Enchanted Prose

Stardom and the heavy price paid (Dublin, also London and Hollywood, 1940s-80s; told in 2010s reflections, Bray, east coast of Ireland): What makes a great female movie star? What is the toll it takes on an “outlandishly interesting,” unorthodox Irish actress of theater and film fame? Similarly, on her “overshadowed” daughter, who narrates this enmeshed, intense, way-out mother-daughter relationship where anything goes “so long as Proust or Yeats was involved”? A relationship that’s not quite a relationship. Rather, “the fact of a relationship, but never the truth of it.”

This fictionalized memoir-in-a-novel centers on a push-and-pull relationship involving multiple themes not always easily detected or obvious that Ireland’s First Laureate of Fiction, Man Booker Prize-winning Irish author, Anne Enright, is known for. Actress, her seventh novel, is an intellectually, emotionally charged expose demanding more than any reviewed here.

Partly because of the often dreamlike, surrealistic prose. Literary fiction that sweeps you away, managing to overpower an already captivating relationship about the lives of two troubled, “hellishly lonely,” conflicted female protagonists.

Katherine O’Dell is an alluring, avant-garde Irish actress and singer born in England yet devoted to all things Irish – theater, literature, nationalism. Her “Irishness would grow more poetic and controlling. Over time, it became a national statement, or national lullaby.” Then, she descended into mental illness. Norah is her “whispered” daughter, damaged too. Loaded with conflicting, ambivalent, suppressed, unsure feelings – another reason the novel demands a lot.

Even under the best of circumstances – and these are far, far from that – Norah might not be a reliable narrator since she’s telling this psychologically complex tale saying, “I will always remember – or think I remember.”

A narrator confused by “the difference between what happens in your head and what happens in the room.” A “star struck” girl; a teenager who couldn’t wait to get away from her mother; a caregiver too young to be thrown into mothering her mother. A narrator too innocent to grasp all the goings on in her Dublin house – men especially: a movie producer, a UCD (University College Dublin) professor, and a priest who also preached “existential psychoanalysis,” trained under a famous French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan.

Lacan is referred to twice because Enright wants us to psychically dig deeper than we typically do to think about what’s obscured by two female characters. Or, in a psychoanalyst’s world, what’s happening below the surface, coming from the subconscious. “References are everywhere,” so it seems Enright wants us to check them out.

When we do, we learn Lacan’s work is explained in terms of Identity, Love, and Politics – themes Enright infuses in Katherine and Norah’s unusual story. His theories are also described from the perspective of what’s Real, Imaginary, or Symbolic – similar to Norah’s ambiguous prose. Is what Norah says real, imagined, or symbolic? Actress begs for psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalytic assessment is better for understanding the complex emotions of the women, giving the novel an aching, taunting, hypnotic tone.

“I’m interested in that moment of glamour, which is almost a moment of loss as well. Once you see something so beautiful and false, you’re losing it at the same time. So that was the psychological moment, very, you might say, psychoanalytically rich. It’s about beauty and it’s about possession and then losing the beautiful object to the world.”

Love satisfies and comforts yet it’s palpably abusive, warning “you can also be destroyed by love.” For Katherine, “sex was just part of the great problem she sometimes called Love, and other times Art.”

Norah’s telling is also circumspect having missed out on the normality, stability of a positive role-model mother; she didn’t know her father, didn’t even know his identity or name. A “clandestine” only child, often left behind when her mother traveled abroad. Kitty, their housekeeper, was her savior.

As Norah and the reader are trying to figure out the mystifying actress who grabs, seduces everyone’s attention with her extraordinary “ability to be over the top, just by standing still,” we’re trying to figure out Norah too.

Complacent, ill-equipped young Norah avoided, repressed things going on, burying her head in books where she “always felt safe on the page.” Finally confronting her past, triggered by a doctoral student requesting an interview asking “what kind of mother was she?” A question haunting Norah for decades, answering it in her fifties.

“People ask me, ‘What was she like’ and I try to figure out if they mean as a normal person: what was she like in her slippers, eating toast and marmalade, or what was she like as a mother, or what was she like as an actress, we did not use the word star. Mostly, though, they mean what was she like before she went crazy . . .”

