Tag Archives: sexual power

Does the Threat Exist, Or Is It Paranoia?: The Vixen

14 Monday Mar 2022

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Review: The Vixen, by Francine Prose
Harper, 2021. 316 pp. $26

In June 1953, the federal government executes Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for giving atomic weapons secrets to the Soviets. Probably few families take the news harder than the Putnams, a Coney Island family, Jewish despite the name. Simon, the only child, worries about his mother, who grew up with Ethel and suffers debilitating migraines, possibly because of the political and cultural atmosphere.

With Joseph McCarthy riding high and roughshod over civil liberties, due process, and common decency, conformity means safety. You never know who will attack you, or why, only that suspicion, fear, and paranoia have gripped country. That’s enough to give any sober citizen headaches.

Young Simon wangles an entry-level job at a Manhattan publisher through a family connection. His assignment is to go through the “slush pile,” unsolicited submissions, and write rejection letters for them. Presumably, he’ll start to learn the business that way.

One manuscript, however, has been marked for greatness, and Simon is to edit it. Titled The Vixen, the Patriot, and the Fanatic, the novel portrays a thinly disguised Ethel Rosenberg as a sex-crazed Soviet agent who does her best to seduce her all-American nemesis and destroy the nation at the same time. Naturally, Simon’s appalled, doubly so when his boss swears him to secrecy and confides that The Vixen will save the company, known for producing literary masterpieces but now on the brink of financial ruin.

The photograph taken of Ethel Rosenberg on her arrest, August 1950 (courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Prose’s novel, a trenchant satire about power, truth telling, and the 1950s reads like a psychological thriller once it gets going, with obvious yet unstated parallels to the present day. Our hero never knows what’s true or not, or what consequences the lies might have. And his life is based on lies. As a Jew at a white-shoe firm, he’s trying to pass. His boss, Warren Landry, a charismatic, narcissistic, vicious bully and womanizer, repels Simon to the core, yet the younger man envies the elder for his power and sense of command. Warren also offers drama and force, commodities that Simon can only wish he understood:

Standing in my doorway with his arms braced against both sides, Warren was partly backlit by the low-wattage bulbs in the corridor. He had a Scrooge-like obsession keeping our electric bills low. His white hair haloed him like a Renaissance apostle, and the costly wool of his dark gray suit gave off a pale luminescent shimmer. He was a few years older than my parents, but he belonged to another species that defied middle age to stay handsome, vital, irresistible to women. I spent my first paychecks on a new suit and tie, cheaper versions of Warren’s, or what I imagined Warren would wear if the world we knew ended and he no longer had any money.

In that larger-than-life atmosphere of deceit and power plays, Simon knows he’s out of his depth, yet can’t help himself. The author of the book he’s supposed to edit, the beautiful, seductive Anya Partridge, lives in a low-security mental-health facility, which tells him something but not enough. She also seems to wish to do everything except talk about her book.

Consequently, the ground under Simon’s feet constantly shifts, and whenever he tries to find out the truth, his informants talk out of both sides of their mouths. He wants to do the right thing, whatever that is, yet to keep his job, all while trying to look as though he knows what he’s doing. After all, everyone else seems to.

I wish that Simon were less of a nebbish, that brand of ineffectuality that makes you want to shake him. Also, at times, it’s hard to know whether the novel intends parody or realism, particularly concerning his lustful interests, which seem rather easily engaged, even repellent. Warren, however, is all too real and gives me shivers; I used to work for a publisher who shared a few of his character traits and political views. What a horrible time of my life.

Without giving anything away, I can tell you that Prose has re-created an era when the most outlandish theories gained credence, and intelligent, thoughtful people had to wonder who was minding the store, and to what end. I’m sure she intends that as a window on our current mess. Maybe too she’s asking how it is that the Rosenbergs were called traitors and executed, whereas the insurgents who stormed the capital a year ago are somehow judged either garden-variety vandals or heroes exercising their constitutional rights.

The Vixen stretches credibility in a few places but remains a compelling, provocative novel. Take a look.

