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Create Expectations: Martin Dressler

24 Monday May 2021

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Review: Martin Dressler, by Steven Millhauser
Random House, 1996. 293 pp. $17

Martin Dressler is nine years old in 1881, when he has his first business idea, to dress the window of his father’s Manhattan tobacco shop in a distinctive way. The boy works hard for the shop and has for several years; the Dresslers are dour German immigrants to whom work and thrift come naturally. Pleasure, affection, or satisfaction have no place, suspect as the harbingers of ruin.

From these humble beginnings, Martin makes his way in the New York in the 1890s, earning astonishing success, even as a teenager. Through clever anticipation of customers’ wants, constant willingness to revise his approach, and an innate grasp of what constitutes service, young Martin constructs an empire. He learns how to tap into expectations and, later, to create them.

Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World Building on Manhattan’s Park Row, which opened in 1890, was the city’s tallest at the time (undated image, but older than 1920, courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Millhauser excels at presenting New York, a city under rapid expansion, so that it appears almost like a child learning to walk and talk, and from whom we anticipate great things. Everyone has an idea, it seems, as though entrepreneurs stand on every corner, awaiting their chance at the big time. Consequently, though Martin may seem larger than life, he fits right in, except that he thinks more boldly than most.

He personifies several themes, one of which involves fascination with modern technology, which promises to make daily life easier, alongside a contradictory desire to remain in the past, anchored to what people already know. Accordingly, architecture and decorative styles figure heavily, and the author details them down to the smallest brick. His people hunger for the newness and their ability to possess it, yet fear what they might have lost, leaving behind what they grew up with.

I admire Millhauser’s finely wrought depiction of these changes, which feel both exterior and personal. Martin Dressler won the Pulitzer Prize and has been rightly celebrated for its prose and descriptive marvels, making the New York of bygone years into a character. One passage, when Martin brings three friends, a mother and her two daughters, for a ride on the Elevated (the aboveground precursor of the subway), conveys this well:

With its peaked gables and its gingerbread trim, the station looked like a country cottage raised on iron columns.… Sunlight poured through the blue stained-glass windows and lay in long blue parallelograms on the floor. Outside on the roof platform they looked down at rows of striped awnings over the shop windows of Columbus Avenue, each with its patch of shade, and watched the black roofs of passing hacks. Suddenly there was a throbbing in the platform, a growing roar — people stepped back. Mrs. Vernon gripped Martin’s arm, white smoke mixed with fiery ashes streamed backward as the engine neared, and with a hiss of steam and a grinding sound like the clashing of many pairs of scissors, the train halted at the platform.

I like Millhauser’s deft, subtle touch, in which he plumbs nascent, unexpressed desires, followed often by rapid, impulsive action. You never know quite what to expect — for the first half of the novel, anyway — which keeps the pages turning.

However, the narrative depends entirely on one character, and Martin grows tiresome. In the beginning, you want him to break his restraints, venture out on his own, find his fortune. But nothing ever satisfies him, and he doesn’t know why, nor does he bother to think about it, much. That may be true to life, especially for someone who grew up with nothing but work and duty.

But past a certain point, there’s a diminishing return. As Martin grows ever grander in his visions, longing to create something so splendid, even he’ll be happy, you know what will result. You also know that in courting a particular woman — and what a bizarre courtship — he’s heading for trouble. Where the first half of the narrative feels volatile, the second half settles into predictability.

More significantly, Martin’s the only character whose inner life comes across, and success erodes his appeal, which leaves the reader nowhere to go. Our hero talks only of his business plans, get easily annoyed if anyone criticizes them, and seems to understand, or want to understand, people only in relation to himself. A narcissist, in other words, bent on greater and greater grandiosity. In keeping with that portrait, there are only so many descriptions of decorative garishness that I can take, so I wound up flipping through some of them.

Martin Dressler the novel is beautifully written and evocative, but Martin Dressler the man is hard to approach, full of much, yet empty. I think that’s the point, and it comes with no surprise.