Norah’s reluctant to air her mother’s story feeling it a “betrayal.” Regardless, how can she when her mother “could not explain – even to herself – what was going on”? Moreover, how can Katherine be truly knowable when she was forever moving back and forth “in and out of character”? We get a sense of that as time bounces around back and forth, aided by chapters untitled, unnamed.

It wasn’t easy for Katherine to shed her public celebrity persona into a private motherly one, so fiercely immersed in her craft. An artist who could “just Give Give Give” to an “audience who takes, and takes, and then likes to criticise.” Devastating for “a great believer in the nobility of the crowd.”

As Norah dissects her mother in unnerving scenes that feel manic-depressive, she occasionally addresses someone as “you.” We learn early on you is her husband, who, pointedly, feels more imagined than real, or perhaps symbolic of men who straddle good and bad. (Most men are bad, except Katherine’s father, Menton, an Irish traveling theater actor who “brought Shakespeare and melodrama around the Irish countryside.”) Norah’s husband is ghostly as he’s a reference not a presence, depicted in contradictory ways.

She says she loves him, marvels at their enduring marriage, yet they were “always leaving or being left.” She slips in how “irritated” he was at her inability to write – presumably this novel. Published, unlike her mother frantically, fanatically trying to write plays all night, caring about the written word as much as the spoken one, only to be rejected by Boyd O’Neill, the movie producer. Is that what led her to commit a crime?

Soon after, Katherine suffered a mental breakdown. The author is quite open about hers, in her twenties, ending her career with Ireland’s national television, RTÉ (Raidió Teilifís Éireann); Norah worked for them too. Another similarity between the two is they both now live in Bray, south of Dublin, on the sea.

The prose veers from beauty and consummate artistry to gut-punching anger and abuse reflected in graphic sexuality, violence, profanity, madness. Voyeurism, similar to a terrible car accident, we can’t turn our gaze away from.

In hindsight, we might have been better prepared if the beautiful emerald green cover of the US edition (matching Katherine’s striking eyes) remained the same as the UK version, a black-and-white cover of a young girl watching an actress on stage. Apparently, inspired by the fraught relationship between Carrie Fischer (Princess Leia of Star Wars fame) and her famous mother, actress Debbie Reynolds.

Motherhood and sexuality are the prominent themes; artistic, philosophical, religious, political, and racial (English towards Irish) themes wrapped up in them.

Through the good and the bad, Actress sticks. Consciously or unconsciously. Or, maybe it’s the magnetic, hypnotic, provocative prose.

Lorraine

Broken horses, Broken people – how they can save each other (northern New Mexico, March 2013 – September 2014; 1990s flashbacks): The historic relationship between horses and people goes back centuries. Yet it’s only been since the 1950s that a therapeutic bond – Equine Therapy – has been seriously applied to physical and mental health rehabilitation and healing.

In Ginger Gaffney’s remarkable memoir, the “horse-human” relationship goes much further psychologically. It’s a “last shot” lifeline for a select group of prisoners on a “livestock team” at an “prison-alternative” 17-acre ranch north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Horse therapy in this “river valley dealing with the blight of poverty and drug addiction much longer than the rest of the states” offers a “sliver of hope” for some convicts stuck in a pernicious cycle in and out of prisons.

Half Broke is a beautiful read, with an empowering message of inspiration and hope that some castaways can find a way out from their inner demons, as impossible as that may seem. Making the memoir a call to prison activists urging reform of our broken criminal justice system.

The author has changed the names of the people in this story out of respect for their privacy. It’s likely, though, she hasn’t for the “giant gods” – “traumatized” wild horses so mistreated and misunderstood they terrorize, having become “dangerous” creatures no one could touch. When they do, horses and people get hurt.

That’s what inspired the prison ranch story. In March 2013, Gaffney received a frantic call from the DS Ranch that one of their wild horses, Luna, was beaten so badly she could lose her eyesight. The caller, Sarah, and Luna, are part of the ranch’s innovative horse-people “gentling” program.

