Tag Archives: historical fiction

New Release: Frieda’s Song

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It’s clear that Ellen Prentiss Campbell’s imagination is captured by historic buildings that hold the unique and intriguing stories of the lives indelibly imprinted within them; it’s also clear that she is just the one to tell those stories. Her first novel, The Bowl with Gold Seams, focused on the role of the Bedford Springs Hotel in Pennsylvania as the holding location for a group of high-level Japanese prisoners at the end of World War II.

FRIEDA’S SONG, Ellen Prentiss Campbell, Apprentice House Press

In Campbell’s latest novel, Frieda’s Song, the building is a cottage, designed in the 1930s by and for renowned German psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichman, on the grounds of the Chestnut Lodge Sanatorium in Rockville, Maryland; here, she lived and worked for more than twenty years.

The cottage serves as the anchor point for a parallel narrative in which we follow Frieda’s story and, 70 years later, that of therapist Eliza Kline and her teenage son Nick, who are renting the cottage even as the acreage of the old sanatorium is being given over to high-end suburban housing.

The novel opens with Frieda’s first-person narration, as she is forced to abandon her successful hospital in Heidelberg in 1935 as the Nazi noose tightens, leaving for America with her best friend and fellow therapist Gertrud even as her mother and sisters refuse to leave Germany. We meet her younger, estranged husband Erich (who is destined to become even more famous a therapist than his wife), and learn that Frieda is fated to grow deaf, just as her mother and father had—an impossible handicap for a psychotherapist.

Shifting into the near-present day of 2009, Eliza drives to pick up Nick from summer camp, where he’s been kicked out for starting a fire. A single mother, Eliza is drowning in the deep end of attempting to raise a sullen, isolated teenage boy, her training as a therapist seeming to offer no help to her in her own situation — especially since she has committed the cardinal sin of lying about Nick’s paternity. She finds herself talking to Frieda’s portrait as her own form of therapy, and later discovers a trove of Frieda’s journals, the source of that first-person account. Eliza takes comfort in Frieda’s quiet influence as she attempts to steer a course for both herself and Nick.

Campbell lets us in to Nick’s head, too, which is a jumble of anger, confusion, and inarticulate longing that he tries to assuage with matches and razor blades. For the reader, experiencing the world through Nick’s eyes makes it even clearer how little Eliza is truly seeing and hearing her son.

This concept of close, active listening — of the healing value that it offers, and of the damage caused by its absence — is one of the novel’s continuous threads. Frieda is painfully aware of her encroaching deafness, when her entire practice is based on establishing trust with patients through careful listening.

For her part, Eliza is stymied by the check-the-box, quick-turnover approach to therapy mandated by modern insurance guidelines. There is no time to listen to patients deeply, practically no time to listen at all. With Nick, unfortunately, she is taking shortcuts as a parent that she does not countenance with her own patients, both forgetting how to listen and practicing the age-old parental dodge of willful blindness.

As the title tells us, Frieda’s Song is steeped in music as well — both listening and playing, and the healing properties of both. Her song, by the way, is Mendelssohn’s “Lost Happiness,” part of his Songs without Words. Frieda is able to recapture some of her lost happiness in the success she has with her Chestnut Lodge practice.

For Eliza and Nick, recapturing the equilibrium in their relationship demands hard truths and a very literal trial by fire.

Campbell delivers a compelling story filled with captivating, humane, and thoroughly human characters. It’s intriguing to realize that Campbell was herself a psychotherapist practicing in Rockville, who lived close enough to the grounds of the sanatorium to be awakened by sirens and the smell of smoke the night it burned down in 2009.

And, not only had she studied Fromm-Reichman’s Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy early in her career, she later realized that Frieda died in her Rockville cottage the same day that Campbell, her parents, and her brother moved into their new Rockville home in 1957. It’s as though Frieda were making sure that Campbell would be the one to tell her story, knowing that she would be in very capable hands.

New Release: YELLOW WIFE

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In her first outing in historical fiction, a veteran author brings a little-known piece of history into stark, unflinching relief.

Yellow Wife

Sadeqa Johnson

Simon & Schuster

288 pp.

