Tag Archives: Prohibition

We’re Not in Kansas Anymore: The Chaperone

21 Monday Nov 2016

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Review: The Chaperone, by Laura Moriarty
Riverhead, 2012. 371 pp. $27

The summer of 1922, fifteen-year-old Louise Brooks can’t wait to leave Wichita, Kansas, for a month-long New York tryout with an avant-garde dance company. Given the political and social tenor of Wichita, Louise’s parents seem unusually liberal and open-minded, but, to their daughter’s disgust, they give out that they’re looking for a respectable woman to chaperone her. Cora Carlisle, mother of two sons about to enter college, volunteers for the job, and the Brookses accept, while making it seem as if they’re doing her a favor. As for Louise, she promises to be absolutely horrible:

But there was no mistaking the contempt in the girl’s eyes. It was the way a child looked at the broccoli that must be eaten before dessert, the room that must be cleaned before playtime. It was a gaze of dread, made all the more punishing by the girl’s youth and beauty, her pale skin and pouting lips. Cora felt herself blushing. She had not been the subject of this sort of condescension in years.

However, that’s not half of it. No sooner have the two travelers boarded their train than Cora begins to sense what she’s up against. Louise has read all the books Cora has, and then some. She’s even brought Schopenhauer along, which would seem pure affectation, except that she’s marked passages where the philosopher’s observations move her. Unlike Cora, Louise disdains Prohibition, wears no corset (but plenty of makeup), and sees nothing wrong with letting men flirt with her, some of whom are old enough to be her father. Cora assumes that naive, inexperienced Louise is merely acting out, an adolescent unaware of consequences, and that her parents have been negligent in raising her. That they have, but she’s no innocent, nor do appearances fool her, as when she wonders how someone as dull and restrained as Cora could have attracted a man as handsome and successful as her husband. Naturally, the remark cuts the older woman to the quick, especially because, as the reader soon learns, Cora’s marriage isn’t what it seems.

Louise Brooks, circa 1929 (Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

Louise Brooks, circa 1929 (Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

Cinemaphiles may recognize Louise Brooks as a star of the silent screen; her bobbed hair helped make that style a symbol of the 1920s, and she was the film incarnation of the flapper. So in casting her opposite Cora, Moriarty has drawn the battle lines, for Cora is a fictional representation of a Midwestern Progressive who fought for woman suffrage but has the social and sexual prejudices common to her time and class. At first, therefore, The Chaperone promises to be a funny, sharply observed clash of outlook, to which the splendid sequences in New York, full of feeling and atmosphere, lend zest. Then, to Moriarty’s further credit, the narrative takes off to a higher level altogether.

Cora, it turns out, was an orphan, raised by a Catholic home for abandoned girls, and shipped by train westward, traveling station to station until someone liked the look of her and took her in. Several novelists have written about these trains, and no wonder (see, for example, My Notorious Life); what a heart-breaking story, and Cora’s had me cringing in pain. But the surprise of The Chaperone is that it’s not just Louise who’s looking forward to a taste of freedom in New York. Cora, who has been dutiful all her life, has undertaken to search for her birth mother, and though many obstacles get in her way, she won’t take no for an answer. She could never explain this to Louise, but of the two of them, she winds up having the more satisfying, successful trip.

The Chaperone is a wonderful book, beautifully written, the characters well drawn, even the minor ones. Moriarty thrusts them boldly into situations from which they don’t always emerge proud of themselves, and I like that–except when her earnestness gets the better of her. For instance, when Cora’s horrified to attend a theatrical performance where black and white sit together and the performers are African-American, the author immediately drops in a scene in which a more tolerant Cora talks to black activists in the 1970s. It’s as if Moriarty fears that we won’t like her heroine anymore and has to rescue her.

If there’s one problem with The Chaperone, it’s that discursiveness, the desire to tell all of Cora’s life. I don’t think Moriarty needs to, and the book runs at least fifty pages too long. They’re not bad pages, but they lack the substance of the rest, and the narrative has the feel of looking in vain for a strong ending. I think the story could have stopped years earlier, letting the reader imagine the rest. But still, it’s a terrific book.

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

Brilliant, But a Little Mean: Leaving Lucy Pear

10 Monday Oct 2016

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Review: Leaving Lucy Pear, by Anna Solomon
Viking, 2016. 319 pp. $26

It’s summer 1917, and eighteen-year-old Beatrice Haven sneaks out of her uncle’s home at Cape Ann, Massachusetts, one night to leave her newborn infant in a pear orchard. Her act is desperate, of course, but not entirely random, for Bea anticipates that poachers from town will be coming to raid the orchard and will therefore find the child. What follows is beyond predictable, but Bea’s only thought–indeed, her only choice, as she sees it–is to save her baby from the orphanage. Further, that suits her purposes, for she plans to attend Radcliffe come the fall, though whether that notion is hers or belongs to her mother, Lillian, is an open question.