This is no ordinary Western ranch. It’s managers, the “elders,” unconventional ranch owners (no authorities, only prisoners). Residents are not typical ranch hands. Nothing ordinary is happening in these pages. And, candidly, Gaffney tells us she’s not ordinary either, profoundly connecting this enormously talented horse-trainer with 25 years experience to dysfunctional souls and wild horses.

Horses feel “every little touch.” You too will feel the sensitive and perceptive touch of the author’s toolbox of skills to gentle horses and people society has given up on.

Miracles can happen, but not for all. When things go wrong – and plenty does – the prose rises to a suspenseful rhythm and pace, evoking the edge at which “recovery can be slipped away.” Including the author’s.

This searing tale has everything to do with trust, starting with Gaffney who deeply trusts the power of horses to save people. When a significant breach occurs, it shatters Gaffney’s trust in the team. She’s fragile, just like them. Occasional flashbacks to the author’s childhood and coming-of-age years enlightens.

For the first six years of Gaffney’s life, she barely spoke a word. “Extreme shyness” shaped enduring feelings of loneliness and isolation. An unintended benefit of those silent years resulted in Gaffney becoming a keen observer of people’s non-verbal body language and movements, enabling her to quickly assess visual clues as to the emotions these behaviors are communicating. Relating to them personally, she doesn’t act condescending towards the prisoners. She treats them as equals, expecting a lot. She does so for 1½ years, never getting paid. Money isn’t her objective. This becomes her mission, her calling. In turn, everyone is respectful to and grateful for Gaffney’s perseverance at a place “she’s never seen anything like.”

Gaffney’s personal story starts first with sizing up people, then horses. A pro at understanding what the “complex communication systems” of horses are telling us.

Most of the novel is structured in 2013/2014 ranch chapters, a month a time. A step-by-step approach similar to the mantra of taking things one day at a time. Except here it’s literally, gravely, “one step at a time.” One measured, mentored step at a time.

“Fascination with horses came from a place inside me I have never understood,” says the author. We see how this plays out in those few flashback-to-the-90s chapters; few because this memoir isn’t meant to be about her, though she’s at the center of it. We do, though, learn some key things about the author’s emotions: she’s an extremely private person, who didn’t feel she belonged anywhere until horses came into her life. “We all come from somewhere, but that doesn’t mean we belong.” The honesty of horses is what she profoundly cherishes, trusting these majestic animals far more than people. We see how much that matters when the author’s first horse, Belle, rescues her.

At the ranch Gaffney feels she belongs. Eventually, she feels most at home there. While she has a supportive partner, Glenda, she describes her sexuality as another reason she’s felt like an outsider. Not at the ranch, where everyone is an outsider.

For someone whose been quite uncomfortable around people, with a horse Gaffney shows an exceptional touch with those in a “sunken place.” She gets their “broken parts” – “their lack of attention span, their wounded bodies, their anger, the dullness in their eyes” – saying they “look like me.” Or, how she used to look, be.

Her human team consists, over time, of three of about 10 women at the ranch: Flor, Sarah, Eliza. Of the 90 or so men, there’s Tony, Randy, Marcus, Rex, Paul, Omar. The horse team includes sisters Luna and Estrella, Hawk, Billy, Moo, Joker, Izzy, Willie. They represent a number of breeds, such as Painted Horse, Morgan Gelding, Lusitano.

All the people/horse names means there’s a lot of characters with individual traits. Horses loom large. A breathtaking challenge for this horse-trainer/psychologist who must keep track of all, to protect, and earn and keep the fragile trust.

Trust is fundamental. Not easy for prisoners lacking role-models, who’ve been let down over and over; people who then let themselves down to a point of feeling there’s no return.

Trust is not easy for Ginger Gaffney either, who “learned to hide, to become invisible.” But now she must be visible. More so, as she has to put herself out there, in harm’s way. Once she evaluates and treats Luna’s emergency, and assesses the team, she leaps in:

“If you want these horses to respect you, you’ll have to respect yourself … How you walk, how you hold your posture, this will tell the horses whether to stomp you or follow you. It also tells them if you are trustworthy or fake.”

