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Call Her Madam: Belle Cora

12 Monday Dec 2016

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Review: Belle Cora, by Phillip Margulies
Doubleday, 2014. 591 pp. $29

On their mother’s death from tuberculosis in 1838, Arabella Godwin and her beloved younger brother, Lewis, are sent from their New York City home to their aunt and uncle’s farm upstate. Neither the children nor their new guardians enjoy the arrangement, but Aunt Agatha isn’t the worst problem. It’s cousins Agnes and Matthew, two of the most devious, cunning torturers an aching child has ever met, at exactly the most vulnerable time of life, whose viciousness (of course) largely escapes Agatha’s detection.

In such a life, no quarter need be asked, for none will be given. Consider the first day of school, in November:

A chalky shard of moon sat in the sky over the barn roof; a veil of frost turned weeds, sheds, and barrels a shade paler; and the frozen vegetation was springy under our feet. Steam rose from fresh dung the boys shoveled into a wheelbarrow, while the girls milked the cows, often dozing for a few seconds on the creatures’ warm bellies. Twice, after I had milked a full bucket, the cow stepped forward and flicked its manure-coated tail into the milk, ruining it, and I was whipped.

But school also brings a ray of light in Jeptha Talbot, a boy whose quiet understanding touches Arabella deeply. Trouble is, Cousin Agnes has had her eye on him, and however skillful a plotter and manipulator Arabella thinks she is, her rival always seems to go her one better. Arabella may have Jeptha’s heart, but Agnes has many cards left to play. More importantly, neither girl has figured on Matthew, whose mastery of psychological bullying, combined with physical strength, make him an even deadlier opponent. When he decides he’ll have Arabella whether she wants or not, violence ensues, and she must eventually leave town.

San Francisco harbor, Yerba Buena Cove, 1850 or 1851 (Courtesy Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons)

San Francisco harbor, Yerba Buena Cove, 1850 or 1851 (Courtesy Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons)

From there, and not for the reasons you might expect, Belle, as she now fashions herself, becomes a prostitute, then a madam, making her fortune in gold rush San Francisco. She’s good at what she does, and she treats her employees well, but what that means becomes open to interpretation. A strength of Belle Cora is how deeply and thoroughly it examines the sex trade. Though the novel painstakingly reveals the hypocrisy of polite, so-called Christian society and how cruel, un-Christian, and immoral it actually is, Belle is no saint, either. She thinks of herself as a caring, warm-hearted person who believes in justice and fairness, and in many ways, that’s true. But she also recognizes that her “girls” are unlikely to live long, healthy lives; that they’ll suffer stigma they can never escape; and that she’s profiting off them.

The men who’ve tried, often successfully, to exploit Belle, are horrid, certainly, and deserve punishment. However, whether they merit it as she dishes it out is an open question. But Belle Cora is much more than a tale of romantic competition and revenge; Margulies’s narrative unravels nuances in the infinite calculus of relations between men and women. For instance, Belle must constantly hide who she is from people who shouldn’t know, including–especially–her family, a falseness that pervades her life in ways she wishes it didn’t. On the other hand, when secrets come out, they often explode, in predictable fashion. It doesn’t matter who she really is as a person, whether her critics are any more moral than she, or, more specifically, whether they’ve ever visited a house like hers. As Belle bitterly observes, no matter what a whore does to redeem herself, no matter what charitable works she devotes herself to, people will never treat her as anything but a whore. “The world,” she says, “holds murderers in far less contempt.”

You have to admire Margulies for tackling such a deep, complex subject, though I have to admit, it takes patience to read his six hundred pages, gifted storyteller though he is. But I do like his design, which, as the jacket flap claims, is to write in “the grand tradition of Moll Flanders and Vanity Fair,” about a good girl who becomes a bad woman. At her most manipulative, Belle indeed reminds me of Becky Sharp, Thackeray’s heroine in Vanity Fair, though Belle has more heart. But the character who kept coming to mind was George Bernard Shaw’s Kitty Warren of Mrs. Warren’s Profession, a thought-provoking play that stays with you much as Belle Cora does.