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

Good, Evil, and Hope: Deacon King Kong

18 Monday Jan 2021

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Review: Deacon King Kong, by James McBride
Riverhead, 2020. 370 pp. $28

Few people even know his real name, because he never uses it. Even the police confuse him with someone else, because he shares a driver’s license with another man, which makes his official record almost untraceable. But to the residence of the Causeway Housing Projects (the Cause) in south Brooklyn, he’s Sportcoat, because of the colorful assortment he wears of that garment.

His finest moment came umpiring the Cause baseball team, now disbanded. These days, the former deacon of Five Ends Baptist Church spends his time high on King Kong, the popular name for a friend’s moonshine, and talks to his late wife, Hettie. Or thinks he does, and nobody can persuade him otherwise.

Except that in summer 1969, Sportcoat shoots Deems, a teenage kingpin of the Cause drug traffic, and his former baseball protégé, at point-blank range. Sportcoat claims not to have understood what he was doing, but nobody believes that, least of all, the police. But he’s the type of character who doesn’t care what anybody thinks, alternately perplexing, amusing, and horrifying everyone else.

From that shooting springs a complicated, finely woven story, involving Five Ends, cheese deliveries, storytelling as an art form, the racism that warps life in the projects, unlikely romances, what constitutes good in the face of so much evil, and how humans dare to hope.

A portion of the Red Hook Houses project, south Brooklyn, as it appeared in 2012 at Lorraine and Henry Streets (courtesy Jim Henderson via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

But I’d be doing Deacon King Kong a disservice if I failed to mention what a rollicking good time the novel is. Pick almost any paragraph, and you’ll find sprawling, delicious sentences like these, oozing with spicy flavor:

Meanwhile Sister Bibb, the voluptuous church organist, who at fifty-five years old was thick-bodied, smooth and brown as a chocolate candy bar, arrived in terrible shape. She was coming off her once-a-year sin jamboree, an all-night, two-fisted, booze-guzzling, swig-faced affair of delicious tongue-in-groove licking and love-smacking with her sometimes boyfriend, Hot Sausage, until Sausage withdrew from the festivities for lack of endurance.

And for those who appreciate snappy dialogue, look no further. What in the Sixties we used to call “rank-outs” or “snaps” appear here in a poetic form guaranteed to prompt laughter. For instance: “But that idiot’s so dumb he lights up a room by leaving it.” Or: “Son, you looks like a character witness for a nightmare.” McBride has a superb ear and inventive pen, which makes the narrative a delightful ride.

For the first two chapters, McBride even goes a little too far, I think, unraveling so many stories within stories, and with such far-ranging flights of verbal fancy, that I worried. I thought reading Deacon King Kong would be like eating an entire tub of caramel pecan ice cream in a half-hour, past my limit. But the narrative settles down somewhat, to the extent that it does, and McBride’s storytelling skills come to the fore.

Every spoonful matters, as details you might have glossed over come back to play important roles. Characters cross paths in natural yet unexpected ways, and points of view transition gracefully from one to other. Sportcoat moves through the novel oblivious to the effect he has on others, the ultimate catalyst — and denies it, if anyone should point it out to him.

Two key themes emerge. One involves how white interpretations of Black life rest on lies that Black people need not — must not — accept, even if they can do nothing else to fulfill themselves. Dignity requires insisting on the truth. Within that, a person finds meaning and hope by taking small actions, even though they won’t change the big picture. That’s all anyone can do.

As historical fiction, the novel gets down to neighborhood level, as in how the influx or departure of certain groups changes the Cause, how the police or certain agencies function differently from the past, or how drugs have taken over, and the horrific damage that follows. That’s what 1969 means here, aside from frequent references to the New York Mets. And though I yield to no one in my love for that team, I do wish McBride had gone a little further. In particular, I’d have liked to hear more about the Vietnam War, for instance, because maybe residents of the Cause had strong feelings about fighting the white man’s war in Southeast Asia.

But Deacon King Kong is a terrific book and a testament to the author’s range and vision.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from bookshop.org, a bookseller that shares its receipts with independent bookstores.