There’s more going on at this ranch than horse-training: vocational skills training to fix cars and other mechanical objects, plumbing, ceramics, cooking. Life skills for earning a living when prisoners complete their sentences and are ready to venture out.

Should you Google the DS Ranch, you’ll come up empty. The author has obscured the ranch’s name too, presumably to protect its space. If you keep at it, you may make an eye-opening discovery that this unusual ranch exists elsewhere around the country; and that there are other alternative prison programs managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) conceived as an approach for handling some of the heart-tugging controversy over what to do, if anything, about mustangs running wild on Federal lands in the West.

“I’ve always felt that riding horses was like riding a wave. The wave rolls you along. You don’t kick the wave, or beat it, or even think you can control it. Every wave is unique,” says the author. Though horse therapy programs are fanned out across the country, the people and horses in this vivid, stunning memoir are unique.

Lorraine

Second Chances wrapped up in a mystery involving art (Edenton, NC 1939-40 and 2018): What if you were asked to do something way beyond your expertise, but it could give you a second chance at life? Would you take it?

That question underlies Diane Chamberlain’s Big Lies in a Small Town, her new, atmospheric, immensely engaging mystery (actually many) involving art (and much more) – her thirtieth novel. What may surprise and delight you is the art is drawn from unfamiliar historical facts.

Deftly tying the artistic theme and the freedom creativity brings to one’s soul, other Freedom themes are tackled: freedom from physical imprisonment and the mind’s “imaginary prison” caused by emotional anguish and mental illness; and freedom from oppression, be it political, economic, or cultural.

Also in the air is a budding contemporary romance.

A lot to unravel in 400 fast-moving pages, but these issues are smartly woven together so chapters in dual time frames flow into each other, fitting puzzle pieces together in a suspenseful and satisfying way. Keep that in mind as the mysterious art plot and two storylines nearly eighty years apart connect piece by piece.

A Prologue introduces the murder of a white man discovered by two black children during the Depression in the South. They run away, afraid of racist consequences. From there the two narratives begin, telling the stories of two twenty-something, white female art students: Anna Dale (1939-40) from Plainfield, New Jersey (the author’s hometown), and Morgan Christopher (2018) from North Carolina (where the author lives).

Set in Edenton, a small town where “the South was nothing like where what you saw was what you got,” warning not to be fooled by the serenity of the landscape. Confirmed when Anna disappears in 1940. Enter Morgan, who becomes invested in finding out what happened to Anna.

Located on a peaceful stretch of water, the Abermarle Sound, on the Inner Banks (versus the better known Outer Banks), Edenton was a port town that thrived on commerce, but was also a place where slaves from Africa entered the South. A stark legacy in contrast to being named “one of the prettiest towns in the South.” Like Anna’s art tale with its dark underbelly.

Both women were artists-in-training. Anna graduated high school majoring in art. Morgan was a junior studying art at the University of North Carolina, but her path was cut short because of a crime she did not commit. She’s served one year of a three-year prison term when we meet her.

A passion for art links Anna and Morgan generally and very specifically. In 1939, Anna won a national art contest aimed at selecting artists to paint murals to adorn post offices around the country. Fast forward to Morgan, who ends up restoring Anna’s lost mural, disappearing like she did. Both women didn’t consider themselves artists, certainly not for the beyond-their-abilities task before them. How will Anna depict Edenton when the drawing she submitted was for a New Jersey post office? She’ll need to paint characteristic images that represent a town in the South where she’s never been. “How do you capture the true feeling of a place?” asks Anna. Chamberlain shows how a skilled writer does that with descriptive prose.

Morgan finds herself with a different set of challenges when from out-of-the-blue she has a chance at freedom if she can restore Anna’s lost mural that has mysteriously be found after all these years. The thing is she doesn’t have a clue about the specialized field of art restoration. And, she’s told failure means returning to jail.

Both women are desperate to alter the sorrowful, lonely trajectory of their lives. Anna just lost her beloved, single mother who suffered from manic-depression; Morgan is incarcerated. Both take the leap, with vastly dissimilar outcomes. One with an unanticipated twist.

