Tag Archives: shame

Year of the Thriller: Novelhistorian Turns Eight

24 Monday Oct 2022

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Another blog birthday and recap of my favorites from the last twelve months. I can’t remember a year in which they included so many thrillers, all literary. For a genre that’s supposed to fly on high-octane action, it’s remarkable how much thrust these authors achieve by putting character in the cockpit.

Not that these novels lack compelling plots; on the contrary, they have propulsion to burn. It’s just that the depth of characterization increases the tension, rather than getting in the way, as the common notion of thrillers would have it.

Pieces of eight, otherwise known as the Spanish dollar; date unknown, but after 1497 (courtesy Numismática Pliego via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

How? I think it’s because the protagonists carry around an internal “no—and furthermore.” They don’t need an antagonist threatening them—though that happens, often—because they have so much to hide, and their sense of shame drives them to take risks.

Exhibit A has to be Hour of the Witch, Chris Bohjalian’s tale of a battered woman in 1667 Boston who brings suit to divorce her husband. That makes her suspect in this Puritan town, if not criminal—and she can never admit her great shame, which is that she has sexual desire.

A different secret to hide drives An Unlikely Spy, Rebecca Starford’s novel about a young woman hired by MI5 in 1939 to track British Nazis. From the wrong side of the tracks, the new operative is brilliant at dissembling—she’s pretended all her life she comes from a higher social class than she does—but the self-deception comes at a price.

Social class also pushes the envelope in A Net for Small Fishes, Lucy Jago’s story about cut-and-thrust intrigue at the court of James I. An herbalist and fashion consultant, hired to rouse a young, beautiful countess from her depressed stupor, quickly gets in over her head, betrayed partly by ambition but mostly by the ruthless aristocrats she serves.

In M, King’s Bodyguard by Niall Leonard, Queen Victoria’s funeral in 1901 attracts Europe’s crowned heads and anarchists who’d like to kill them. Since Kaiser Wilhelm is a likely victim, the head of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch must work with his German opposite number, who’s probably lying about his identity. Our hero bows to convention outwardly yet holds subversive ideas, among them a sense of decency he knows others don’t share. That makes him fascinating and gives his enemies an edge: they’ll stop at nothing to achieve their goals, whereas he draws back.

The World That We Knew, by Alice Hoffman, ventures into mystical territory via a female golem created in 1941 to protect Jewish children from the Holocaust. Much more than a page-turning survival story, this novel, set in France, portrays human characters trying to transform themselves—and a nonhuman character wondering what life means. A beautiful, passionate narrative about life and death, love as miracle and sacrifice, and the nature of grief.

Jenny Tinghui Zhang’s Four Treasures of the Sky offers a contest between good and evil through a single character and often reads like a thriller. A young Chinese girl kidnapped in the 1880s and sold into sex slavery in San Francisco fights to free herself. But her face and gender are inescapable, and her shame at how people treat her sharpens her pain to the breaking point. This novel is bleak but essential reading.

Matrix, by Lauren Groff, isn’t a thriller, whatever its title suggests—it’s about Marie de France, an author of fairytales appointed in 1158 by Queen Eleanor of England to run a failing abbey. Marie deploys her considerable social and political skills attempting to put the place back on its feet and to create a haven where the women in her charge can escape men’s influence altogether. That may sound like a fairytale too, but Groff makes you believe, and her prose is spectacular without calling undue attention to itself.

Peter Manseau takes up similar issues in The Maiden of All Our Desires, except that the convent he portrays, though run under similar principles and rendered in similarly tactile prose, is about faith—where it comes from, what it means, and what gets in the way. The residents have secrets, desires, and questions, as well as a different take on dogma—and the bishop’s coming to decide whether rumors of heresy are true. A thought-provoking, engaging, and entertaining novel.

So long as we’re talking about women challenging church doctrine, consider The Myth of Surrender, Kelly O’Connor McNees’s story set in 1960 about two pregnant teenagers resigned to giving their children up for adoption at a Catholic home for unwed mothers. But these young women, who think they’ll outrun their shame and bypass a youthful mistake, have unpleasant surprises in store. An old story, to which the author gives fresh punch and stunning twists.

