This Blog Is One Year Old Today
Andrew W. Taylor, Ann Weisgarber, Colm Toíbín, Geraldine Brooks, Helen Dunmore, historical fiction, Jean-Christophe Rufin, Jerome Charyn, John Spurling, Laila Lalami, Lily King, Mary Morris, Robert Harris
A year ago today, I published my first review as Novelhistorian. My thanks go to all my readers, regular or casual, with a special nod to those who've graced their visits with commentary. Without all of you, this blog wouldn't exist. Thank you again.
When I was growing up in the New York area, a local TV channel broadcast Million Dollar Movie, a program that showed a single film continuously for hours at a stretch. The theme song, as I only found out years later, was from Gone With the Wind; I still think of it as belonging to the TV program. The movies were generally the swash-and-buckle type, like Scaramouche or The Crimson Pirate (Burt Lancaster in a title role he probably preferred to forget). It's thanks to Million Dollar Movie that I can quote stretches of Duck Soup, without which my education would have been incomplete, or vividly recall James Cagney playing George M. Cohan and Errol Flynn as Robin Hood.
Each showing of a movie closed with the voiceover, "If you missed any part of ________ or would like to see it again, stay tuned after these messages."
So that's what I'm offering you today. After reading about a hundred books the past year, the following dozen are the ones that have stayed with me most clearly and probably will for awhile. And if you missed my reviews (or care to read them again), here they are, in recap, with links, following the order in which I published them.
The Lie, by Helen Dunmore, recounts the painful, tragic struggle of an English veteran of the First World War who returns to his village and tries to make a life. The Anatomy of Ghosts, by Andrew W. Taylor, involves an eighteenth-century amateur sleuth who must combat superstition, class prejudice, and political influence to solve a murder–and grows as a person in the process.
The Dream Maker, by Jean-Christophe Rufin, is a gripping tale about Jacques Coeur, the fifteenth-century French merchant who not only helped Charles VII transform his country but conceived of power as stemming from knowledge, a revolutionary idea. I Am Abraham is Jerome Charyn's stirring portrayal of Lincoln as a man conscious of his physical ugliness and tortured by loneliness and desire as he tries to find his way.
An Officer and a Spy, Robert Harris's novel about the Dreyfus Affair, is more than an intensely compelling story about the most infamous political scandal in nineteenth-century French history (and there were many). It's also the gold standard for thrillers. The Ten Thousand Things, John Spurling's novel about Yuan Dynasty China, explores art, sex, love, justice, and politics–you know, the important stuff. For the record, it won this year's Walter Scott Prize. Colm Toíbín's subtle, probing Nora Webster, set in 1960s Ireland, takes a commonplace subject, widowhood, and makes it into literary art of the first order.
Jazz Palace, Mary Morris's lovely rendition of Chicago jazz during the Twenties, captures the era and two of its walking wounded in a hard-edged, deeply felt romance. In The Promise, Ann Weisgarber spins a keenly observed, taut love story of 1900 Galveston, about two people who can see past surfaces and the jealousies that surround them.
The Moor's Account, by Laila Lalami, follows the disastrous sixteenth-century Narváez expedition to the Gulf of Mexico, as viewed by its most adept (but socially and culturally invisible) member. Lily King's Euphoria follows a love triangle among anthropologists in New Guinea in 1931, based on Margaret Mead's life, in a retelling of exceptional breadth, psychological insight, and power.
Finally, The Secret Chord, Geraldine Brooks's recent novel, recounts the rise of King David, as told by his prophet and trusted adviser, Natan. Like The Dream Maker, I Am Abraham, and An Officer and a Spy, Brooks manages to infuse edge-of-the-seat tension into a narrative whose events are no surprise.
Here's to another year of good reading.
Always Ask for More: The History of a Pleasure Seeker
1907, Amsterdam, erotic, historical fiction, novelty, picaresque, pleasure, Richard Mason, social class, twentieth century
Review: History of a Pleasure Seeker, by Richard Mason
Knopf, 2012. 277 pp. $26
Piet Barol, a young man from Leiden who appreciates the fine things he can't afford, has everything and nothing going for him. He has no accomplishments or talents, save an ability to draw and a decent singing voice; no bloodlines to boast of; and his meager wardrobe consists of more-or-less presentable finery he's bought second-hand (from university students in hock up to their eyeballs). These are rickety assets on which to build one's fortune in 1907, but Piet won't settle for less than the life to which he plans to become accustomed. And he figures that he'll win the day through charm, manners, good looks and, most important, his conceit that he can get anyone to like him.