Details about the mural, particularly its 12 ft. by 6 ft. size, may lead you to suspect this fictional things-are-not-what-they-seem novel may be inspired by history. Turns out it is. The 48 States Competition held in 1939 is the year Anna’s story begins. Run not as an FDR New Deal program administered by the Work Project’s Administration (WPA), but oddly by an unknown Painting and Sculpture division in the Treasury Department (ended in 1943), with the same employment mission. The competition selected artists to paint murals to hang in the WPA’s newly constructed post offices. Interestingly, one of Anna’s chapters is dated December 14, 1939, the same date Life magazine published the winning artists’ State submissions. And yes, the images were painted on large 12 ft. x 6 ft. canvases.

Another significant date – August 5, 2018 – haunts Morgan. It’s her barely two months deadline to restore Anna’s mural. Inconceivable! Can she pull it off? If so, how? And, why that specific date?

The stakes are high for both women. All Anna has left in the world is a precious leather journal from her mother and advice to “not be afraid to try something new.” Morgan’s torment is related to an “accident,” which we learn of soon enough so we can understand what Morgan is emotionally going through. Whereas we have to wait until the last 50 pages for all of Anna’s puzzle pieces to link up.

As Morgan learns how to clean the badly mildewed, filthy canvas, what emerges are sordid details, shocking, especially given the otherwise tame, conventional images. Did Anna add these? If so, why?

There’s a character in the novel who figures in Anna’s and Morgan’s story: Jesse Jameson Williams. A teacher introduced Anna to him because of his art talent. Mentoring seventeen-year-old, black student Jesse was decried by the prejudiced town. Jesse went on to become a famous black artist, living in New York and France, later returning to his North Carolina roots to raise his daughter, Lisa. Recently he’s passed away, leaving Lisa with a confounding, demanding will dictating very specific, mysterious instructions as to how she must open up an art gallery in his name, choosing Morgan to restore Anna’s missing mural. The mural is to be prominently displayed. Why? How did he know who Morgan was? Why pick her?

Chamberlain drops references to North Carolina artists. Best known is black artist Romare Bearden famous for his distinctive collage style of painting, awarded the National Medal of Art, like fictional Jesse. Was Bearden inspiration for Jesse?

Edenton is an intriguing place to set the novel (real NC murals in other towns) because of its storied history, dating back to the 1700s. In colonial times, it was once the State capital. A Tea Party, like Boston’s, protested British rule, a very early, unusual example of political activism by women. Quite opposite the conservative view toward the role of women in society during Anna’s time.

Balancing Anna’s darkness is Morgan’s evolving lightness. Oliver is the curator of the soon-to-be-opened art gallery, so he and Morgan end up working together. He touches Morgan’s heart, and ours. Oliver’s sensitive, selfless, nurturing character, and their tenderly developing relationship is the part you may love most.

Morgan thinks Oliver is “one of the best people I’ve ever known.” But how does she know it’s love when she’s never “felt love from another human being” before? How sad she’s so unsure, how marvelous the answer unfolds.

Lorraine

Illuminating the unsung Gilded Age legacy of socialite Alva Vanderbilt – philanthropist and activist for children’s, women’s, and civil rights (Manhattan and Newport, Rhode Island, 1874 – 1908): What Do Billionaires Owe the Rest of Us? was recently broadcast on NPR 1A, in response to the wealth tax plans proposed by some 2020 Democratic candidates. As we reflect on the extremely wealthy today, what, if anything, they owe to us, it’s worthy to look back on what the richest American families in the late 1800s – the Gilded Age era, whose name came from a Mark Twain book, did for America.

Cornelius (nicknamed The Commodore) Vanderbilt, was one of those families; he built his fortune in steamboats and railroads. Therese Anne Fowler captures the era and the family in her second novel (her debut, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald) about another compelling woman behind the man. Except this time the woman is not known to us: Alva Vanderbilt, the wife of William Vanderbilt, one of Cornelius’ many grandchildren.

The novel is a captivating historical read. Strong-willed Alva Smith married a Vanderbilt for financial security not love. She sought to become a prominent force in the early days of establishing Manhattan’s upper-crust. An activist for children, she later became one of America’s earliest suffragettes. Today, these fights continue – for migrant children and immigrant Dreamers, voting rights, women’s, and human rights – making Alva’s story important to tell.