Readers often wonder where authors initially find the germ of the idea for their books, curious to know what caused the spark. Sadeqa Johnson has won acclaim for her three contemporary novels that highlight the challenges of modern-day relationships, but it is Yellow Wife, Johnson’s highly anticipated first historical novel, that offers an exceptional origin story.

After moving to Richmond, Virginia, the author spent a day with friends and family walking the three-mile Slave Trail that follows the James River. Along the path from the ship docks to Lumpkin’s slave jail, the trail markers offered tantalizing bits of the story of notorious slave trader and jailer Robert Lumpkin and his wife, a former slave named Mary. Johnson felt an urgency to know more, and her research brought forth the story of Pheby Delores Brown, the first-person narrator of Yellow Wife.

Pheby is the daughter of Ruth, the Bell Plantation’s seamstress and medicine woman, and Master Jacob, the owner of the Virginia plantation—and of Pheby and Ruth. Jacob’s late sister Sally doted on Pheby and taught her to read and play piano, and Jacob has promised Ruth to free Pheby on her eighteenth birthday and send her to school in the north.

Unfortunately, Jacob’s young wife sees these women as a personal affront, and her fury is the catalyst for the horrors that befall Pheby, from putting Pheby’s sweetheart Essex into mortal danger, to allowing Ruth to die from neglect after an accident, to finally selling Pheby to a slave trader who marches her and other shackled captives down to The Devil’s Half Acre, the Lapier Jail. When she refuses to cooperate during her auction, Pheby is pulled from the block by the jailer himself, Rubin Lapier, which starts her on the path to becoming his “yellow wife”.

Johnson’s research unearthed Richmond’s small community of slave jailers, men who, as rich as they were, nonetheless had trouble convincing respectable society women to marry them. Thus, they selected light-complexioned women from among those who passed through the prison gates to serve as their concubines; over time, these women often helped to run their husbands’ businesses and were the mothers of their children.

The author does not flinch from depicting the violence and depravity of the universe that Pheby and her fellow slaves inhabit, but she also ensures that her characters are not one-dimensional heroes or villains. Lapier—the Jailer, as Pheby thinks of him—is savagely sadistic in meting out punishment, but also willing to woo her, taking an almost courtly approach in his attempts to win her over.

When it becomes obvious that she is pregnant—a result of her lone assignation with Essex before she engineered his escape from Bell’s Plantation—the Jailer moves her into her own room in his house. Once her son Monroe is born, she understands that she must do whatever is necessary to protect him. Having learned the story of another Richmond slave jailer’s “yellow wife,” Pheby negotiates the terms of her acquiescence to the Jailer’s desire: she alone will serve as the prison’s mistress, and he will never separate her from her son.

Seeing through Pheby’s eyes and hearing her thoughts, we are able to grasp her blind spots and understand the things she either cannot or will not allow herself to consider.

Her role at the jail is to prepare attractive young girls to be sold as “fancy girls,” purchased to be hired out as prostitutes or to serve as their buyers’ own personal sexual attendants. Pheby outfits a room on the prison property with dresses and accessories to ready the girls, and takes pride in doing this job well. She feels that she is doing all she can for them by praying with them and capturing their stories in her hidden diary. The day that one of the cannier girls spits in her face and tells her she’s lost her soul, Pheby feels a passing twinge of guilt and shame, but is unwilling to take a hard look at her own culpability. She feels more lasting concern over a jar of rouge the girl ruins.

Pheby has made this bargain for the sake of her son, but the children she bears the Jailer—four girls and a boy who doesn’t survive—pull her ever farther away from Monroe, who understands better than Pheby his place in the world. The Jailer dotes on his daughters while putting Monroe to work in the stables. When Pheby tries to correct his speech, saying, “People will judge you on the way that you speak,” Monroe knows that is only too true. He reminds her that a Black boy who talks like whites is asking for trouble. “Silver-head man did not like me speaking like white folk. Showed me a man with his cheek gone and told me to watch my uppity ways.”

