• About Me
  • Contact Me
  • Policies
  • Welcome

Novelhistorian

~ What's new and old in historical fiction

Novelhistorian

Tag Archives: show versus tell

The Agony of Passing: The Gilded Years

09 Thursday Jun 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

1896, bigotry, book review, characterization, Gilded Age, historical fiction, Karin Tanabe, nineteenth century, racism, segregation, show versus tell, social ostracism, Vassar

Review: The Gilded Years, by Karin Tanabe
Atria, 2016. 379 pp. $16

In autumn 1896, Anita Hemmings returns to the place she loves most, the Vassar campus, for her senior year. Not only is she the class beauty (by popular vote), she excels at Latin, Greek, rhetoric, and music, the subjects deemed most suitable for young ladies–along with hygiene, of course. Social convention funnels Vassar graduates toward a single profession, teaching school, if not marriage to a wealthy Harvard or Yale man. But Anita dreams of further study, a professorship, perhaps even fieldwork involving ancient Greek artifacts. For someone of her ability, it’s possible.

the-gilded-years-9781501110450_lg

Yet it’s also not. Anita is African-American, so for three years she’s been passing as white. To look at her, no one would guess her secret. But if the school were to find out, she’d be expelled, for Vassar doesn’t admit Negroes. In fact, as the story opens, the Supreme Court has just supported segregation, through the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson case. Consequently, Anita has survived three years by remaining on the fringes, not exactly keeping to herself, but avoiding the spotlight.

Her senior year, however, she rooms with Louise “Lottie” Taylor, heiress to a New York fortune and a social dynamo. Lottie loves to shock, talking freely, and (perhaps) knowingly, about sex, alcohol, and other forbidden subjects. As she says, “There has never been a woman more worried about appearances than my dear mother. Luckily she has me to appall her around the clock.” So Lottie’s the perfect foil for Anita, pushing her into adventures that threaten to blow her cover, but which Anita can’t resist. It’s not just that Lottie’s a force of nature; it’s that Anita has desires like anyone else. And those yearnings lead her toward Porter Hamilton, a Harvard man smitten with her, a handsome, forward-thinking son of a Chicago lumber baron.

It’s a wonderful setup (based on a real person, incidentally), and Tanabe goes interesting places with it. Every move Anita makes, she risks pain, indignity, or exposure, all of which she must keep to herself, which provides a constant source of tension. The first meeting of the debating club takes up Plessy v. Ferguson, and Anita has been chosen to argue for segregation. By chance, Lottie meets her roommate’s brother, Frederick, and falls for him. Anita suffers her classmates’ casual references to blacks as inferior, which she must of course swallow in silence.

With that much going for it, I wish The Gilded Years had done more to live up to its promise. The slings and arrows that Anita must endure deserve sympathy, but she never explores them to any depth. Tanabe misses many chances here, starting with the Plessy v. Ferguson debate, which could have revealed much, but which the author prefers to summarize after the fact. That explanatory style, telling versus showing, hurts the novel in several respects, especially in character portrayal. To name one example, Anita declares her passion for intellectual subjects, yet her drive to obtain top grades seems to grip her more, because you see and feel it. But her intellectual ambitions pale beside her hopes of marrying Porter Hamilton, a notion that takes her captive maybe six minutes after they meet. I sense that Tanabe’s rushing things because she wants to compress the subplot to fit a grander design, but that comes at a cost. Anita’s undue haste makes her come across more like her flighty, less substantial roommate than herself.

But even the lightning love affair might work if Anita were reflective enough to penetrate her conflicts, rather than simply ricochet off them. Shakespeare’s Juliet famously observed that a rose by any other name would still smell as sweet, precisely the idea here. But Anita merely dips her toe into what life would be like with Porter but having to deny her family, or how her experience differs from, say, Frederick’s, who could pass physically but hasn’t tried. Despite that good head on her shoulders, she never asks herself what the many accolades she receives from her racist classmates imply about perceptions of beauty, character, intelligence, or social standing. Nor does she ever wonder what makes the Vassar community so sure of its racial and social superiority, what feelings might lie behind this, or how that shapes the world around her. She’s not quite a full person, in other words.

