally, the story doesn’t end there; it’s only the beginning. But how Sanger advances her cause, and at what cost, makes compelling reading indeed. Her husband, Bill, who suffers her many, many love affairs, is a frequent casualty. So are their two sons and daughter, who seldom see their mother, because she’s too busy to take care of them. Professing to believe neither in guilt nor regret, Sanger lets herself off the hook all too easily regarding the people close to her; her conscience seems to work only on behalf of the women desperate for her help.

If you’re thinking that this novel reads more like a biography (an assumption the jacket flap unfortunately underlines), that’s not quite accurate. Terrible Virtue packs plenty of tension, and, unlike life, there’s nothing humdrum in it. Feldman has deftly chosen what to include in her short narrative and what to omit, letting her marvelous prose do the rest. For instance, when young Margaret first climbs the hill in her upstate New York town to attend a boarding school, she sees a family of four playing croquet on a large lawn:

I knew no more children lurked in the house behind, though it looked big enough to accommodate a brood of eight or ten or a dozen. I knew it from the whiteness of their clothes, as immaculate as the conception fable the priest handed out to the parishioners at the bottom of the hill; and from the mother’s serene smiling face as she swung her arms and the sound of the mallet making contact with the ball cracked the quiet air. . . .The sight of that perfect quartet who had never scrapped for food or love or attention, who had never been humiliated before an entire class, who had never felt ashamed of anything, reached out and grabbed me like an arresting officer. And I was guilty as charged, of envy and pride and shame.

The reactions to what Sanger does lend Terrible Virtue part of its power. I particularly recall a gloating, nasty policewoman in a fox fur, who arrests Sanger at Planned Parenthood in 1916, the first birth-control clinic in the country, and takes pleasure in it. Throughout the narrative, myriad characters unwittingly expose their hatred for what Sanger represents, as if reproductive freedom stole something from them–to wit, as with the nasty policewoman, if the Brooklyn poor stopped breeding like rabbits, she could no longer hate them the same way. Terrible Virtue is therefore timely; this scene happened exactly a century ago, but when I read what many state legislatures are doing these days to women’s health clinics, I have to conclude we’ve learned absolutely nothing since.

What mars the novel, though, is Feldman’s choice of first-person voice–not that it’s a bad idea, but because she tampers with it. Sanger’s self-absorption and vanity come through loud and clear when she talks about her family, her movement, her struggles. Yet rather than let Sanger’s narrative voice tell the whole tale, the author drops in random, first-person perspectives from the people Margaret has hurt, which feel like jarring interruptions. Is Feldman afraid that readers really won’t understand that there’s another side to the story? If that’s the case, without breaking the narrative voice, she could easily have shown more of what Sanger chose to deny through scenes in which other characters object to what she’s done. I’m surprised that a fine writer like Feldman should have shown so little confidence in herself or her readers.

Terrible Virtue is worth your time.

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