I’ve never read a mystery quite like I Will Have Vengeance, by Maurizio de Giovanni, in which the detective’s character and outlook drive the story, also a page-turner. Set in 1930s Naples, concerning the murder of an opera star, the narrative shows why hunger and love are the motives for all crime. That truth affects the brilliant, moody, yearning protagonist, who has the reputation of being cold, yet feels more deeply than anyone around him.

Fine novels all, with more than a few thrills to spare.

Independence in India: The Henna Artist

29 Monday Mar 2021

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Review: The Henna Artist, by Alka Joshi
Mira, 2020. 342 pp. $27

It’s 1955, eight years since India received its independence, and Lakshmi Shastri feels as though she too has finally earned her own. At thirty, living in Jaipur, Rajasthan, she has saved enough money to buy a house, something she’s always wanted, both to live without a landlady and for the respect and prestige owning property brings. Lakshmi’s practice in herbal medicine has grown, but she’s even better known for her henna artistry, in which she paints designs on women’s bodies for decoration, good luck, and as a health treatment. Word has gotten around among upper-class women that Lakshmi is capable, discreet, and above reproach; the last quality matters the most.

Mehndi (henna paste) applied to hands (courtesy AKS.9955 via Wikimedia Commons)

Consequently, none of them know that her parents married her off at fifteen because they couldn’t feed her — not that such a tale would bother them. Rather, when Lakshmi tired of her husband’s beatings, administered because she remained childless and therefore shamed him, she brought even greater shame by running away. If her clients knew that story, they’d cut her dead. Another unsavory secret: She earned her keep for years among courtesans, decorating them with henna and supplying herbal contraceptives and abortifacients. Now, in Jaipur, she still doles out these remedies, but under the table, often to rich men who pass them on to their mistresses.

But this income, though more or less comfortable, won’t pay for the cost overruns on Lakshmi’s house; her contractor demands payment. So, to cement her standing, garner an entrée to the maharani’s palace, and collect a nice piece of change, Lakshmi tries to broker a marriage between the son of her most important customer and the daughter of another wealthy client. Still, she has no reason to suspect that trouble beckons, until her abandoned husband tracks her down and hands over a sister she didn’t know she had, thirteen-year-old Radha. Explaining the girl’s sudden appearance, strange accent, and unpolished manners tests Lakshmi’s diplomatic skills (perhaps not enough, I think), but the real problem is Radha’s ungovernable character. The girl’s own desire for independence, too much, too fast, causes conflict between the siblings.

This setup, though complicated, promises a remarkable novel, and in the most important ways, Joshi delivers handsomely. The Henna Artist has its soap-opera arias, but the author redeems them somewhat by lingering in those moments, adding meaning, or returning to them. Problems that seem to resolve actually don’t, and a crucial one that defies solution is the gross inequity between men and women.

Lakshmi rails against it in her heart. Yet she still feels the shame she brought on herself, her parents, and her husband. This duality rings true, a woman perhaps slightly ahead of her time who can’t escape her split perspective — ideals in one frame, and cruel knowledge of cultural and social reality in the other. Contrasting her with Radha, a brilliant stroke, widens the split. Lakshmi wants her sister to escape the male-dominated trap to the extent she can. But Radha craves the familial love she never got, and though Lakshmi would want that herself, she’s cynical about it.

Joshi also provides a detailed social context, and a fascinating one it is, in which, for instance, individual shame doesn’t exist. “Humiliation spread, as easily as oil on wax paper, to the entire family,” which includes distant cousins. Another aspect, which Joshi reveals without hitting you over the head, involves upper-class preferences for the former colonial masters’ habits. Witness this passage, which, aside from the difference in costume from the British, evokes the certainty of superiority, the right to rule:

The Maharaja of Jaipur was easy to identify… the long brocaded coat, white leggings, ornamented headdress. He carried himself like the sportsman he was — chest thrust out, legs planted firmly on the ground, strong calves — taking up more physical space than his companions, including two nawabs, their Muslim headdresses and elaborately jeweled coats rivaling the maharaja’s.

Such preferences extend to hairstyles, luxuries, reading matter, and schooling. Closer to Joshi’s story, the two teenagers whose marriage she hopes to arrange are the most spoiled products of wealth and social position you can imagine. The chase for money and prestige runs through these pages and twists Lakshmi’s life.