What’s more, it’s Lottie who commands attention, generous and grasping at once in her self-absorption, a grand manipulator and benefactress. It’s she who propels the narrative, has a clearer physical presence (it’s curious that Anita, the campus beauty, doesn’t even rate a physical description), and brings about a climactic confrontation. If Anita can’t drive the action, she could at least spend that energy internally, ripping things apart and trying to reassemble them. Unfortunately, she doesn’t do either.

The publisher calls The Gilded Years “Passing meets The House of Mirth,” evoking Nella Larsen’s 1929 tale of race relations, set mostly in Harlem, and Edith Wharton’s story about social climbing among Fifth Avenue bluebloods, published in 1905. Like other attempts to “package” a novel, the glib comparison misrepresents all three books. Tanabe’s publicists would have done her better service by letting The Gilded Years stand on its own.

The official pub date of The Gilded Years was June 7.

Disclaimer: I received bound galleys from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

What a Family: Médicis Daughter

18 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Catherine de Medicis, France, Henri de Guise, Henri of Navarre, historical fiction, Marguerite de Valois, show versus tell, sixteenth century, Sophie Perinot, Wars of Religion

Review: Médicis Daughter, by Sophie Perinot
St. Martin’s, 2015. 374 pp. $27

James Thurber once wrote about a vicious, ill-tempered Airedale, of which he observed that there was a slight advantage living in the same house, because Muggs didn’t bite the family as often as he bit strangers.

Unfortunately for Marguerite de Valois, the heroine of this novel, there’s little advantage in being Cathérine de Médicis’ youngest daughter, and no humor, however dark, to comfort her. The Queen Mother, the real power in late sixteenth-century France behind her weak-willed, ineffectual son, Charles (portrayed here with symptoms of manic depression), spares no one. Though an able, decisive leader, not for nothing is Cathérine known as La Serpente, and nobody feels the venom more than Marguerite, a beautiful, curious, intelligent child.

Marguerite, who can’t believe that maman cares about her only to the extent that she can marry the girl off for political advantage, redoubles her efforts to please. Naturally, too, this gets her nowhere, because she can never be pleasing enough, and any sign of hesitation to obey, let alone have her own mind, dooms her to punishment, which of course Marguerite turns against herself. She must be wrong. Maybe she even harbors sinful desires that prevent her from being properly dutiful. Otherwise, why would her family, who love her, treat her like that?

Trouble is, though Marguerite readily accepts her position as a diplomatic pawn and yearns to have a royal husband and a crown, her carefully tutored notions of morality and sin clash with what she sees at court. When she happens on her elder brother, Henri, having sex with a lady-in-waiting, Marguerite asks her mother whether she intends to stop it. Of course not, Madame says.

It is to your advantage to permit and ignore those women who are least dangerous–those less clever than you, lacking connections, or with personal attributes which presage a short tenure. A woman who a man will soon tire of is no serious threat.

Cathérine speaks from experience; when she first came to France from Italy, she had to put up with Diane de Poitiers, her late husband’s mistress. Nevertheless, “Had I arrived and found His Majesty without a mistress, I would have made it my business to steer him toward a woman loyal to myself. One must be clever where there is a husband to be managed.” Her daughter is appalled, though she doesn’t say so.

But there’s more pressing business. Catholic and Protestant are at each others’ throats, and the conflict, occasionally breaking out into open warfare, divides the kingdom. The Valois monarchy, caught between the need for internal order and the wish to wipe out the Protestants–a project that many French subjects are itching to carry out–leads to twisting, double-edged alliances and a deep insecurity. Marguerite vaults herself into the hurricane by conducting a torrid, clandestine affair with the duc de Guise, a Catholic champion from Lorraine viewed as an upstart by the Valois.