It is only when she learns that Essex—who has made a name for himself in Boston among abolitionists as one who escaped slavery—has been kidnapped under the Fugitive Slave Act and is to be brought to the Lapier prison, that Pheby finally finds the courage to take action.

In her afterward, Johnson describes how closely her story mirrors the one she was able to piece together from the historical record, down to the famous escaped slave who is kidnapped and brought to Richmond to serve as a warning to other would-be escapees.

The coda to this story is that Mary Lumpkin, the model for Pheby, eventually leased the prison land left to her by Robert to a seminary school for freed slaves that later became Virginia Union University, a historically Black college.

Yellow Wife is the product of the serendipitous alchemy of a talented storyteller uncovering a story that longs to be told. It is a story worth hearing.

Book Review: The New Inheritors

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This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 23 August 2018.

I remember experiencing Kent Wascom’s 2013 debut novel, The Blood of Heaven, almost as a physical onslaught. Savage and searing, it was also gorgeously written. I remember, too, being stunned that the author was only 27; he wrote like a man who has lived several lifetimes.

Blood was the first in a loosely cast series of books that traces the Woolsacks, starting with bloody-minded Angel, through most of two centuries of Southern, dark-souled American history. And while the first sprawled across years and geography, the second, Secessia, had a completely different tone, kept its lens more narrowly focused — on a New Orleans occupied by Benjamin Butler’s Union troops — and unspooled in less than a year. Still, it remained as unsettling and foreign-seeming as the first.

Here, then, is the third of Wascom’s Woolsack novels, picking up in 1890 and bringing us closer to a more recognizable era just beyond the Great War. Again, this book feels completely different than the other two and yet — now that we know his writing — is fully identifiable as belonging to this author.

The first thing to set it apart is that a Woolsack is not the main character. Instead, Wascom brings us into this story through Isaac, an orphan torn from the one woman — not his mother — who cares for him, but is later adopted by another woman and her family, who fully embrace him as their own. His idyllic childhood and early adulthood on the Mississippi Gulf Coast awaken in him a talent as an artist, and his subject is the natural world he discovers around him.

That’s the second thing that sets this book apart: that any of it might be described as “idyllic.” Stretches of the novel are infused with a sense of light, air, and hopefulness that are entirely missing from the first two.

It’s a setup, certainly, to provide a contrast between the surface beauty and the ugliness that lurks just out of sight (“They were young and white and had money, and this combination could put you a good ways out of the path of the world’s great reaping. But not in every case”), as well as a contrast between the time before, in happiness, and the time after, in misery. Still, we, like the characters, can bask in the golden light while it shines.

Gradually, we’re introduced to the Woolsacks, who spend summers on their own island just across the sound from Isaac’s family. We met Joseph and Marina as troubled children in Secessia, and here they are as adults with three troubled children of their own: Angel, the carefully closeted eldest, named for his notorious grandfather; Kemper, the girl, named for her grandfather’s adopted brother; and George, apparently named for no one, described as a “puny boy with blood-red hair,” nicknamed Red, who spends his life attempting to live up to his grandfather’s unhappy example.

When, freshly arrived home after years of southward travel, Isaac finally meets Kemper, she is stealing crabs from a trap, and he is entirely smitten. He seeks her out the next day and finds her “on the beach shooting arrows into the back of a parlor chair…She looked like the wild survivor of some near-apocalypse, careless of the value that things once had, as if somewhere not far she had a smoldering pile of banknotes for a campfire.”

Wascom is a careful student of history, and his portraits of America are riven with many of its seamier episodes. Sometimes these are used as telling asides, and other times they are woven seamlessly into the backdrop of his stories. Kemper remembers “hearing her mother say that the U.S. had dressed Cuba as a woman in torn clothes on the verge of being raped, then kindly shoved Spain out of the way and took our turn.”

Joseph Woolsack’s money, built on his father’s wealth from slaving, has steadily increased through his own involvement in the Caribbean and Central and South American fruit trade, a notorious business in which ruthless U.S. corporate involvement directly gave birth to “banana republics.”