Photocrom print of Nieuwmarkt en Waag, Amsterdam, between 1890 and 1905 (Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons).
Accordingly, when Mr. and Mrs. Vermeulen-Sickerts, pillars of Amsterdam merchant wealth, interview Piet in their sumptuous home as a prospective tutor for their young son, Piet boldly (but with proper deference and discretion) acts as if he belongs. He has no other prospects, and if he's turned down, has no idea what he'll do. On the other hand, he has no experience dealing with children, was himself a mediocre scholar, and, what's more, the Vermeulen-Sickerts are deliberately vague when describing Egbert, their son. Through tactful questioning, Piet learns that the boy never goes outside and has a particular way of relating to others. Nevertheless, the Vermeulen-Sickerts expect that Piet will "cure" Egbert, which the young man from Leiden promises to do. So they hire him–upon which he asks for, and receives, a raise.
Naturally, the situation presents other perils. The Vermeulen-Sickerts have two beautiful, marriageable daughters, spoiled young women who immediately set upon Piet's destruction. The younger, Louisa, cold and devious, suspects him as a fake and invents ways to trip him up, starting with the first meal he shares with the family:
Piet took in the handwritten menu in front of him, the four crystal vases of orange roses that decorated the table, the two silver dishes piled high with blood oranges on the sideboard, and felt wonderfully proud of himself. If Louisa had expected him to be confounded by the oysters or the langoustines or the quail à la minute, she was disappointed–because [his mother] had foreseen just this eventuality and twice a year had served Piet the delicacies of her youth so that he might dine in sophisticated company one day, without shame.
The elder daughter, Constance, flirts with him for the pleasure of rousing an attraction that she can then reject (and for which he'd be fired, should he pursue her in any way). The butler and footman would like to cozy up to him too–his looks attract both men and women–and the lady of the house seems available as well. What's a fellow to do? Win them all over, but without compromising himself or his ambitions.
Rest assured that in this picaresque, often hilarious tale, our hero has plenty of erotic adventures, all graphically described, and sexual tension hums in the background, even–especially–when everybody's fully clothed. But if Piet Barol were merely a hedonist on the make, The History of a Pleasure Seeker would be far less interesting than it is. Rather, Mason has thought about how being surrounded by exquisite sculptures, eating foie gras off Sèvres china, and soaking in a hot bath for the first time can change a person's outlook.
In doing so, he's underlined a forgotten point about the modern age: It wasn't so long ago that the simplest luxuries were beyond any but the very rich. We take that for granted, because today, they're commonplace. But have we deadened ourselves to the real pleasure they give, and does that mean we have to seek greater and greater novelty to arouse our senses?
Moreover, Piet's presence changes his employers' lives too, because he's a reminder of the physical and emotional intimacy they've cast away in exchange for creature comforts. As such, The History of a Pleasure Seeker examines social class and how the need to be superior exacts a price from those who fall victim to it, a theme reminiscent of novels by Edith Wharton and Henry James.
Less Is More: The Wilson Deception
1919, Allen Dulles, David O. Stewart, diplomacy, Georges Clemenceau, historical fiction, implausible plot, Lawrence of Arabia, Paris Peace Conference, Robert Lansing, thriller, twentieth century, Woodrow Wilson
Review: The Wilson Deception, by David O. Stewart
Kensington, 2015. 266 pp. $25
As I mentioned in my review of Robert Goddard's novel, The Ways of the World (August 30), I've always wanted to read a first-rate thriller about the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. So when The Wilson Deception crossed my path, I grabbed it.