St. Bartholomew Massacre of Protestants, 1572, as reconstructed by Francois Dubois, a Protestant painter. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

St. Bartholomew Massacre, 1572, a key event in the Wars of Religion, as reconstructed by Francois Dubois, a Protestant painter. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

I like how Perinot handles the Valois family dynamics. The way Cathérine coddles her eldest son while essentially emasculating him seems real, as does her blind preference for Marguerite’s older brother, Henri, a narcissistic jackass of the highest order. The affair with de Guise gradually reveals sides of Marguerite’s lover that she’d rather not have seen, yet he can rightfully protest that she also values him for those qualities, or once did. Best of all, I like how Perinot portrays Marguerite’s early married days with a husband she detests; those familiar with the history will recognize how mistaken Marguerite is, and how he’s worth ten of anyone else.

That said, there are serious flaws in Médicis Daughter, chief of which is that the first eighty pages are largely irrelevant and slow the pace. The later narrative repeats what you need to know about the characters anyway, whereas the ending feels somewhat abrupt and could have used more space. The writing, though often fluid, occasionally stumbles because of a heavy hand, as when Marguerite’s first-person narration underlines a point already made. At times, Perinot explains when she should show, and the racing pulse and sharp inhalations are formulaic expressions of emotion, curiously so when the author has drawn her characters so astutely. One oddity is the random French word or phrase dropped into dialogue, which seems to have no purpose; another is the use of current colloquialisms, like call out, impact, or according to her script. No doubt sixteenth-century royalty used idioms like the rest of us, just not the same ones.

Still, there’s much to like about Médicis Daughter, and I think readers who stay with it will be rewarded.

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

Novel As Synopsis: The Flight of the Sparrow

22 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Amy Belding Brown, Calvinism, colonists, early America, historical fiction, King Philip's War, Massachusetts Bay Colony, narrative technique, Native Americans, Puritans, race prejudice, show versus tell

Review: Flight of the Sparrow: A Novel of Early America, by Amy Belding Brown
NAL, 2014. 331 pp. $15

Flight of the Sparrow depicts the Massachusetts Bay Colony of the mid-1670s and the bloody struggle between colonists and Native Americans known as King Philip’s War. The premise supposes that Indians raiding a Massachusetts settlement kill the men and a few women and children, while taking the rest captive, among them Mary Rawlandson, a minister’s wife. For Mary, as for the other captives, shock follows shock–the murders, separation from loved ones, enslavement, near-starvation after a life of relative plenty, the constant threat of death.

The Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1629 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

The Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1629 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain in the U.S.)

But Mary’s captivity involves much more than trauma, which is why Flight of the Sparrow is a fascinating book. Her church teaching has reinforced the common assumption among the English colonists that the devil drives Native American life, and that heathen depravity makes Indians less than human. No surprise there, but what Brown does with that gives rich thematic scope to her narrative. Mary learns that many aspects of native life compare favorably with her own, including kind playfulness toward children, the willingness to share, greater respect for women, and, perhaps most of all, the expression of deep, unconstrained feeling.

Though Mary dreams of returning to colonial society and her husband, Joseph–whose absence the day of the raid saved his life–she begins to rethink who she is and what she wants, questions she’s never asked herself. She’s a captive, yet her definition of freedom (and relationship with God) will never be the same. You sense that she’ll somehow resume her former life, and you want to know how she’ll deal with that, or how the other colonists will view her.

To her credit, Brown airbrushes nothing, seeking neither to excuse nor obscure the gruesome violence Mary witnesses, nor to patronize the Native Americans as noble savages. It’s a generally sympathetic portrait, but a mixed one, and I believe it, as I do her portrayal of colonial ways. I knew very little of this subject, so I was pleased to read her thoughtful, thought-provoking narrative. For theme and scope, Flight of the Sparrow deserves an audience.