Bartolomeo Vanzetti, left, and Nicola Sacco, 1923 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons via Boston Public Library)

Bartolomeo Vanzetti, left, and Nicola Sacco, 1923 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons via Boston Public Library)

Meanwhile, the woman who picks up the infant girl is Emma Murphy, mother of eight, wife of a hard-drinking fisherman, Roland. The narrative shifts ahead to 1927, when Lucy Pear, as the foundling is called, is ten years old, and Emma has tired of her husband’s frequent absences and violent temper. She’s easy prey for Josiah Story, mayoral candidate and quarry manager, whose charm, money, and connections prove irresistible. Josiah arranges for Emma to tend Bea’s invalid Uncle Ira, who still lives in the house with the orchard. The job brings Emma needed money, a measure of independence from Roland, and puts her in Bea’s path, for that’s where she lives too. Radcliffe lasted barely a few months, and depression has immobilized her ever since.

So everybody’s got secrets, and cowardice has brought them about. Had Bea been able to stand up to her mother, she might not have made disastrous, self-destructive decisions. If Emma could face down her husband, she’d be better off, as would their children. And so on.

All those tightly contained secrets create an emotional pressure cooker, and Solomon exerts every ounce of tension imaginable, posing moral tests right and left that her characters often fail. I admire her refusal to protect them or ease their way; they’re no better than anyone else, and sometimes less. Yet the author never disengages to throw them in your lap, as if they were suddenly your problem. I think it takes courage to write like that, particularly when, more often than not, the publishing marketplace values the milk of human kindness, even–especially–if it’s artificially sweetened. Reading Leaving Lucy Pear, I’m reminded of the boldness of Philip Roth or Vladimir Nabokov–though she’s more merciful than they–and in most ways, it works for her.

I also admire Solomon’s way of illuminating psychological moments through superb prose:

Her mother looked at her tenderly and Bea felt swollen and strangled. She nearly began to speak. I am already so disappointed. She was stopped by fear: fear that if she started talking about herself, she would never stop; fear that her pain would fall out of her, grotesque, hairless, gasping, and she would not be able to stuff it back in.

All this makes Leaving Lucy Pear a gripping, painful, exceptionally well-observed narrative. And it’s also damned difficult to read, because the only truly sympathetic characters among a multitude are Lucy, Bea’s Uncle Ira, and her estranged husband, Albert. Tenderness is strictly rationed here, whereas hardness litters the ground, blocking every move, or so it seems. There’s a fine line between courageous, unflinching honesty and what can feel, at times, like authorial sadism. Solomon crosses it, I think, which makes her people difficult to sit with.

Similarly, I wonder why the Havens, wealthy Jews, must have no sense of their Jewishness except that they’re ashamed of it, Lillian especially, who’d do anything to pass. I get that Leaving Lucy Pear is partly about people afraid to be who they are, and that the historical background includes the Sacco-Vanzetti trial and the unabashed bigotry it aroused, an atmosphere from which nobody escapes. Even so, the portrayal has a mean edge, and the Havens’ self-hatred digs them a deeper hole than they already have as crass, disconnected, and (in Lillian’s case) manipulative people. Solomon rescues them, somewhat, by conveying how weak and fearful they are, and therefore still human. (Lucy, at age ten, is actually the strongest, most luminous character in the story, outshining both her mothers by far.) Yet Leaving Lucy Pear is a frightening, disturbing ride, and though I like the ending, I felt a bit bruised by the time I got there.

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

A Flood, a Bootlegger, and Two Orphans: The Tilted World

08 Thursday Oct 2015

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Review: The Tilted World, by Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly
Morrow, 2013. 303 pp. $26

This improbable, larger-than-life tale of abandonment and redemptive love makes entertaining reading, but I wonder whether the feel-good got in the way–unless, of course, you think it needs no justification. That larger question belongs in a future post, but for now, let’s consider The Tilted World on its own, fairly considerable merits.

Start with the premise, which has two federal agents casing Hobnob Landing, a fictional Mississippi town, in spring 1927. The region has suffered biblical rainstorms, and the mighty river has risen, threatening to break the levees and bring disaster. But the two agents, Ham Johnson and Teddy Ingersoll, aren’t there to help tame the tide, though they pitch in heroically. Rather, reporting to Herbert Hoover, ambitious secretary of commerce who wants the Republican nomination in 1928, Ham and Ingersoll are to: investigate the murders of two Prohibition agents; solve the case; and keep the news from a hungry press eager to discredit the government. Nothing to it, right?

Natural Steps, Arkansas, during the Mississippi flood of 1927 (Courtesy Wikipedia).