I wish, however, that Lakshmi didn’t beat herself up quite so often, especially to apologize for what she didn’t do. I believe her powerful urge for self-blame, but if repeated too much, I begin to wonder whether a character showing such masochistic impulses could have achieved what she’s been credited with. Or is the author trying to burnish her protagonist’s image as a person of conscience? To me, she’d be more believable, therefore more appealing, with slightly less earnestness. But that said, The Henna Artist is a fine novel, well worth your time.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from bookshop.org, an online retailer that splits its receipts with independent bookstores.

Blame the Woman: No Small Shame

17 Monday Aug 2020

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Review: No Small Shame, by Christine Bell
Impact, 2020. 396 pp. AU $33

When fifteen-year-old Mary O’Donnell emigrates from Scotland to Australia in 1914, besides the promise of a more prosperous life, she’s hoping to taste a thin wedge of freedom, like a good pie — and to be reunited with her childhood crush, Liam Merrilees. But there’s precious little money waiting in this sparse landscape for Mary or her family, Further, Liam has lost the fire in his eyes, though not his self-involvement. When he’s not being outright brutal toward Mary, he shows absolutely no interest in her, but she’s the only one who can’t see it. She’s used to being kicked. Mary’s mother has bruised her all her life, and not just emotionally; daughter accepts this as her lot.

From this premise, you can predict where the narrative will go most of the time. You know that Mary won’t give up on Liam, that mother will never stop ripping into her, and that vile prophecies will bear fruit, evoking more than one trope. Yet the novel works, more or less, because Mary struggles to slip between the Catholic hellfire her mother has taught her to fear and the life she’s dreamed of leading. Her awakening from masochism won’t happen overnight, nor will the world spin any differently for it, but Mary’s interior journey is far less ordained than her exterior one.

The background fits too. First World War Australia, though distant from both Gallipoli and the Western Front, where its volunteers have gone, has its own battlegrounds, starting with that word volunteer. The country has no conscription, but the number of white feathers handed out to able-bodied men not in uniform, based on the grotesque assumption that real men never shirk a fight, takes a heavy emotional toll, on Liam as on others. The lengthy casualty lists don’t seem to make a dent, either; if some men have been slaughtered, it’s up to the rest to avenge them, even if nobody really knows concretely what the war’s about. Throw in wartime price inflation, the wages that haven’t kept pace, and strife between Catholic and Protestant, you’ve got quite a vortex of problems. Incidentally, Mary’s mother relishes the religious conflict, in her perverse way. She’s a piece of work.

I like this aspect of No Small Shame, the everyday burdens that twist life in ways that no one could have imagined when the trumpets sounded. Not least are the burdens that women bear, silently and without question, for it’s their job to make sure their men are happy and feel supported, no matter what sacrifice that entails. And you guessed it: Mary takes the brunt, though she’s not alone.

Bell’s prose is simple yet effective, as with Mary’s first glimpse of her new home:

Where were the fabulous fields and plump livestock waiting for lads and farmers promised by the immigration agent in Motherwell offering assisted passages to sunny Australia? All Mary could see extending beyond the train windows was blade after blade of grass bleached colourless as sand in a desert. The poor animals in the endless paddocks were without a leaf of shade or drip of water. She couldn’t guess how any of them survived.

Less convincing, I find, are the characterizations. Maw, her mother, is well drawn. As for Mary, it’s not easy to portray a slow transformation to selfhood, and Bell succeeds, mostly, barring shaky instances that don’t quite make sense to me. Liam, though predictable, has edges. He’s never learned to move past self-pity or reckon with who he is, and though he wants to do better, he can’t. Unfortunately, the reader knows what Mary doesn’t, that he’ll never change. I wish Bell hadn’t tried to redeem him, which I don’t believe, and which I think actually demeans his stature, renders him less tragic.

The children in these pages are idealized, not like any I’ve ever met. Ditto Tom, a Protestant friend of Mary’s who holds a candle for her, which she’s remarkably slow to recognize. He’s a nice guy and treats her kindly, but he’s cardboard, and since he’s crucial to the story, his opacity hurts the narrative. As a man with a medical condition that prevents him from enlisting, he embodies the shame men feel, just as Mary represents women that way. That’s not enough.

Nevertheless, despite these objections, I should point out how unusual No Small Shame is among First World War novels with a female protagonist, a narrow field to begin with. Mary’s neither nurse nor bandage roller nor factory worker nor her country’s soul, keeping the home fires burning. I like that. For that reason, you may find this novel worth reading.