But in other ways, this is an artless, frustrating novel. Mary’s the only character of any depth. Her husband’s fire-and-brimstone persona wears thin after a while, because you can’t tell what sin and salvation actually mean to him, or why he has his particular take. To say that he’s a Calvinist preacher or a man of his time and place gives Brown leeway at first, but sooner or later, she has to show us more to keep him a plausible character with more than one dimension. There are hints, here and there, of vanities, desires, and weaknesses, but I wish she’d explored them. It would have made him more sympathetic, and a true match for Mary. Likewise, the baptized Indian man, James, who protects Mary as best he can, seems more like a representative than a full person. He’s crucial to the themes, plot, and politics of the narrative, and he reflects her conscience, but I wanted more.

The writing also bothers me, especially the emotional transitions. Instead of using metaphor, memory, or sensory clues to show what Mary feels, Brown offers summaries, full of rhetorical questions and bald statements. “She begins to accept the fact that he [Joseph] will not come for her and her affection for him shrivels.” This is a key moment, surely worth exploration. Another is the night Mary approaches James’s tent, an action that should feel as if all the devils in hell are leering at her, even as her desperation to understand what only James can tell her drives her toward him. But Brown describes the action, so that the passage reminds me of an emotional synopsis, what she might have written in planning the chapter. In certain similar moments, you can even imagine the bullet points, as with, “She becomes abruptly aware of how her clothes restrict her and promote her submission.”

I don’t mean to pick on Brown or hold her up to ridicule. I think she’s an astute writer who’s told a story of psychological complexity; I only wish she’d carried it through. And I bring this up because I’m trying to figure out whether my insistence means I’m chasing rare air in the literary atmosphere. Reading The Flight of the Sparrow makes me wonder about other books in which the authors tell too much, and whether most readers prefer that.

What do you think?

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

Recent Posts

  • Women Without Men: A Single Thread
  • The Prince Who Could Not Speak Up: Lampedusa
  • Hard Life Lessons: Dominicana
  • Love, Theft, Hate: The Sisters of Summit Avenue
  • Which Side Are You on, Boys?: The Women of the Copper Country

Recent Comments

Which Side Are You o… on Get Out of Dodge: Doc
Novelhistorian on Five Years, and I Still Haven…
Sarah Johnson on Five Years, and I Still Haven…
Five Years, and I St… on Past Lives: Old Baggage
Five Years, and I St… on Mythic Seduction: Once Upon a…

Archives

  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014

Categories

  • Comment
  • Reviews and Columns
  • Uncategorized

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Blogs I Follow

  • Rewriting History
  • Damyanti Biswas
  • madame bibi lophile recommends
  • Barda Book Talk
  • History Imagined
  • Suzy Henderson
  • Flashlight Commentary
  • Reading the Past
  • Diary of an Eccentric

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 128 other followers

Follow Novelhistorian on WordPress.com

Recent Posts

  • Women Without Men: A Single Thread
  • The Prince Who Could Not Speak Up: Lampedusa
  • Hard Life Lessons: Dominicana
  • Love, Theft, Hate: The Sisters of Summit Avenue
  • Which Side Are You on, Boys?: The Women of the Copper Country

Recent Comments

Which Side Are You o… on Get Out of Dodge: Doc
Novelhistorian on Five Years, and I Still Haven…
Sarah Johnson on Five Years, and I Still Haven…
Five Years, and I St… on Past Lives: Old Baggage
Five Years, and I St… on Mythic Seduction: Once Upon a…

Archives

  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014

Contents

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Blog at WordPress.com.

Rewriting History

How writers turn history into story, and story into history

Damyanti Biswas

For lovers of reading, writing, travel, humanity

madame bibi lophile recommends

Reading: it's personal

Barda Book Talk

Book Reviews

History Imagined

For Readers, Writers, and Lovers of Historical Fiction

Suzy Henderson

What's new and old in historical fiction

Flashlight Commentary

What's new and old in historical fiction

Reading the Past

What's new and old in historical fiction

Diary of an Eccentric

writings of an eccentric bookworm

Cancel