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

Narrow Fiction: The Cherry Harvest

14 Thursday Apr 2016

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Review: The Cherry Harvest, by Lucy Sanna
Morrow, 2015. 321 pp. $26

You know what must happen next. It’s spring 1944, and Thomas Christiansen, a Wisconsin cherry farmer who’ll lose his orchards if he doesn’t get help for the harvest, asks the U.S. Army to supply German prisoner-of-war labor. His wife, Charlotte, though she’d do anything to save the farm or ease her daily struggle to put food on the table, has severe misgivings. Her favorite child, Ben, is with the army facing German bullets, and Charlotte wants no Nazis near her house, especially nowhere near her beautiful, innocent, teenage daughter, Kate.

Cave Point County Park, Door County, Wisconsin (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

Cave Point County Park, Door County, Wisconsin (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

Charlotte never expresses her feelings, except about Ben, but for some reason, she’s dissatisfied with her marriage. Her husband, though hardworking, is a mild-mannered intellectual type who’d much rather be running a bookstore, and the physical spark she once felt for him has lessened considerably since Ben went to war. Thomas is always quoting poetry and talking about books with Kate, a subject that Charlotte disdains when she’s not feeling jealous. Naturally, however, she won’t discuss any of this, because her answer to every problem is to shut up and soldier on.

So am I spoiling anything by saying that it’s Charlotte, not Kate, who has an affair with a German prisoner? Further, the jacket flap gives away that Ben returns wounded, though you’d have guessed that too. And when you read, early on, that he romanced the girl next door at a dance, you need no crystal ball to figure what kind of wound he has. As for yet another dose of predictable, when Kate nearly drowns in a lake and washes up at a fancy vacation home, who should rescue her but a handsome senator’s son, who’s smitten with her from the get-go and promises to fulfill all her dreams? That said, however, I do like the scenes in which she tries to mingle among his posh friends, which capture what a poor, simple farm girl trying to pass in La-La Land would feel like, including her reaction at a bathroom large enough to live in.

My point isn’t to beat The Cherry Harvest into the ground, but to figure out what went wrong. Sanna has tried valiantly to re-create a moment in time, and though I don’t really believe we’re back in 1944, particularly, I do believe we’re in Door County, Wisconsin, during hard times, and farm life comes through loud and clear. She’s got an excellent premise to work from, and Charlotte’s a mess, which means she has potential.

So what could Sanna have done differently? Let’s start with Ben, who, though a crucial character, doesn’t show up until fifty pages from the end. Aside from rare smiles or jests, he’s a hundred percent the angry, bitter, young warrior, spiraling out of control, repelling everybody faster than you can shout, “Incoming!” because, well, the novel has to end. Thomas has possibilities, but, aside from an explanation that he has the farm only because he inherited it, we see only that he’s forgiving, reasonable, thoughtful, and everything else a patient, long-suffering husband should be. At one point, Charlotte wonders, briefly, whether he had another life before they met, an instance of authorial telegraphy that repeatedly mars this novel. But we never witness his soul-stirring. Nor do we get past the surface of Karl, the English-speaking German who tutors Kate in math (natch; what Germans are expert at, ja?) and makes love to her mother. He’s got a feral side that draws Charlotte, but the rest of him is blank, aside from his many declarations that Germans are good people, just like Americans. It was all Hitler’s fault, you see.

When he says that, I’m waiting for Charlotte, proud of her Norwegian heritage, to blurt out, or at least think, Then what the hell are you SOBs doing in Norway? Or the rest of Europe, for that matter, where surely she knows that goodness has folded its tent long ago. But nobody says anything like that, only repeats that Ben has been fighting them, so they have no place on the farm.

What kills The Cherry Harvest for me, then, is its narrowness. If you’re going to whistle an old, hackneyed tune, add a harmony or three, an improvisation, a surprise, an unexpected duet or trio. Charlotte clearly has an Oedipal entanglement with her son, but we don’t know why he’s her special child. Likewise, Kate never resents playing second fiddle, nor does Thomas question his wife’s obsession. As for Karl, he could be a fascinating character, someone who entices Charlotte but also repels her for who he is, not just the uniform he wore. Instead, he rescues her from rape, and the prisoner who assaults her is the badass nobody likes, who so happens to have a scarred face. Compounding these literary felonies, Sanna has Charlotte fantasize all too easily about a life with Karl, though never really developing the idea, just dropping it in, only to dispense with it even more quickly two pages later.