Killer Jewels: Cartier’s Hope

23 Monday Mar 2020

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Review: Cartier’s Hope, by M.J. Rose
Atria, 2020. 322 pp. $27

Vera Garland would be the envy of most New York women in 1910. Born to a socialite mother and a merchant father whose retail emporium is a household word, Vera has never wanted for any material possession. Nor would she lack the leisure to enjoy them, should she choose. But she doesn’t; she dreams of making her mark in journalism.

To that end, she writes a society gossip column in her gilded-set voice, while, as Vee Swann, she reports on back-alley abortions, tenement life, and corporate malfeasance. She’s got no time or interest in her mother’s plans for her, to wit, a wealthy husband and a career in society. The conflict splits the family, but Vera gets to do what she wants.

Maintaining Vera’s two different personae takes a great deal of sweat (and a little credulity on her friends’ parts, not to mention the reader’s). But it makes a great story, and getting trapped in one identity while needing to be in the other, though an old device, offers excellent possibilities, which Rose ably exploits. Vera wants revenge against the extortionist who brought about her uncle’s and father’s deaths within a week of each other. And the key to her scheme lies within Cartier’s, the world-class jewelers whose premises she may visit with ceremony and complimentary champagne as Vera Garland, but where, as Vee Swann, she’d never expect an audience.

The Hope Diamond, on display at the National Museum of Natural History, New York (courtesy David Bjorgen via Wikimedia Commons)

Her plan has to do with the Hope Diamond, whose lore of danger and ill fortune to its succession of owners furnishes grist for Pierre Cartier’s publicity mill. How that dovetails with bringing down an extortionist, I leave for you to discover.

Plot is by far the strongest aspect of Cartier’s Hope and just about the only reason to read the novel. It’s a good reason, though. In the interest of full disclosure, my taste runs toward character-driven narratives — as though you might not have guessed — because some plot-driven novels pay little or no attention to subtlety. So too here, in ways I’ll discuss further down. Yet I have to admire how Rose strings out the story, layering twist after twist, making her protagonist work, so that nothing comes easily, and the “no — and furthermore” feels genuine. Rose also keeps you guessing without tricking you. She’s a generous writer that way; if anyone falls for a misperception or misdirection, it’s Vera/Vee.

The plain prose never draws attention to itself, and Rose limits her descriptions largely to interiors, with sparse, thoughtful detail. The author loves New York, and it shows in the locales portrayed as they were, whether tenements, newsrooms, or the Plaza Hotel. I trust her research in general, though I did find one anachronism: Traffic lights didn’t exist back then.

More troublesome are the language and the characters, who speak and think like latter twentieth-century folk, or even those of the present day. I don’t just mean words or phrases like accessorize or reach out to, but the manner in which people discuss their ideas. Vee and her journalist friends, passionate about women’s rights, seem like retro creations, modern sensibilities and worldviews dropped into 1910. It doesn’t help that some of these scenes feel like information dumps.

But it’s not just the political or social milieu that strikes me wrong. Vera’s father sounds like a gifted psychotherapist as well as a brilliant retailer, a wonderfully thoughtful, considerate man. He’s made one mistake, a whopper, but seems perfect otherwise. Ditto Vera’s love interest, who could be a midcentury intellectual. He’s done one bad thing too, but there are mitigating circumstances, to be sure. These people are too good to be true.

Rose often explains what a character’s trying to do or has just done when it’s obvious. That authorial hand not only feels condescending, as if the reader can’t be trusted to get the idea, but prompts you to wonder what other manipulations are taking place. A skeptical reader (guilty, Your Honor) might suspect sleight-of-hand in the storytelling.

Still, Cartier’s Hope offers that intriguing plot, with legends about jewels thrown in. If that’s your style, you could do a lot worse.

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

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.

Just Three Blocks Apart: Not Our Kind

17 Monday Dec 2018

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Review: Not Our Kind, by Kitty Zeldis
Harper, 2018. 337 pp. $27

One morning in 1947, Eleanor Moskowitz is on her way to a job interview when two taxicabs collide on a Manhattan street. Eleanor, riding in one, suffers a mild injury, though she’s more upset at missing her interview. But the passenger in the other taxi, Patricia Bellamy, insists on bringing Eleanor to her Park Avenue home and tending to her.