Natural Steps, Arkansas, during the Mississippi flood of 1927 (Courtesy Wikipedia).

But no sooner do they arrive in Hobnob Landing than they happen on the bodies from a random, everyday shootout, the only survivor of which is a crying infant. Ingersoll takes the orphan’s care upon himself. He gives the boy to Dixie Clay Hollister, a woman who happens to be mourning her only child. Dixie Clay also happens to be a bootlegger, which the good-hearted Ingersoll doesn’t know. Nor can he guess that her husband, Jesse, walks that Mississippi Valley of death fearing no evil because he’s the meanest sonofabitch in it and the probable killer of the two Prohibition men.

Dixie Clay is bereft of love and destined to remain so, she supposes, because she let Jesse’s charm blind her to his now-obvious flaws. Ingersoll, an adept who can shoot straighter than anybody, set a broken limb, and (in a hilarious scene) make a one-string blues guitar from the wire around a broom neck, has never turned his resourcefulness to find time to become emotionally attached. Bootlegger and federal agent, a match made in heaven, and it’s an orphan who brings them together–fittingly so, because Ingersoll grew up in an orphanage.

I like the irony in this novel. Dixie Clay makes a quality product to scrupulous standards, for which she demands top dollar; no bathtub gin for her. The joyful love she lavishes on Willy, the infant, feels real and touching, and she generously gives people the benefit of the doubt. A good person, in other words, who made the mistake of marrying a scoundrel. Meanwhile, there’s rampant bribery, whoring, and racism running through Hobnob Landing, none of which anybody objects to. But the law has made Dixie Clay a criminal, and Ingersoll, who sees her need and understands her context, will have to arrest her to fulfill his office.

Consequently, the tension in The Tilted World comes mostly from whether evil deeds go unpunished while good ones bring catastrophe, and the authors delay the definitive answer with skill. However, it’s pretty clear from the get-go what’s meant to happen, and various scenes of dire circumstances stray perilously close to cliché, if not going over the line. Call me unromantic, but I think a woman with a freshly broken arm and cracked ribs would tell her lover, “Not tonight, dear.” But maybe we should all inhabit a novel someday.

Ingersoll seems altogether too nurturing and sensitive to have never made a friend besides Ham, whereas Dixie Clay is rather erudite for someone who’s had practically no formal learning. Remarkably, neither reveals an ounce of prejudice about anyone. Jesse starts out as a believable villain but slides into over-the-top stereotype. In his single but crucial scene, Herbert C. Hoover sounds more like J. Edgar Hoover (and I doubt that the secretary of commerce would have been chasing the nomination four months before Coolidge renounced it). The flashbacks to World War I, in which Ham and Ingersoll served together, offer much extraneous detail and a few inaccuracies; here, the authors’ love of period detail gets them into trouble.

On the plus side, there’s the prose. I loved this passage, in which Dixie Clay frees a hummingbird that has stuck its “needle nose” in a screen door, and whose “wings in their blurry panic” remind her of the outboard motor on Jesse’s boat.

Dixie Clay opened her palm, but the hummer didn’t fly away, just sat, stunned, its heartbeat rapid. . . . The hummer’s grommet had three or four scarlet flecks, and so she knew it was a young male, just easing into its ruby muffler, one feather at a time. Like Willy’s eyes, which she’d studied earlier that day, in the process of turning from blue-gray to brown, not by darkening overall but dot by chocolate dot.
I’ll show you hummingbirds, Willy. I’ll show you every wondrous thing.

There are wondrous things in The Tilted World, along with the excesses. Take all of that for what you will.

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

Scarred Lives: The Jazz Palace

04 Monday May 2015

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Review: The Jazz Palace, by Mary Morris
Doubleday, 2015. 245 pp. $26
It’s 1915, and Chicago’s South Side has its clubs where black musicians assume that the very few white patrons must be there to steal their secrets. But that’s not why young Benny Lehrman hangs around, using the money intended for his piano teacher to bribe his way past the door. Jazz, whose name Benny doesn’t even know at first, reaches him because it says everything the tongue-tied, soulful teenager can’t put into words.

Jazz speaks of loneliness bred in the bone, of having to drag yourself to a job you hate, of desire for the kindness, attention, and sympathy he can never have and believes he doesn’t deserve. Underlying his pain is a family tragedy: Several years before, his younger brother, the family favorite, died in a blizzard. Ever since, Benny has unfairly taken the blame.

However, the novel opens on a different catastrophe. Three of Pearl Chimbrova’s brothers die when the S.S. Eastland rolls over and sinks just after leaving the dock. Benny, who happens to be watching from the same footbridge as Pearl, dives into the water and tries to help, but the bodies he pulls out are already dead. Even without reading the jacket flap, you know Pearl and Benny will meet again.