Pure, uncomplicated qualities–and their inevitably flimsy transitions–make for weak fiction; they’re Hollywood. Round them out, give them depth through complexity. That’s what The Cherry Harvest fails to do.

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

Mangled Shakespeare: Beatrice and Benedick

21 Monday Mar 2016

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Review: Beatrice and Benedick, by Marina Fiorato
St. Martin’s, 2014. 431 pp. $28

Beatrice, a young woman from Verona, is walking her cousin’s estate in Sicily when she sees a Moor making love to a white woman who wears an identical wedding band to his. Though at first surprised that interracial marriage is even possible, Beatrice comes away wanting a husband too, especially one who’ll desire her so powerfully. As it happens, her uncle is about to play host to Spanish noblemen representing the power that rules Sicily; joining them are Benedick and Claudio, merchants’ sons from Padua and Florence, respectively. Beatrice and Benedick fall for each other on sight, while Claudio cozies up to her cousin, Hero.

According to legend, this balcony was where Juliet entranced Romeo (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, undated)

According to legend, this balcony in Verona was where Juliet entranced Romeo (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, undated)

Readers familiar with Much Ado about Nothing will recognize this setup as backstory for Shakespeare’s comedy. Maybe you’ve also identified the passionate couple on the beach as Othello and Desdemona. And when you hear that Beatrice’s older brother is named Teobaldo (aka Tybalt), and that a feud between the Montecchi and Capuletti families is tearing apart Verona, you’ll know to keep an eye peeled for Romeo and Giulietta.

This bold contrivance promises a rollicking story and a bushel of grand themes: jealousy, the nature of love, the sexual double standard, how appearances deceive, split loyalties, and so forth. But Beatrice and Benedick falters from the get-go, and the narrative seldom rises above what feels ordained. It’s never easy to create tension in a well-known story, but Fiorato tries by adding plot rather than by deepening her characters. That’s a mistake.

The trouble begins with her premise, which supposes that Shakespeare was Sicilian. I might accept that notion for the two hours’ traffic of her stage if she portrayed him as a rising poet and dramatist, a charismatic figure caught up in his verse. But her ink-stained scribbler’s capacity for invention takes a distant third behind the terrible wrongs done him and his thirst for revenge. He claims the mantle of authorship solely by spouting words that have since become famous, which prompts either a wink-wink, nudge-nudge or uneasy laughter. Worse, Beatrice and Benedick quote random snippets from Guess Who and even pen sonnets from the same source. You too can write great literature in your spare time, without any practice at all!

This implausible conceit would matter a lot less if the characters, especially the men, amounted to more than a collection of attitudes, locked in place for an obvious purpose. Benedick, aside from his looks and ability with a rapier (how he learned is never adequately explained), has little to recommend him, and his pride, ideas about women, and approach to life seem handed to him rather than born from within. As the wheels turn, you sense that he’s got a long journey to make, and much ado about transforming himself, before the final drama with Beatrice takes place.

Moreover, for no good reason, he immediately embraces as great friend Don Pedro, a Spanish nobleman who wears villainy barely concealed below his charm. Yet it takes Benedick, supposedly a perceptive fellow, a very long time to get the message. Further, he does so while serving Don Pedro aboard ship in the Spanish Armada, a nod to the political theme. But the conflict between Don Pedro and Benedick could unfold anywhere, and burdening the narrative with yet another epic story–one with an inevitable ending–is too much. Maybe more to the point, Fiorato’s narrative seems to lose its moorings at sea, while it’s far more authoritative at the Spanish court, where, for example, King Philip II keeps a red-headed dwarf as a caricature of England’s Queen Elizabeth. What a fabulous scene, full of tension from unexpected undercurrents.