Interesting comparisons can be seen between Alva’s post-Civil War time period to today. Both a highly divided America: extreme poverty and the dwindling middle class versus extreme wealth; and racial, anti-immigrant, and anti-Semitic discrimination.

Newly married Alva is seen as sensitive to the plight of African American women. She fought tooth and nail her new husband’s and sister-in-law’s racial condescension towards her personal maid and confidente who was black and by her side since childhood, opposing their desire she let her go because she didn’t fit the “lady of privilege” image the family wished to project. An early example of the expectations of marrying a Vanderbilt, raising a timeless question: Is choosing wealth over principles worth it? And in Alva’s case: Can a marriage survive based on transactional benefits?

Alva acted like a well-behaved woman, but she was also fiercely independent-minded when it came to injustices – equal treatment of all children and women, including those of color. Noteworthy at “a time when many people (including those in the suffragette movement)” were not standing up for equality for all.

In the year since the novel was published, America is more polarized than ever. So now is a poignant time to read the newly released paperback edition.

There’s other reasons to sing the novel’s praises. It’s a lovely literary escape into more classical prose, manners, evoking classics like Edith Wharton’s A Custom in the Country and Henry James’ Washington Park, two of Alva’s reading choices, also set in Manhattan’s Gilded Age. Again, timely as NPR just confirmed we’re living in the second Gilded Age.

Alva’s motivation to marry a Vanderbilt at twenty-one opens the hefty novel: “Once there was a desperate young woman whose mother was dead and whose father was dying as quickly as his money was running out.” And there were four sisters who needed to be fed – Alva’s older sister, Armide, destined for spinsterhood, and two younger ones.

The Smiths weren’t always poor. Their father made his money in cotton in the Deep South until it became the “disgraced-South.” The family escaped to Paris, where they spent many lavish years before coming to New York, where they weren’t accepted into high society – the “deep-rooted Manhattanites.”

A shortage of men after the Civil War also limited the sisters’ marriage prospects. Also, Alva wasn’t a beauty to show off. What she had going for her was ancestry and cultured years in France.

Consuelo Yznaga, Alva’s best friend, is a huge presence. A wealthy, prettier socialite whose Cuban-American father made his money in sugarcane, she fancied matchmaking, which she did for Alva with William Vanderbilt. Both women wanted the same things because “status gave a woman more control over her life.” For years, they traveled along parallel paths, Alva in Manhattan and Consuelo in England, until something terrible happened. Letters between the two over the years keep us updated. Consuelo, not so well-behaved, is flamboyantly revealing; Alva is more reserved.

Over time, we like Alva more and more, Consuelo less and less. We don’t approve of their gold-digging, but we’re sympathetic to Alva’s desperation to support her family in crisis. Alva’s strength, moral convictions, and compassion towards Consuelo’s painful behavior is admirable. Valuing friendship, another prevailing theme.

Pearls, the inviting title of the novel’s first part, focuses on Alva’s fixation on acceptance into New York’s upper class, starting with getting invited to exclusive society balls, scheming and hobnobbing with Consuelo’s help and another friend’s, Ward McCallister. A long-time friend of Alva’s family, this charming, gossipy man-about-town was close to Caroline Astor, the famous Mrs. Astor, seen holding the key to opening doors, or not. Considered queen of New York society, her Old Money world frowned on “robber barons” like The Commodore for their exploitative business practices. William seized on Alva’s attributes to help breakthrough Mrs. Astor’s disapproval of the family, so it was a marriage of convenience for both.

Alva in turn, raised to “always put sense above feeling,” that “love was a frivolous emotion,” seized on the challenge. Yet, for all the head-over-heart guidance, a sexual thread runs throughout, making Alva more relatable.

Formidable Vanderbilts posed other challenges for Alva. One,the earlier cited sister-in-law, Alice, wife of William’s brother, Corneil, who was perceived as “a shining example of all that’s right in the world.” Snobby, overbearing Alice assumed that meant her too; she aimed to be the next Vanderbilt matriarch – not Alva. Forever disparaging Alva, she gets under our nerves and Alva’s. Alva is too disciplined, wise, and ambitious to cower.