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

A Fairy Tale Made Real: While Beauty Slept

05 Monday Jul 2021

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Review: While Beauty Slept, by Elizabeth Blackwell
Putnam, 2014. 416 pp. $16

When fourteen-year-old Elise Dalriss loses her mother and almost all her siblings to the plague that nearly kills her too, she must make a desperate choice. She sees that she has no future on her father’s farm, which has been failing for years, and he’s a cruel, bitter, hard man, whom she fears. He’s also not her real father—Elise was born out of wedlock—and she doesn’t know who is, so she has that shame to bear as well.

Given courage by her mother’s last words and finding a few precious coins sewn into the dead woman’s skirt hem, Elise seizes her chance. She flees home and throws herself on the mercy of her mother’s sister. Receiving more kindness there than expected, Elise prepares to ask for employment as a chambermaid at the castle, where her mother once worked, and where King Ranolf and Queen Lenore hold court. It’s a terrifying proposition, especially for a girl of humble birth who knows nothing of court etiquette and little of the work for which she claims to be qualified. Symbolic of Elise’s anxieties, the castle itself threatens her:

I expected it to be large and well fortified. But . . . I was overwhelmed by the sheer mass of the fortress that sprawled defiantly atop the hill before me. Thick walls of rugged stone seemed to have burst forth from the earth to encircle the towers within. Behind the battlements, turrets stabbed the sky, with a few narrow windows giving the only indication that people lived within. For a moment, the weight of it chilled my spirits, and I was seized by a sudden reluctance to enter. Raised in the open air, with land extending in every direction, I had never considered what it would mean to live enclosed within walls.

This is the premise for an ingenious retelling of Sleeping Beauty, stripped of its romance and all the more captivating for it. Gone are the homage to chivalry, the rarefied sensibility, the obsession with instant physical attraction (though it does occur), or a royal perspective. Elise’s narration, though emphasizing the king, queen, and, later, their daughter—those fixtures of the legend remain—delves deeply into unpleasant realities no fairy tale ever concerned itself with. And I don’t mean the evil witch, though here she is.

Henry Meynell Rheam’s 1899 pencil-and-watercolor rendition of Sleeping Beauty (courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Rather, Blackwell tells her story through the power imbalance between men and women, the snobbery of social rank (reveled in by those who have none), and the harshness of everyday life in an era that approximates the Middle Ages without too-specific detail. Typical of that time and any seat of power, the politics of court and realm take center stage, which believably grounds the narrative and offers credible, deeper motivations than the original. When Ranolf and Lenore bemoan the lack of a child, they’re not just parents but rulers seeking an heir; foreign enemies menace the kingdom. Consequently, though Blackwell derives suspense from changing what we think we know, providing that contrast to expectations that draws us in, she’s also showing us a more plausible, harder-edged version than the original.

While Beauty Slept delivers a strong feminist message, but the novel revolves around the power of love—again, not courtly love or the powdered, happily-ever-after variety (in which you just add water and stir). She means abiding love, one that weathers years and trials without recompense asked or offered, that between parents and children, or between clear-eyed adults who’ve had enough time in life to rack up regrets.

Elise rises within the servant pecking order with perhaps too much ease—the story requires her to—though the author does her best to portray the fallout from her rivals, witness social snubs, jealousy, and backbiting. I don’t mind that so much, though I do question how a girl battered by life and a violent father could bloom so, once given the chance. That’s the downside to psychological realism versus fairy tale—once you throw down that gauntlet, you have to fulfill the challenge—and I’d have expected Elise’s losses to deduct a higher toll from her emotional resources.

Nevertheless, that doesn’t bother me as much as the moments when she announces that trouble’s a-coming, and, in retrospect (she’s retelling the story to her great-granddaughter), she wishes she’d done things differently. Such heavy-handed portents accomplish nothing except to pull the reader out of the story.

But I highly recommend While Beauty Slept, which adds realistic flesh to legendary bones in a thought-provoking way that speaks to the modern reader without compromising the time and place.