That leaves it up to Beatrice to save this hodgepodge, but she can’t. How she got to be so independent-minded, capable with a sword, or virtually oblivious of sex until watching Othello and Desdemona are only some of the questions I have. Her conversion to ardent feminism feels unnecessarily earnest, maybe because she doesn’t have that far to travel. Further, I’m not clear how a woman who holds feminist views (and knows how to defend herself physically) surrenders so meekly to her tyrannical father. One such surrender, however, provides what I think is the author’s best scene. Before male witnesses, a doctor brusquely examines Beatrice to prove her virginity so that a marriage contract may be drawn up. Nothing speaks more eloquently than this humiliating, abusive act, which needs no further commentary. I wish the rest of Beatrice and Benedick had shown the same directness and economy.

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

A Famous Life in the South Pacific: Euphoria

28 Monday Sep 2015

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Margaret Mead in 1948 (Courtesy Smithsonian Institution Archives).

Margaret Mead in 1948 (Courtesy Smithsonian Institution Archives).

Review: Euphoria, by Lily King
Grove/Atlantic, 2014. 257 pp. $25

Suppose that three anthropologists, a husband-and-wife team and another man, cross paths in New Guinea in 1931. The husband, a magnetic, vicious boor, is jealous of his wife’s fame and has myriad ways of expressing it. His animosity grows sharper as he senses the other man attracting her with two qualities he sorely lacks, simple kindness and the ability to play with ideas. But they’re scientists, so their love triangle seethes with conflicting views about human nature, reflecting what they observe about the indigenous peoples they’re studying and how they themselves behave, so that scientific theory becomes practice. And throughout this chillingly tense, enthralling novel, it’s fair to ask what civilization means and whether Westerners have a monopoly on it the way we tell ourselves we do.

King has closely based Nell Stone, the woman of the triangle, on Margaret Mead, and the men, on two of her husbands. But don’t think for a second that their actual history predicts King’s narrative or the themes involved. Yes, she portrays Mead’s exploration of tribal sexual mores and the lives of children, findings controversial then and now, which have, incidentally, influenced American theories of child-rearing. (It was no coincidence that she chose Benjamin Spock to be her daughter’s pediatrician.) But scientific history aside, it’s the relationship between Nell and her husband, Schuyler Fenwick (known as Fen), and how Andrew Bankson comes between them, that give Euphoria its remarkable breadth.

Take, for instance, the differences between Nell and Fen:

Fen didn’t want to study the natives; he wanted to be a native. His attraction to anthropology was not to puzzle out the story of humanity. . . . It was to live without shoes and eat from his hands and fart in public. He had a quick mind, a photographic memory, and a gift for both poetry and theory–he had wooed her with these qualities day and night for six weeks on the boat from Singapore to Marseille–but they didn’t seem to give him much pleasure. His interest lay in experiencing, in doing.

For her part, what drives Nell to suffer the hardships of field work is to gather stories about other people and return home to tell them. She hopes to find a loving audience, much as she had wished her parents would pay attention to her when she was little. More important, though, she believes “that somewhere on earth there was a better way to live, and that she would find it.”

The struggle between them, with Bankson as mediator, sounding board, and, eventually, equal participant and catalyst, plays out in so many facets of life that Euphoria held me spellbound, in awe of King’s breadth of vision. To name only a few themes, the narrative reveals the anthropologists’ conflict while hashing out the nature of science, culture, feminism, violence, sex, power, exploitation, greed, selfishness, and what it means to understand someone else.

And to give you just a hint about the depth of this story, euphoria refers to how gratifying that understanding feels. But, like all euphoria, it’s brief, whether as friend, lover, or scientist. As Nell tells her journal, she loves the start of any new field posting, when she must rely on visual, nonverbal cues to communicate, to which she must pay close attention, or she’ll miss the meaning. Once she gets past that point, though, it’s less exciting and possibly misleading, for in her focus on verbal conversation, what’s really happening may slide by, unnoticed. Words, she remarks, are so often unreliable.

The field work provides a vivid, ever-changing background, in which there’s no such thing as a casual interaction. That’s another of this novel’s pleasures, the window on how anthropologists go about gathering information (or did in the 1930s). As a former Peace Corps volunteer, I’ve always liked good cross-cultural stories. Euphoria is that, and a lot more.

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