As it happens, Patricia’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Margaux, needs a tutor, and Eleanor has teaching experience and a Vassar degree. More importantly, Margaux takes to her instantly, as she has to no other person besides her parents and her mother’s brother, her Uncle Tom. As an angry, whiny child suffering a disability — she had polio and walks with a cane — she normally dislikes everyone on sight, so the connection to Eleanor means something to Patricia.

Trouble is, Eleanor’s Jewish, and Patricia’s an anti-Semite — the genteel sort, to be sure, but her husband, Wynn, is louder and more pointed about it. In fact, he’s louder and more pointed about everything, a drunken boor with roving eyes and hands. But the Bellamys hire Eleanor anyway, because Margaux likes her, and they’re desperate for someone to get through to their daughter.

Screen shot from the trailer for Gentleman’s Agreement, 1947, which featured John Garfield, one of the era’s great actors, in a supporting part. For this and other “suspect” roles, the House Un-American Activities Committee destroyed him. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

But Eleanor has her doubts too. As her mother says, these prospective employers are “not our kind,” and the newly hired tutor feels intimidated by their wealth, apparent ease, and, well, perfection, observable even in the building where they live, only three blocks from her own:

Mrs. Bellamy lived in a twelve-story apartment building on the southwest corner of Eighty-Third and Park. Eleanor was more attentive today to the six limestone medallions, each depicting a wreath of fruit and flowers, the four massive Greek columns, two on either side of the door, as well as the black lanterns that were attached to the façade. With its limestone and brick exterior, the building projected a permanence, and even moral rectitude, that made the buildings in her own neighborhood seem almost provisional in contrast.

Zeldis has New York down — the clothing styles, social mores, scenery, and, most germane, workplace anti-Semitism. The author has a gift for the unexpected, the essence of tension, so that even when the plot seems predictable, events don’t turn out quite the way you think. I also like Zeldis’s knack for getting tremendous mileage out of a simple situation that’s actually very complicated, especially once Patricia’s charming, individualist brother happens on the scene and hits it off with Eleanor right away. The Bellamys’ prejudice lurks behind every interaction, as if the elephant in the room were trumpeting loudly, except they try not to hear it. It’s the problem that simply won’t go away, and Zeldis resists any temptation at easy fixes. For the most part, until the last quarter of the novel, the plot unfolds naturally, with no apparent guiding hand.

Where Not Our Kind falls short, I think, lies in the characters, especially the men. Wynn is a cartoon; Zeldis belatedly announces his merits, trying to mitigate his villainy, but you don’t see them. Likewise, though Tom’s charming, he’s elusive, and though I can see Eleanor admire his ease and wish she had it, and that she soaks up his kindness and sensitivity, that’s different from love. I like Patricia and her daughter, who seem real, and Eleanor’s mother, Irina, who can observe that she’s unhappy about decisions Eleanor has made, but that unhappiness isn’t fatal.

The heroine’s another story. I sympathize with Eleanor, but once I finished the book, I tried to remember her flaws and couldn’t. She’s unsure of herself and a little envious, but those hardly count, and she seems remarkably self-possessed, seldom at a loss for the words she needs to stick up for herself. She grows toward feminism without using the term, a worthy theme and apt for the time, but I find Patricia more rounded.

Further, Eleanor’s Jewishness is entirely cultural, and though many novelists draw such characters, I often suspect that they do so merely for the inconvenience that observance causes in the workaday world, or because they’re not confident they can do otherwise. Zeldis plainly can; late in the book, Eleanor recoils inwardly at pork on a plate. She could have, should have done that throughout the narrative–not necessarily as strongly, just to acknowledge her difference, her otherness, which she notes in many other ways.

Finally, Not Our Kind, despite its marvelous descriptions of clothing or architecture, doesn’t feel like 1947. There’s no sense of relief after a war, or even that there was a war, though we’re told that Wynn didn’t fight, and that Patricia lost a brother. There’s nothing about popular culture, politics (as in anti-Communist hysteria, whose roots lay in anti-Semitism), or other goings-on — surprising, given that Gentleman’s Agreement, a movie about covert anti-Semitism, came out that year.