That bad news is that this book isn't what I'm looking for. Melodrama afflicts The Wilson Deception with a high fever, which, in its delirium, spawns a very far-fetched plot, full of talking heads of state repeating commonplace information, and whose French is sometimes less than grammatical. Even the novel's protagonist, Major James Fraser, an army doctor, feels like a cardboard cutout who'll topple in the slightest breeze off the Seine. Tending horribly wounded men has left its mark, but the narrative says so more than it shows him feeling it. He's estranged from his wife and adult daughter, but that too feels handed out rather than enacted, and when the women arrive in Paris, the chance for reconciliation unfolds with little process. It's not earned.
However, the good news is that the talking heads include the likes of Woodrow Wilson, Georges Clemenceau, and David Lloyd George, with Lawrence of Arabia trying unsuccessfully to lobby them. As a historian of that era, I'm a sucker for Clemenceau in particular, and Stewart has a good time letting the French premier unleash his witticisms. For instance, when a would-be assassin wounds him, he tells American visitors to his sickroom:
Yes, it was a shameful episode. A Frenchman stands not ten feet from me and fires seven times. Yet he hits me only once. Who will respect French marksmanship? Our honor is forever stained. It will cause men in Berlin to think about invading France again. . . . Of course, men in Berlin need very little encouragement to think such thoughts.
Stewart also tries to turn Robert Lansing from a footnote into a person, and I like that too, or at least the attempt. Lansing became secretary of state in 1915 when William Jennings Bryan resigned, and he should have been the chief negotiator in Paris. But Wilson, who had never let Lansing do his job–the president even typed his own diplomatic notes–wasn't about to unchain him now, given Wilson's oversized ego and the chance to act on the world stage. The novel captures Lansing's frustration at being pushed aside, which gives the supposedly dry-as-dust lawyer the chance to fire off his own bons mots: "Wilson's had such a charmed political life that he's afflicted with the optimism of the consistently fortunate."
Robert Lansing, Wilson's second secretary of state (Courtesy Library of Congress).
However, the author hasn't decided where the story lies. Lansing offers possibilities, but he's there only because of his nephews, Allen and John Foster Dulles (whose relationship to Lansing was news to me, and piqued my historian's interest). Since Allen would later direct the CIA, for which he seems to have been practicing, he serves Stewart's purpose, in a way. But dragging him in requires a connection to the negotiations, which covers acres of ground, the promontory of which seems to be Lawrence's attempts to create an Arab state in the Middle East. Linking these pieces would be a stretch in any narrative, but that's only half the trouble.
Remember Fraser, the army-doctor protagonist? He, as an influenza expert, is called in to examine Wilson and winds up trying to clear a young African-American soldier from a trumped-up charge of desertion. So there's yet another complication or three. The friendship between Fraser and the soldier's father, who shows up in Paris for a conference on race, is never explained and seems unlikely, though it does lend a counterpoint to Wilson's bigotry, on full display here.
Consequently, The Wilson Deception fights itself, with too many threads tugging the reader's attention. I've always thought the conference provides plenty of drama, with even minor figures looming larger than life, as with Lawrence. If they're the story, why shoehorn in a separate, unbelievable plot? Or, if Fraser really is the story, put the leaders in the background, just within the periphery, and devote full attention to the medical man and the young soldier he's trying to protect.
Hiding in Plain Sight: The Imposter Bride
1946, abandonment, betrayal, characterization, deceit, divorce, historical fiction, Holocaust, identity, Jews, mail-order bride, Montreal, Nancy Richler, refugees, twentieth century
Review: The Imposter Bride, by Nancy Richler
St. Martin's, 2013. 360 pp. $25
Montreal, 1946. A young Jewish woman named Lily Azerov, escaping from Europe via Palestine, steps off a train, expecting to meet her fiancé, a man she's never seen. But at the train station, after one look at Lily, he decides he doesn't want her, so his brother marries her instead.
Boulevard Dorchester, Montreal, 1946 (Courtesy Archives de la Ville de Montréal, via Studio Pluche).
From this arresting premise comes a richly layered, marvelously observed novel about deceit, betrayal, and (of course) abandonment. Though at first seemingly the victim, Lily never really joins her new family, and she winds up enacting her own betrayal, disappearing from Montreal without a trace. Lily leaves behind a three-month-old daughter, Ruth; a large, uncut diamond; and a diary in Yiddish that, like her name, may or may not be hers. Ruth's father, aunt, uncle, and grandmother do their best for the abandoned child and answer her innocent questions about her origins; she could never say she went unloved. Quite the contrary.