Less offensive and better-intended was William’s mother, related to the Roosevelts. “I don’t pretend to understand all this best society nonsense. Who’s allowed in, who’s kept out,” she says, but she certainly knows how to take charge to make that happen, “acquiring a house on Forty-Fourth Street as a wedding gift” for the newlyweds.

Of course, the house wasn’t an ordinary one. Rather, a magnificent mansion, the first of a number of their palatial properties in Manhattan and Newport, where this wealthy clan summered. Alva relished furnishing and decorating her estates.

So many historical figures fill the pages, going as far back as the 1600s when New York was settled by the “best New York Dutch.” The juiciest parts of the city’s real estate development are how “family history and reputation” led to “the clear establishment of order” along the richest areas of Manhattan along Fifth and Park Avenues, setting down boundaries.

Another Gilded Age family – the Belmonts – is ever-present. The Belmont critical to Alva’s story is Oliver, one of William’s friends. Their on-and-off friendship is the real sexual tension that makes the novel hum.

Alva’s accomplishments exceeded her lofty goals, but she was lonely much of her life. Besides managing estates and entertaining to the hilt, she kept herself busy mothering three children and increasing her progressive philanthropy and activism.

Ironically, Alva learns that “existing on a joyous merry-go-round of wealth” was not enough. Finding love is what makes the world spin. Still, would she think her sacrifices were worth the greater good?

Celebrating Alva’s great deeds feels like a good way to end this year’s reviews. Wishing you peace and happiness. See you in 2020.

Lorraine

Little-known Dutch pre-WWII profile-in-courage (Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, England, 1936 – 1940): Had the International Women of Courage Award existed in the late 1930s (created in 2007 by former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice) – Geertruida Wijsmuller-Meijer from Amsterdam, affectionately called Tante (Auntie) Truss – would surely have received it. The Last Train to London, Meg Waite Clayton’s seventh novel, offers a revelation about an extraordinary Dutch woman who wasn’t even Jewish who rescued 10,000 Jewish children out of Germany and Austria before WWII ignited, when Hitler rose to power and invaded Czechoslovakia and Austria.

Surprisingly, her story is unfamiliar in Holocaust fiction. Even more surprising, the Kindertransport was relatively unknown in Austria until fairly recently.

To see the desperation and chaos of these historic times when parents sent their children away before their destiny was sealed by the Nazis, take a look at this short video:

Seeing those images and then reading the novel’s preface – an excerpt from Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel’s Nobel Prize speech fifty years after the novel opens in 1936 – beautifully summarizes the resounding message of Truus’ life: “one person of integrity can make a difference, a difference of life and death.”

Clayton’s meticulously researched, chock-full of details (460+ pages worth, fast-moving in brief chapters) novel is divided into four sections – Part I, The Time Before, 1936; Part II, The Time Between, 1938; Part III, The Time After, 1939; and Part IV, And Then … – that layout before and after. The 1938-1940 years mark Truus’ heroic accomplishments, with the help of other historical saviors, pitted against evil historical figures.

You can’t help but wonder if Truus’ death in 2016, the year the 45^th President of the United States was elected, inspired some of the prose. Like quoting Hitler as saying “the lying press.” And asking: “how has Hitler convinced all of Germany that lies are the truth and the truth is a lie?”

Historical fiction is hot. Inventing characters illuminates and humanizes history and statistics, provides lessons to guide us, as long as we can connect with them, find them believable, interesting, relevant, informative. In this novel, we want to wrap our arms around three fictional characters, fittingly children: two Jewish brothers and a non-Jewish best friend forced to mature well-beyond their tender years. Their sensitivities, loyalties, attachment to one another, terrifying fears, uncertainties, and suffering feel real. Combined with Truus’ rescuing truths, the novel builds suspense and hope as to whether history and fiction will intersect. Did Truus save the three child protagonists?