I enjoyed reading Not Our Kind, but I don’t think it will stay with me.

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

Who Sups with the Devil: Manhattan Beach

01 Monday Jan 2018

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Review: Manhattan Beach, by Jennifer Egan
Scribner, 2017. 433 pp. $28

Anna Kerrigan likes to join her father, Eddie, on business trips around their native New York City. Anna’s too young to understand just what Eddie does for a living, and since this is the Depression, plenty of people get by in strange ways. But she’s proud, at his insistence, to provide another pair of eyes and ears, and he loves her emotional strength and quick-wittedness beyond her years. When she’s almost twelve, in 1937, Eddie brings her to meet Dexter Styles, a man who, she gathers, is very important to her family.

Years later, Eddie has disappeared. The war has come, and Anna has taken a job at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. She runs into Styles again, and she doesn’t recognize him at first; but she realizes he’s a gangster, and that sets her to wondering whether he knows what happened to Eddie.

At the time this photo was taken at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in mid- April 1945, four aircraft carriers were under construction (courtesy U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons)

I expected to love Manhattan Beach, not least because of the rave reviews in the press, but I find the book a disappointment. Still, there’s much to praise. From her solid, if complex, premise, Egan has spun an ambitious novel about greed, power, lust, money, self-image, and innocence lost — the important stuff. She writes compelling, many-faceted characters, develops them over time, and gives them room to stretch. Nor does she pull punches with her storyline, so her people take plenty of punishment. She has also researched her historical ground with care and love, revealing myriad nooks and crannies of Depression and wartime New York, seamlessly rendered. Some years ago, the New-York Historical Society ran a terrific exhibit on the social mood of wartime New York and the hundreds of businesses and institutions that supplied the war effort. Manhattan Beach is like walking through that exhibit, except it speaks.

Egan gives you the harbor, both topside and below water; nightclubs and gambling dens; Brooklyn walkups and country clubs; ships and churches; anyplace you could want. And she peoples them with working stiffs, sailors, soldiers, young women doing “men’s jobs,” bankers, society folk, and hoods. The parent-child scenes are wonderful; a few took my breath away. And especially with her most important characters, Egan takes care to show their inner lives, as with this reminiscence of Eddie’s:

Lying in the vast dormitory, hearing his breath melt into the collective sigh of so many boys asleep, Eddie was shamed by his own meagerness: narrow hips; a sharp, unremarkable face; hair like dirty straw. Even more than the orphans’ annual excursion to the circus, he thirsted for the moment each month when the protectory barber’s hands would touch his scalp briefly, indifferently, yet capable of soothing him almost to sleep. He was of no more consequence than an empty cigarette packet. At times the brusque mass of everything that was not him seemed likely to crush Eddie into dust the way he crushed the dried-out moths that collected in piles on the protectory windowsills. At times he wanted to be crushed.

So what’s not to like, you ask? The narrative is so complicated that the pieces don’t fit together, and I have trouble believing much of it. Styles’s life as a gangster and Anna’s as a Navy Yard worker make sense apart, but trying to weld them—at least in the way Egan wants, pushing her characters to change–the components fail to mesh, so the effort feels forced. For instance, though I understand why Styles married his wife, Harriet, daughter of an admiral turned banker, I don’t see why she married him (and that’s a key part of the setup). More significantly, the story works very hard to bring Styles on a tour through the Navy Yard, using his daughter, Tabatha, as the catalyst, whereupon she drops out of the novel almost completely, even though she and her father have a special relationship. But the biggest trouble I have is imagining that Anna would go near Styles after realizing who he is, how dangerous he can be, and what he might have done to hurt her. She wants to let loose, yes; but she’s too smart, has such a strong sense of self-preservation, and has worked so hard to get where she is that I can’t see her risking it. Not for him.

I admire Manhattan Beach for its emotional range, breadth of theme, descriptive power, and bold scheme. I think Egan’s an excellent writer. But this novel left me unsatisfied.

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

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.