But as Ruth gets older, she receives the occasional birthday package, always a beautiful rock specimen from various places in Canada, with time, date, and temperature, but no signature attached. Naturally, the girl becomes more curious, less accepting of her relatives' explanations, more determined to learn the truth about her mother. Do they know more than they're saying, or is it really a mystery to everyone? That's the problem, but it goes much deeper. Told from several vantage points (though mostly Ruth's), The Imposter Bride recounts how each person has his or her own reasons to feel abandoned and betrayed, and how these experiences have blinded them to their own deceptions, of themselves and others.
I got lost in this web occasionally, because Richler jumps back and forth in time. But her narrative always sorts itself out, and her moment-to-moment exploration of what goes said and unsaid reveals a keen grasp of psychology and portrays well-rounded characters. Several times, I had to laugh while shaking my head at familiar Jewish inflections and perspectives, which Richler captures perfectly. I've never met these people, yet I know them.
Richler's prose is simple, depending as much on the states of mind she evokes as on the imagery she sparingly but tellingly deploys. Here's an example, from when Lily first arrives in Montreal and shuts herself in her room, fearing to go out.
It was as if the world outside her bedroom was a stilted play she'd walked into and couldn't walk out of again, a dream she couldn't wake from, where everything was menacing in an intangible, slightly surreal way. She hadn't felt this way during the war, when the dangers that she faced were real. Had she felt it then, she would not have survived, she thought; she would have given herself away with the sort of anxious glance or gesture that had been fatal to so many.
Why she hunkers down goes beyond the shock and trauma to which her new family at first ascribes her aloof unfriendliness. The answer is no great surprise, especially after the clues that pop up in the story, so the ending feels predictable and fails to carry the force it might have. The novel makes Lily out to be a stable person, yet it's hard to imagine anyone sane (a) abandoning a three-month-old infant and then (b) trying to keep in touch by sending her rocks. I also wonder how the characters who've been abandoned by spouses can even think about remarriage without obtaining a divorce. But despite these criticisms, The Imposter Bride has so much to say about wanting to belong, recovery from tragedy and humiliation, and the purpose of truth–all told in a gripping, astutely described process–that I still like the book very much.
Harsh Necessity: The Secret Chord
adultery, Bible, bloodshed, civilization, David, dramatic tension, Geraldine Brooks, historical fiction, Israel, Nathan, prophecy, Pulitzer Prize, Solomon, Tanakh
Review: The Secret Chord, by Geraldine Brooks
The stories are so well known they're common metaphors. When one person, athletic team, or military force faces a much larger, stronger opponent, we talk of David confronting Goliath. If we hear of adultery that leads to murder, the case evokes David and Bathsheba. Everyone knows, too, how the first king of Israel was a celebrated warrior, political leader, poet, musician, and judge, yet how a prophet's rebuke made him repent while at the height of his power.
The Tel Dan stele, one piece of archeological evidence for David's kingdom (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).
Or maybe not, if you read this magnificent, powerful, intensely gripping novel, which reimagines the biblical hero in his glory and fatal flaws. Brooks shows David's daring, passion, devotion, ability to listen, grasp of military and political strategy, his occasional efforts to restrain the blood lust of the age, and his unmatched singing voice, beautiful verse, and cries of rage or grief. In other words, she explores why people followed, loved, and believed in him, and how he forged a kingdom out of warring tribes, but also why his vanity, arrogance, sexual appetites, and blindness to misdeeds (his own and his favorites') caused so much misery and jeopardized his entire enterprise. Perhaps most important, the bloodshed and cruelty that David calls necessary to create a strong central government and, thereby, curtail unnecessary bloodshed and cruelty, keeps circling through the narrative, just as it has circled throughout human history.
How does Brooks manage to convey all this while sustaining the tension of a story written thousands of years ago? On first reading, I see several ways. First, though David is the object of everyone's attention, he's not the protagonist; Natan, his conscience, is. (Throughout, Brooks uses Hebrew names for people and places.) Like all prophets, Natan often wishes he didn't have his gift, which keeps him from living like other men and evokes a mixture of fear, awe, disbelief, and misunderstanding.
