A Reader's Place

In preparation for the historical fiction panel I’m moderating tonight, I’ve been reading the novels by the two authors on the panel, Carole DeSanti’s The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R and Kathryn Harrison’s Enchantments. I’ve enjoyed both and I’m particularly delighted that there are such wonderful contrasts between the two. If you’re in New York, you can come to the event. Here’s a link to the registration page with all the details.

First for the similarities: both novels are set in the turmoil following the overthrow of governments in France and Russia. Both novelists chose to write in the first person from the point of view of young women. Eugenie and Masha are both caught in a floodtide of disastrous events. But then we start to see how novelists make choices and how a genre like historical fiction is endlessly fascinating because of the creativity of those choices.

The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R is a richly detailed story about life in Paris in the 1860s when Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte was President of the French Second Republic, and the disastrous events in 1870 when his government was overthrown. Eugenie is a country girl who comes to Paris expecting her rich lover to follow and make her an honest woman.  She lives through the siege of Paris and the ensuing chaos; in the process she learns to survive. There are a few historical characters who make an appearance, but DeSanti focuses on the unrecorded lives of (mostly) women who scraped, fought, starved, and loved as best they could, hounded by a male bureaucracy that feared and desired unattached women. DeSanti’s familiarity with the detail of Paris in that era is remarkable; I can’t begin to imagine the quantity of research that was required.

The characters in Kathryn Harrison’s novel Enchantments are almost all historical. The story of the end of the Romanovs, the last royal family of Russia, is  steeped in tragedy, romance, and legend. Alyosha, the heir to the throne, unlikely to survive childhood because of  hemophilia; Tsarina Alexandra, spending her days in a mauve-colored room, hoping that the Mad Monk Rasputin will heal Alyosha; and Tsar Nicholas who only wants to be a farmer.  When the Tsar is overthrown, the family is moved to the Summer Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, under house arrest, forbidden to leave or display any trappings of monarchy. Rasputin’s gruesome murder has already occurred when Harrison’s book opens and his daughters have moved in with the Romanovs for their own safety, or so they are told. Masha, Rasputin’s oldest daughter, teller of this tale, has been asked by Alexandra to be a companion to Alyosha.  Alexandra is hoping that Masha has absorbed her father’s healing powers, but Masha’s talent is as a Scheherazade–she tells Alyosha stories that transmute the pain and perplexities of his life into something else entirely. We also see Rasputin from her perspective, one that humanizes him, stripping away the legendary and comedic aspects and reinventing him as a loving father.

There are wonderful set pieces in both novels and both are absorbing in such different ways. I heard Kathryn Harrison speak last week at the Center for Fiction and she said that Masha was “her eyes to see into the story.” That’s a great way to describe the role of character in historical fiction–I’ll have to ask both writers more about how their characters evolved.

I’ve been a fan of Penelope Lively’s novels for years; they’re rich with insight into human relationships and full of ambiguity and speculation about human behavior and motivation. She’s always interested  in the effects of our actions; in fact, one of my favorite novels of hers is titled Consequences. In the opening pages of How it All Began, Charlotte Rainsford is mugged on the street in London and thereby hangs a tale. The event ripples outward, changing the lives of several characters, each of whom steps off the page, fully formed: cranky, lovable, self-absorbed, decent, greedy, and maddening, they’re people we recognize.  More important, we want to see what happens to them as they are caught up in Lively’s web of consequences.

There’s satire, comedy, and tragedy, but also delightful insight into the role that reading, writing, and language play in our lives and inform our sense of self.  Charlotte, recuperating with a stack of books from the mugging in the novel’s opening scene, muses about the role of reading in her life:

“Forever reading has been essential, the necessary fix, the support system. Her life has been informed by reading. She has read not just for distraction, sustenance, to pass the time, but she has read in a state of primal innocence, reading for enlightenment, for instruction, even.  She has read to find out how sex works, how babies are born, she has read to discover what it is to be good, or bad; she has read to find out if things are the same for others as they are for her—then, discovering that frequently they are not, she has to read to find out what it is that other people are experiencing that she is missing.”

Passages like that are the reason I’ve always enjoyed Lively’s novels.

Did  you see the article by Garth Risk Hallberg in last the NY Times on Sunday, Jan 13 titled Why Write Novels at All? I had taken a break from the Sunday Times that weekend (heresy, I know) and a friend in Israel emailed me a link to the article. We emailed back and forth during the week, talking about Hallberg’s comments on The Marriage Plot and the difficulties we both had reading it.  Sigh. I wanted to love the novel for many reasons, not least of all because I thought Middlesex was a tour de force and also because like many of us, I too knew some brilliant, unstable people in college and was hoping that Eugenides would capture some of the intense emotionality of that experience.  It didn’t happen for me.

Hallberg, in the Times article, writes that in The Marriage Plot (and other recent fiction by specific authors he mentions) “we encounter characters too neatly or thinly drawn, too recognizably literary, to confront us with the fact that there are other people besides ourselves in the world, whole mysterious inner universes.” I have to agree. There’s lots of great stuff in The Marriage Plot; there are still some sentences, that stick in my mind, but I felt that overall it was self-indulgent. I’m waiting for Eugenides’s next novel.

Well, in addition to the books on my MP3 player and the physical books that are waiting to be read, I have an e-reader, a nook, and I love using it. The only drawback is that it’s entirely too easy to buy books–just a few clicks and  it appears in front of you. But then, um, you notice there’s that charge on your credit card. There are several ways I get around that–borrowing ebooks from the library via Overdrive or downloading them from NetGalley–but there are books that I just have to buy for one reason or another.

A while ago I requested a copy of Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution from NetGalley I couldn’t resist the glowing reviews and it was starting to appear on lots of “best” lists. Once I began reading it I could see why. Marx was charismatic, contentious, and arrogant; a loving father but also heavy drinker and an adulterer whose children grew up in grinding poverty. He was always scrounging money from friends and relatives, sometimes in the most disgraceful ways.  He committed to writing projects and publishers advanced him funds, but Marx was allergic to deadlines or to finishing projects at all. He was hounded from country to country for his political views but always lived in hope of the masses rising up and taking their due.  I grew up during the Cold War, when Marx was a bogeyman, so it’s been a revelation to have him turn into a real person, a brilliant economist and a very fallible husband and father. His long-suffering wife, Jenny, never wavered in her adoration of her scruffy husband or lost faith in his brilliance; she was the rock of his life.  Unfortunately I couldn’t finish the book before it expired so I put a reserve on it at the library. Now I have it sitting on my nightstand, waiting…

I read a review of Thrumpton Hall: A Memoir of Life in My Father’s House by Miranda Seymour and sensed that it was something I had to read. I downloaded a sample to my nook and was instantly absorbed by the author’s painful tale of her upper class dysfunctional English family. So I bought it, although I won’t be able to read it until I go on vacation later this year.

I also have lots of samples on my nook, impatiently waiting for me to make a decision: The Vertigo Years: Europe 1900-1914 by Philip Blom, War and Peace (!), The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good by Robert H. Frank, Carpe Diem Put a Little Latin in Your Life by Harry Mount, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, and Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope (I loved The Way We Live Now, hoping this is as wonderful).