I Sing the Body Dissected: Speakers of the Dead

31 Thursday Mar 2016

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Review: Speakers of the Dead, by J. Aaron Sanders
Plume/Penguin, 2016. 301 pp. $16

Not quite halfway through this mystery novel set in 1843, a man who makes most mortals tremble says, “Your ego surpasses your reputation. Not every New Yorker believes you’re the next Charles Dickens.”
To which comes the reply, “Your nose seems to have healed,” a reference to a tussle that defined their previous meeting.
The man who landed the punch is a youthful Walt Whitman, and the target belongs to a Tammany Hall ward heeler from Manhattan’s toughest neighborhood, so Speakers of the Dead offers the chance of a fresh, zesty tale. Throw in that Sanders has plumbed an arresting piece of social history–a controversy over medical dissection–and the novel promises even more.

Elizabeth Blackwell, medical pioneer (Undated photo, courtesy Wikimedia Commons via National Library of Medicine; public domain)

Elizabeth Blackwell, medical pioneer (Undated photo, courtesy Wikimedia Commons via National Library of Medicine; public domain)

Unfortunately, however, Speakers of the Dead seldom delivers more than the novelty of a poet serving justice with pen and rough-and-tumble. The storytelling depends solely on revelations and surprises rather than what lies within the characters, which means that Sanders has to keep pulling novelties out of the hat. Well before the end, the mystery peters out, and you can often hear the literary machinery creaking between the lines.
The narrative begins as twenty-two-year-old Mr. Whitman, who’s written tons of newspaper stories and an admittedly bad temperance novel but little poetry, tries to save a woman friend from hanging for murder. But the police prevent Walt from presenting evidence, and as she dies, he vows to prove her innocence. As editor of the Aurora, a struggling newspaper, Whitman has a ready mouthpiece to raise public opinion. But powerful men quickly make their opposition known, and his life and job are threatened. The furor only grows when Whitman discovers a link between so-called resurrection men, body snatchers who sell the newly deceased to medical schools, and the murder for which his friend died. Not just that murder, either; since the resurrection men have a lucrative (and illegal) business, they’re more than capable of protecting it by creating more medical specimens.
The most interesting part is the deep-seated objection to dissection. Many people, encouraged by clerics, believed that dissection prevented the soul from reaching heaven. In the novel, their protests at medical institutions quickly turn violent, and Sanders portrays the mob scenes with frightening vividness. As I read, I couldn’t help thinking of their present-day counterparts, attacks on abortion clinics and the blood libel against Planned Parenthood, a comparison that Sanders underlines. Lurid rumors swirl about medical practitioners known to have performed the random abortion, testimony to public fear and ignorance.
Sanders takes this idea one step further, probing the notion that beauty exists in what we fear, in death as well as life. In one vivid scene, he has Whitman observe human organs preserved in jars:

The sheer enormity of the collection overwhelms Walt. He looks away, but there is no away in this room, and he has to confront these objects, and so he regards them as they are . . . and he feels pulled at by their odd beauty, their untranslatable state, and he is overcome with the sense of his own decomposition, his flung likeness, coaxed to vapor and dust, and he gives himself to the image of his impending death. . . .

Several well-known figures populate Speakers of the Dead. For instance, Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States, represents feminist themes about male power and female suffering. Edgar Allan Poe makes a memorable cameo appearance, shouting like a madman to help his fellow poet escape capture. But except for Poe, these famous characters are flat, without edges.
Sadly, the narrative suffers the same flaw. Walt learns the apparent connection between the resurrection men and the murders rather easily, and no contrary evidence complicates his reasoning. He fingers the culprit fairly early on, and the only question is how much trouble he’ll get into before he can plead his case.

Aside from an occasional striking detail, New York drifts in and out of focus, a half-sketched landscape with or without figures. I wanted to see facial expressions, body language, scenery just beyond the immediate picture frame, all of which would have helped.
Though Whitman makes a vital, attractive protagonist, full of lust, rage, egotism, and passion for justice, like the other characters, he seems boxed in, restricted to what the narrative demands. I wish he’d been given more rein, especially to develop the theme of beauty in death. But I also wish he’d been restrained, as when he quotes a poem from Leaves of Grass; and decides, in a single paragraph, that he needs to focus on poetry rather than prose. Such self-conscious passages feel like nonfiction, unless they’ve been earned and worked toward, not simply dropped in.