However, it also saves his life. When David, then a rebel outlaw, puts a village to the sword for having refused to share food with his soldiers, the ten-year-old Natan watches his father die. Then it's Natan's turn, whereupon he falls into a fit and pronounces the fateful prophecy of great things. Naturally, the soldiers think it's a performance, if brilliantly done; they don't believe what they can't see or touch. But David brings the fledgling seer into his household, where he eventually becomes a trusted adviser, and you get the idea that it's not just David's ego that has guided him but his talent for seeing beyond surfaces.
Even so, for Natan, his calling cuts more than one way. First, intense physical and emotional anguish always presage and accompany his prophetic utterances, so that he's completely outside himself and can't hear his own words. If it happens among other people, he can only find out what he's said after he recovers, though meanwhile, he sees how his listeners react. That separation puts him at a disadvantage. Secondly, though his status protects him, when Natan speaks to the king and the generals in his own guise, he's risking his neck, especially if they think he's criticizing them. It's a delicate balance for Natan, who must resist the temptation to pretend that certain words come from God when they don't, and he can be sure that these powerful men will ask. Further, contrary to what they assume, he doesn't see how things will come to be, only what will be. Consequently, his presence at their councils creates tension, as do his divided feelings, and much rides on what he chooses to say or keep to himself.
The narrative of course grows much flesh on the bones of an oft-told story, but Brooks never lets her inventiveness betray her characters. For instance, how she shows David winning his epic combat with a slingshot, or how she explains why Batsheva was bathing on her roof, make perfect sense for the people involved. You know that these things will happen, but you don't know how, or how people will view them, and that adds drama as well.
Then there's the prose, though which Brooks re-creates an ancient landscape and ways of thought until you can practically touch them. Take this example, when Natan leaves his burning, corpse-ridden village forever, his father yet unburied, and his mother refuses to say goodbye:
I felt, in her shunning, the first of many turnings-away. It was hard for a child to feel that ebbing love, to sense an estrangement that I could do nothing to gainsay. For my part, I still loved her as much as I had the moment before my mouth opened and the words poured out of me. But like the leper when the first lesion darkens and pits his skin, I was marked in her eyes, blemished, unlovable.
As for quibbles, I do wish Brooks had scrapped the prologue; I dislike them, and they feel gimmicky. The narrative switches time perspectives, leaving me in the dust on occasion, though I caught up soon enough. Finally, when the five-year-old Shlomo (Solomon) speaks words that he'd later set down in Ecclesiastes, that feels a bit precious, much as I love their wisdom. He's a prodigy, sure, but it's actually more meaningful that Brooks stresses David's vanity, a subtle contrast with the philosophy that his son would later express.
This is the fourth novel of Brooks's I've read (see my review of Year of Wonders, January 5). But I like this one the best of any, and I wouldn't be surprised if The Secret Chord, like March, earned her a Pulitzer Prize.
A Flood, a Bootlegger, and Two Orphans: The Tilted World
1927, Beth Ann Fennelly, bootlegging, flood, historical fiction, Mississippi, natural disaster, orphans, Prohibition, racism, Tom Franklin, twentieth century
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).
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.
Dabblers at War: The Race for Paris
1944, D-Day, feminism, France, historical fiction, liberation of Paris, Meg Waite Clayton, Normandy, occupation, romance, sexism, twentieth century, war correspondents, World War II
Review: The Race for Paris, by Meg Waite Clayton
Harper, 2015. 311 pp. $26
Jane Tyler, a fledgling reporter from a Nashville paper, and Olivia (Liv) Harper, a young photographer from New York, are covering the American army following the D-Day landings in Normandy. Or, rather, they're trying to, but the prejudice against female journalists prevents them from gaining accreditation to the front lines. So they sweet-talk Fletcher, a British intelligence photographer who happens to be a good friend of Liv's husband, to drive them through the war zone, against all regulations. Their goal: To get to Paris the moment the city is liberated and score a scoop.