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

About a Marriage: Thomas and Beal in the Midi

13 Monday May 2019

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Review: Thomas and Beal in the Midi, by Christopher Tilghman
FSG, 2019. 371 pp. $27

In the early 1890s, childhood friends, now newlyweds Beal Terrell and Thomas Bayly, leave their native Maryland for a new life abroad. Their displacement would be unremarkable, except that Thomas’s father owned the extensive farm and peach orchards on which Beal grew up, as the child of former slaves. Since interracial marriage is illegal in Maryland — and dangerous anywhere in the United States — the couple has chosen France. Or, rather, Thomas has. Beal, though she loves Thomas and has agreed to the plan as the most practical, sensible way to have a life together, hasn’t chosen anything, and therein hangs a tale.

Thomas and Beal in the Midi offers an unusual twist on interracial marriage. Between the two participants, race causes no rifts. Other people construct what they will about the Baylys, often to indulge their bigotry, but their reactions leave no scars. The real problem is that the two exiles have married young; their inexperience makes for growing pains, specifically Beal’s difficulties being a beautiful woman. She’s tired of having men tell her who she is or must be, which is perfectly understandable, especially because that would put her in their power. But Thomas doesn’t do that, so when she lets herself be put upon or even drawn to other men who do, it’s perverse.

True, Thomas does decide, after a few months’ research in Paris, that they’ll move to Languedoc and grow grapes, and, as the man of the couple, he’s expected to be the planner. But the way Tilghman portrays his protagonists, Thomas would like nothing better than to share his enthusiasm, and Beal acts as if she couldn’t care less. Consequently, her rebellion — if such it is — takes the form of permitting approaches from precisely those men who look upon her as an object for their own admiration, a self-defeating and hurtful choice all around.

To be fair, Thomas has a certain reserve about him, a delicacy that keeps him from assuming too much. It can be maddening and charming, both, and one thing about Beal’s secret admirers, they’re not shy about talking. Meanwhile, Thomas has a mild flirtation of his own, looking for the intellectual passion Beal withholds, so the wrong doesn’t go only one direction. But he’s more honorable, with a firmer conscience. I find him far more sympathetic than his wife, who acts like an immature ninny, at times. That’s why I like the novel less than I wanted to.

For all that, though, it’s a beautiful piece of work. Tilghman has a terrific eye for emotional nuance, as in this scene between Thomas and a nun, a contact of the young man’s in Paris:

One thing he did not want to hear was some nun expounding on the challenges he faced, on the barriers Beal would encounter as — he had expected her to use this word and she had — a ‘Negress.’ But of course, expounding on challenges was what she had done. Thomas could only take refuge in the fact that she clearly held him in no higher regard than she did Beal.… When he said he was exploring various possibilities for a career in business, she acted as if this were code for doing nothing at all. She looked at Thomas and saw idleness; she thought he was stupid. He was supposed to think she was treating him perfectly properly, but he was also supposed to feel bad without really knowing why, to go away with a gnawing disquiet. He’d seen this performance from his mother dozens and dozens of times: how perfectly fascinating, she would say.

Compared with many novels, this one has a less-than-busy plot. Yet the writing, which finds unexpected meaning in small moments, fills the spaces with tension. In fact, the last part of the narrative seems rushed, a little, as though the author (or agent or editor?) wanted a quicker resolution, even at the expense of a confrontation or two that need to happen before the reader’s eyes. Nothing like destroying a climax before it starts.

Aside from the marvelous prose, I also like the symbolism. Thomas’s grape-growing experiment comes on the heels of an agricultural disaster, the invasion of phylloxera, an aphid that laid waste to much of France’s grape rootstock. To keep his vineyards alive, he must therefore graft resistant American stock on to what already grows, while uprooting the one hardy local varietal that makes insipid wine, and whose market is glutted. Since Thomas’s father’s peach orchards died off from blight (symbolic of the slavery that existed there), you can take the grafting metaphor in any direction you wish — Beal and Thomas’s marriage; America and Europe; Thomas repairing his father’s mistakes; a rebuilding of tolerance; new life in general.

Having worked for a wine merchant and traveled widely in France, I could have happily read more about the wine business. But Thomas and Beal in the Midi is a pretty good love story, and there’s much to admire in it.

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