Since the subtitle of Speakers of the Dead is A Walt Whitman Mystery, I gather that Sanders has others in mind. I hope he takes a different approach with them.

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

Rumors of His Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated: Sundance

18 Thursday Jun 2015

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Review: Sundance: A Novel, by David Fuller
Riverhead, 2014. 338 pp. $28

In this suspenseful, thoroughly enjoyable tale, Harry Longbaugh, aka the Sundance Kid, didn’t really die in Bolivia in 1908. How could he have? He was serving twelve years in a Wyoming prison for armed robbery, dreaming of a reunion with his beloved wife, Etta, from whom he hasn’t heard in two years. So when he’s finally released in 1913, he sets out to find her, unsure whether she even loves him still.

The Sundance Kid and his wife, Etta Place, in 1901 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

The Sundance Kid and his wife, Etta Place, in 1901 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Trouble is, he’s a free man barely an hour when a seventeen-year-old kid provokes him into a duel. Naturally, Longbaugh’s quicker on the draw. Naturally, the boy’s death brings the local law after Harry. And just as naturally, when Harry traces Etta to New York City, a detective much smarter than the local Wyoming law follows him.

Shortly after Harry reaches New York, he gathers that Etta’s also on the run, but not from the law. Actually, it’s worse: Her political activities have made powerful enemies, including the Black Hand, a mafioso ring operating in Little Italy. Harry doesn’t know what to make of his wife’s social conscience and the new life she’s led during the past two years.

But that’s not all that’s changed:

 

He had heard of motorcars while inside, but seeing one in person made him keenly aware of the things he had missed. He was entering the world anew. He thought he heard the jingle of harness and clop of horseshoes as the motorcar passed, clearly his imagination, then was surprised when a horse and wagon came around behind him. Surprised, but also relieved. The old world was not quite banished, but it had certainly eroded.

 

Harry has seen electric lights before, but not the profusion that illumines New York. Trolleys, elevated trains, subway tunnels, and skyscrapers earn his admiration; I loved the scene in which he travels to the top of a skyscraper under construction. There are billboards and stores devoted entirely to men’s clothes, if you can believe that–the notion takes him aback–but certain things never change. Ever the honorable outlaw, he foils a pickpocket ring in the act and returns the bag of missing wallets and jewelry to their astonished, grateful owners. (Right afterward, Harry reappears at the scene, dressed in his new city duds, but nobody recognizes him, because he’s no longer a cowboy–a clever touch.)

I like that scene, which is more than just a bravura performance by our hero. Fuller means to show how Harry represents the decline of the Old West (and our romantic notions of it), while being self-consciously aware that he and his kind have ridden off into the sunset. But that’s where Sundance confuses me, because everything about it is romantic, so much so that the subtitle, A Novel, is misleading. It’s more like a typical Hollywood movie in which the characters are all one way or all another, so the conflict isn’t between complex people. Rather, it’s an opposition of single traits or ideas–evil versus good, justice versus exploitation, treachery versus integrity. And yet, Fuller has much to say about the Progressive Era that feels like politicking–labor conditions, women’s rights, disarmament, radical movements–which seems out of place in this context.

Harry’s an extraordinary guy. He can charm just about anyone, slip into and out of a building like a ghost, give expert marital advice, and is a remarkably quick study for things he doesn’t have a clue about. He’s even a dab hand at modern art. You’d never know he’d spent twelve years in prison–his psyche seems remarkably sound, without a drop of bitterness–and he’s a thoroughly honorable man. He’s a character to root for, and you keep reading just to see what amazing feat he’ll perform next. But he’s not a real person.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed reading Sundance (and couldn’t get the movie theme song out of my head). Fuller tells a tense story. He writes well, beautifully at times. He does shoehorn historical references into the narrative, especially toward the (not quite believable) end. I also wish he didn’t alternate stretches of dialogue in which you can’t tell who’s speaking with others in which he explains the characters’ motives, as if they weren’t already clear. But despite its charms, Sundance would have been much better had Fuller decided either to tell a tall tale or a realistic novel, and go at that whole hog.

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