S.S. Eastland, ca. 1911. (Detroit Publishing Co., Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons).

S.S. Eastland, ca. 1911. (Detroit Publishing Co., Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons).

Pearl’s mother never recovers, leaving her eldest daughter to pick up the pieces. As the years pass, Pearl takes over more and more responsibility for running the family saloon and mothering her younger sisters. Like Benny, she believes that she doesn’t deserve care or attention. Only routine keeps her going.

For Benny, it’s music, as he pursues learning jazz with a single-mindedness and energy he has never shown toward anything else. When he hears Napoleon Hill on trumpet, he knows why:

Everything he’d ever known about the world–that gravity holds you down and mothers are there when you get home, that baseball has nine innings, and sleep awaits you at the end of the day–was turned upside down. He forgot about his brother lost in the snow and the dead girl he’d danced with when the Eastland went down. . . . He even forgot he was a person in a crowd, not a very old person at that, just a boy. His arms and legs all melted into one. He wasn’t anywhere but inside the music he was hearing.

Napoleon and Benny, African-American and Jew, become close friends and musical partners, drawn together in part by vulnerability. With the advent of Prohibition, Pearl’s saloon has turned into a speakeasy, and Napoleon plays there from time to time, a great risk for a black man to take in a white neighborhood. Naturally, Benny sits in one night, but if you think you know the rest, you’ll have to read this book to see why Morris is too good a novelist to take the low road.

The Chimbrovas, the Lehrmans, Napoleon, every character in this book, even Al Capone, has been emotionally (if not physically) scarred. In this world of pain, in which warm currents drift through–sometimes within reach, sometimes not–there are no answers, only doing what you have to. But there are dreams, for those who dare, whether it’s just to be able to keep going, or to reach for something that might, one day, feel like happiness.

As I’ve said recently, I generally dislike novels about crossed paths, but The Jazz Palace nails it. I could explain that by saying that Morris opens up her characters’ inner lives, gets beneath their skins, and writes lyrically in the bargain. But it’s also that these people, like their creator, know they can’t afford cheap sentiment, and that whatever they want must be earned.

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

Send Up the Twenties

24 Monday Nov 2014

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Review: Bandbox, by Thomas Mallon
Pantheon, 2004. $25

A vodka bottle comes through an interoffice mail chute by mistake and clunks a sozzled reporter on the head–and that’s just the beginning. A satirical farce that reads like a thriller, Bandbox is a hilarious valentine to the New York of 1927. The title refers to a flashy magazine fighting for its life against a hard-charging competitor, led by a one-time staffer nurtured at its hooch-filled bosom. Nothing’s too low for this ingrate defector, whether it’s bribing an office underling to rifle desk drawers, calling in the vice squad, or faking photographs.

That’s the premise, assuming it matters. Throw in a raft of eccentrics adept at stirring up whirlwinds, mobsters, a star-struck young man escaping college in Indiana, an unfortunate encounter with President Coolidge, and you’ve got as tart and heady a Manhattan as served in any speakeasy during Prohibition. Mallon spices the drink with lovingly researched details that made this transplanted New Yorker sigh with nostalgia: the interior of a subway car, the views from the newest skyscrapers (since become landmarks), the then-famous but now-obscure personalities who appear just within the story’s peripheral vision.

Mallon gratifyingly obliges the dictum that a satirist should push characters’ eccentricities to their limit. These include a shy magazine staffer who prefers animals over humans to the point that he believes John Scopes guilty “of at least presumption, since neither God nor nature would ever have allowed the evolution of charming monkeys into terrible men.” Then there’s a researcher, once married to an Italian count, who wouldn’t know an ordinary, everyday fact if it bit her, but can confirm–from experience–the shoe size of Arnold Rothstein, the gangster.

What really makes this cocktail fizz, however, is the prose. I can’t remember the last time I laughed so often over a novel. Consider this offering, about a “big-game-hunting literary sensation,”

a writer so virile and hairy-chested, he looked, when his shirt was open, like something he might have just shot. . . on the page, he boiled his sporting and amorous adventures so spare it sometimes seemed he was being paid by the word for what he left out.

It’s pretty clear who this is, but Mallon drops Hemingway’s name into the book later, as if to pretend otherwise. Wink, wink; nudge, nudge.

Bandbox is good fun and sharp satire, and I suspect that Mallon intended no more than that, which is to his credit. His publisher, however (as publishers do), tries to go further, using the adjective poignant on the jacket flap. I didn’t see any poignancy, and I’d be hard-pressed to call any of the characters three-dimensional. But they’re not supposed to be. They’re vehicles for a rollicking, crazy ride, and that’s just fine. Hop aboard.