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

Shame: Paris Never Leaves You

06 Monday Jul 2020

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Review: Paris Never Leaves You, by Ellen Feldman
St. Martin’s, 2020. 347 pp. $18

Ten years after Paris was liberated, Charlotte Foret lives in New York but is still in chains. No one’s threatening her anymore; she has her beloved daughter, Vivi, now fourteen; and a career as an editor at a prestigious publishing house, Gibbon & Field. Her boss, Horace Field, is also her landlord, for the Forets live in his East Side brownstone.

Further, Horace and his wife, Hannah, sponsored Charlotte and Vivi to come to the United States after their internment at Drancy, the camp in the Paris suburbs that was a way-station to Auschwitz. Charlotte loves her job and is grateful for the apartment and the sponsorship, but the arrangement feels more than a little awkward, especially since Hannah, a psychoanalyst, has plenty of parenting advice to give, though she herself is childless.

As the novel opens, these threads threaten to unravel, first via a letter from Bogotá that she can’t bear to read. (Melodramatic, but okay, I’ll bite.) More plausibly, Vivi asks about her heritage, specifically about her father, killed in the war, and what it means to be Jewish.

But Charlotte has always said that it took Hitler to make her a Jew, and she wants no part of such explorations. Charlotte’s so adamant, so resolutely opposed to reflection on or discussion of her past — their past, for Vivi lived through the war too — that you have to wonder whether psychoanalyst Hannah has a point. Charlotte’s not only too tightly wrapped, she’s a lousy mother, forbidding her child to discover her identity. To all and sundry, however, Charlotte says, with truth, You weren’t there, so you don’t know.

Even now, in her dreams, she heard Vivi crying, not the childish whimpers and sobs of temporary discomfort but a shrieking rage born of an empty belly, and chilled-through bones, and the agony of rashes and bites and festering sores. Sometimes the crying in the dream was so loud that it wrenched her awake, and she sprang out of bed before she realized the sound was only in her head.

But Charlotte’s memory of Vivi’s sufferings is by no means the whole truth. Paris Never Leaves You excels as a moral tale, for Charlotte’s secret feels so shameful to her that she believes — with reason — that to confess it would make her a pariah. Specifics here would spoil the suspense; once more, I advise against reading the jacket flap, clever and subtle though it is.

Feldman brings alive Paris under the Occupation, as she does New York publishing, some scenes of which are positively delicious. In Charlotte and Horace, she’s created two memorable characters, and the dialogue between them crackles like a moral duel, full of challenge and riposte. Horace wants, nay, demands that Charlotte think and reflect on who she is and what she believes, and as a result, the novel pushes the reader to do the same. That’s what Paris Never Leaves You has to offer.

But, if you’re like me, you’ll have to overlook several flaws, starting with the bland title, which sounds like the compromise offspring of a deadlocked editorial meeting, and the cover, which says nothing except, “See, here’s the Eiffel Tower, so guess where this story takes place?”

More seriously, a key aspect of Charlotte’s secret seems historically implausible, despite what the author maintains in an afterword. I don’t believe the circumstances permitting the premise could have existed for so long, if at all. And even if you take Feldman at her word, there’s Vivi, who’s too sweet, calm, and reasonable for fourteen, and who bears nary a psychological scratch from her wartime early childhood. No nightmares, no tics, no fears, just perfectly adjusted.

As for psychological thinking, I’m tired of reading about dictatorial, heartless psychoanalysts, especially those who sleep with their analysands. It’s also unnecessary, here. Feldman didn’t have to make Hannah an expert—it takes no letters after your name to know that teenagers are trying to figure out who they are–and Hannah’s involvement in Charlotte’s life, particularly her friendship with Vivi, give her standing to sound off.

It’s also odd that nobody, not even Horace, asks Charlotte how she can feel so intensely about literature, an art that lives within reflection and self-examination, yet refuse to look at herself. To do so, of course, would reveal the exact cause of her shame, and though Feldman derives tension from that secret, Charlotte can’t even think about what she has to hide, or the reader will know. That contrivance makes me ask whether Charlotte could have spelled out the secret in interior narrative early on, which would invite the reader deeper into her dilemma, a more generous approach, and perhaps a more genuine characterization.

Still, I think the moral framework stands out, and Paris Never Leaves You may be worth your time because of it.

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