Fletcher's ability to roam anywhere seems a mite improbable, as does his job, taking pictures of enemy installations that somehow prove of instant use. But no carping, here. Fletcher has always been sweet on Liv; he takes a liking to Jane too, who returns the feeling; and their adventures make for gripping reading. The whole setup offers a terrific opportunity for exploring feminist themes, which Clayton clearly wishes to do. And having recently returned from a hiking trip to Normandy (see my photo, below), I was primed for a story like this.
It's hard to believe that these quiet, bucolic hills near St.-Martin-de-Sallen, Normandy, were the scene of bloody fighting in August 1944.
The Race for Paris focuses on the victims of both sides. To that end, Clayton underlines American excesses or mistakes, as with the intentional destruction of St.-Lô, or when friendly fire kills or wounds hundreds of soldiers in their foxholes, an incident that never made the press. We've heard so much puffery about the Greatest Generation and the good fight, it's refreshing to read a novel daring to point out that our boys were human after all. And Clayton excels at depicting the carnage, the waste, the poignancy, in prose that often attains effortless beauty.
Nevertheless, she seems too rigorous in her intent. It's not just that she can't make up her mind whether she's writing historical fiction or history, as when she borrows a well-known quote about St.-Lô and lets her characters hear it, a self-conscious you-are-there moment that undercuts an otherwise touching scene. Nor is it Jane's startling omniscience, when, out of nowhere, she somehow acquires a theoretical grasp of an immense, fluid battlefront that nobody could have observed through the cracked window of a wandering jeep.
Rather, it's Jane's moral omniscience, which comes without a struggle, that absolutely kills this book for me. It's one thing to view Germans and Allies as victims and see individual circumstance as paramount, but it's another to make that judgment willfully ignorant of the context. The narrative says nothing about the Occupation, except that it's "brutal," or to note that children look painfully thin. Nor does Clayton show collaboration or even mention the Gestapo or the SS–whose crimes right after D-Day were arousing great fury–or the Holocaust. She does drag in a few Jews at the end, but I'm not buying.
I'm not saying Clayton should have had her characters discuss all these things; that would have sounded canned and ruined the narrative. Still, Liv and Jane seem unconscious of what's happening–and what has happened–around them, which spares them the difficulty of having to make complex choices based on inconvenient facts. It also makes them lousy journalists.
Take, for instance, the moment when they witness the signature cliché of the liberation, a man shaving a woman's head because she slept with a German. Naturally, Liv and Jane vent their outrage on the man who holds the scissors; Fletcher attempts to stop him, in vain. But he also tries to tell his companions that the scene may be more complicated than they know, that the woman probably informed on her fellow villagers or lived high while they starved. To no surprise, given their role in this novel, Liv and Jane shout him down. He can't be sure, they say, and in retrospect, they may be right. From the holes historians have punched in the legend of near-universal French resistance, it's just as likely the hair-cutter was himself a collaborator or simply looking to inflict his righteous hatred on a powerless victim.
But the Americans' snap judgment, their own self-righteousness in quashing what Fletcher says, belies their job to gather the facts, to understand what they're snapping pictures of or writing in their dispatches. It's that comfort in ignorance, the failure even to recognize a wider context, let alone try to grasp it, that turns these potential feminist heroines into dabblers, precisely the perception they're struggling against. The men who'd deny them access to the battlefront, who resent their presence, disparage their abilities, and assume that their only talent is their physical appearance, would have said, "You see, dear, this is men's business, and you really do know nothing about it."
Had the narrative lingered on the shearing scene to explore whether a woman's lot in war is to pay for men's mistakes, that would have been a feminist statement. But the author has paced her story too quickly for that, seldom lifting the feminist lens beyond the premise that two young women have crashed a men's club. I wanted to see Liv and Jane challenge what they might have been taught as girls or hesitate the least little bit about the allegedly masculine role they were choosing. What feminism takes for granted today was much newer and scarier in 1944; the 1960s hadn't happened yet, but again, the novel feels retrospective, as though all that had gone before. The love triangle with Fletcher offers rich ground for a feminist conundrum, especially what it means to be attracted to a man who is, after all, their savior and guide, the traditional male figure. But Clayton doesn't go there, leaving us with the same old story. What a shame.