The number of Jewish children killed by the Nazis is estimated at 1.5 million. Another 10,000 didn’t perish because of the children’s transport program. How many more survived through hiding and escape? Added up, these numbers are impossible to grasp. But when they’re no longer a number but real individuals, we emotionally feel the weight of their pain and losses.

Stephen Neuman is the sixteen-year-old Jewish son of a famous chocolate-maker in Vienna. His family symbolizes Jews Hitler rounded up and attacked over two brutal historic days in 1938 – the Kristallnacht – vividly announcing to the world his intention to wipe out all Jews in as many countries as he could.

Austria has a long history and love of chocolate, even a Museum of Chocolate, so the family’s business is apropos. As is their cultured life in Vienna – arts, music, literature, theater. Stephan aspires to be a playwright; his idol is the prolific Austrian Jewish writer who wrote some plays, Stefan Zweig, considered one of the most popular writers in the world back then. His inclusion also a terrific choice for the era, especially since he escaped Nazi Germany only to be so exhausted by the long years of homeless wandering he tragically took his own life.

Walter is Stephen’s young brother forever clinging to his Peter Rabbit and his brother, who protects and cares for him as their mother is ill, confined to a wheelchair. Mutti is another emblematic Jewish character, as the Nazis had no use for weakness. Her sister, Aunt Lisl, loves the boys as if they were her own. Childless, she’s married to Michael, a Christian; they live in the Neumans’ opulent mansion. Michael represents the unbearable choice of having to choose family over one’s own life. Trying to balance both, he walks a dangerous tightrope.

Žofie-Helene is Stephen’s fifteen-year-old new best friend he meets early on through her adoring grandfather, Otto, Stephan’s barber. They’re instantly drawn to each other. Žofie’s prose shows she’s brilliant, a protégé of her renowned mathematical logician professor, Kurt Gödel, famous for his “Incomplete Theorem”. Her independent streak comes from her mother, Käthe, who publishes an anti-Nazi newspaper; her historical news articles punctuate what’s swirling around the fiction.

Unless you’re mathematically logically inclined, you’ll likely not fully grasp this confounding way of thinking, except to glean that just as some things cannot be proven in math they do carry over to Žofie’s trying-to-make-sense of her adolescent world. For instance:

“This very sentence is false, she said. The sentence has to be true or false, right? But if it’s true, then, as it says itself, it’s false. But if it’s false, then it’s true. So it has to be both true and false.”

OK, so we may be a bit lost there but not when she transfers math logic into relationships, like when Stephan wants to hold her hand but she hesitates:

“How could you take the hand of someone who had so quickly become your best friend without risking the friendship?”

This human paradox (paradoxes from math logic are titles of their Vienna chapters) befuddles Žofie and Stephen for a long time as they both care for each other and are afraid to jeopardize their friendship. Until it becomes vital and urgent once the Nazis invade Vienna.

Tante Truus’ historical tale is told in alternating chapters. Also childless (she and her loving banker husband, Joop, ache for not being able to have a baby of their own), her love for children drove her to save thousands of innocent Jewish children.

Some may prefer history painted into novels in broad brushstrokes, rather than chock-full of details as this one is. Yet it seems necessary to pack in facts to see how rapidly and dramatically pre/post-Nazi occupation changed lives, forever. Facts, like people, can mean all the difference in the world, as we’re witnessing in the Trump era.

Adolph Eichmann makes his first appearance on page 22. His role in the Holocaust looms larger than perhaps we realized, as the expert who devised the plan to solve Germany’s “The Jewish Problem”.

Britain’s Helen Bentwich, “a real and important contributor to the Kindertransport effort,” who coordinated with Truss, offers another stark contrast to heinous historical people. The above quote is taken from the postscript (Author’s Note and Acknowledgements), which delivers quite a punch when we learn how the lives of the novel’s characters turned out.

More prose feels pointedly designed for today: “Everyone is too wrapped up in their own families and their own lives to see the politically darkened clouds piling up on the border between Germany and Austria.” How many overworked, stressed American families are paying attention to the facts of our national security crisis? And: “Courage isn’t the absence of fear, but rather going forward in the face of it.”

Will these Holocaust heroes and loud alarm bells help to awaken America before it’s too late?

Lorraine