Kemper, aware of the stained wealth, removes herself from her family but is guiltily willing to take its money to support herself and Isaac. She is also haunted by her role in driving her beloved elder brother from the family after Red’s venomous revelation to them that Angel is homosexual. Once the Great War breaks out and Isaac’s refusal to serve puts him in prison, she is completely alone.

Red, for his part, is haunted by voices in his head. After having to teach himself as a child how to smile in an attempt to cover up his otherness, he begins to hear the voices in early adulthood and learns how to cover that up, too, though he listens to their violent instruction.

This is a family not destined for happiness.

The novel moves at various times through the eyes of Isaac, Kemper, and Angel, with a touch of Marina and too little of Neda, the woman who cares for Isaac through his first four years. The pieces of Red’s story come primarily through the eyes of his reluctant enforcer, a well-read black man named Rule Chandler.

Each one is trapped, one way or the other, by expectations they can’t meet and would refuse to anyway, and by circumstances that someone else has dictated for them.

If there is a weakness to The New Inheritors, it’s an unevenness in pacing that makes it feel at times that Wascom is in a hurry to move on. I, for one, did not want him to hurry; the beauty and richness of his observation and detail when he dives deep made me long for more.

If I understand correctly, there is one more book expected in the Woolsack series, which should bring us close to or into the present day. Since the only next-generation Woolsack children belong to schizophrenic Red, it appears he is to be the patriarch ushering the family into the latter half of the 20th century.

Given that Wascom makes an art of illuminating the many ways that America’s history belies the vaunted ideals on which it was founded, it should be riveting to watch him take on the more recent moments in the American story.

Need Some Advice?

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This column originally appeared in Jenny’s “Write Now” book blog in the Washington Independent Review of Books on March 22, 2018.

It’s funny to me how many authors bemoan the solitary nature of writing: how hard it is to forsake all society, to turn our backs on friends and family; how the isolation makes us a little ragged and churlish.

For me, the isolation of writing is one of its great attractions. I’ve never been much of a joiner to begin with, and friends of mine would probably agree that churlish is a good description whether I’m writing or not.

Still, however much I enjoy solitude, there comes a time when even I need to get out of my own head and bounce my work off of other people. Though many of my writing friends are in critique groups, even considering that kind of long-term commitment makes me claustrophobic and panicky.

Instead, I joined a small writing workshop that meets six times in 12 weeks, with the opportunity to submit up to 150 pages for critique.

(This is the second time I’ve had the chance to work with DC-based author and writing coach Mary Kay Zuravleff, and, at this point, my writing and I would follow her over a cliff.)

Writers are a prickly bunch. We need a lot of advice, but we’re often not that great at accepting it. Typically, we’re far better at seeing the weakness in others’ writing than in our own. When we read anyone else’s story, we can see what works, what doesn’t work, and often why.

All that insight evaporates when we turn a critical eye toward our own pages. Even when we know it’s not really working — or perhaps especially when we know that — we hug that ugly baby even tighter.

Here, though, I find it’s energizing to use a draft that is still pink and raw from the birthing process to be reminded of everything I already know about what makes fiction work. Advance the story with every sentence! Reveal in action! Make every character want something! (Even if, as Kurt Vonnegut assures us, it’s just a glass of water.)

Knowing, of course, is not the same as executing, but seeing and hearing it again ahead of trying it again brings me that much closer to success.

One of the first conversations we had in the first session of the workshop was about favorite books of writing advice. Mary Kay pulled out her marked-up, dog-eared copy of a relatively new addition to the writing advice canon, Benjamin Percy’s Thrill Me.

At the end of a discussion about managing multiple plotlines, she handed me her copy and said, “Read the part about flaming chainsaws.” Instead, I read the entire book, and promptly went out and got my own copy.

Have you ever noticed how many books there are that give advice to writers? You can fill a decent-sized library with all the volumes that attempt to explain writing, either to those who have no clue or to those who need some reminding.

(Many of them purport to give advice on both writing and life. It’s alarming to think that admitting you could use help with writing signals that you’re struggling all around.)

I have a couple theories about why there are so many advice books. One is that every moderately successful writer is grilled to explain how they did it, as every editor and agent is beseeched to reveal the key to their book-accepting hearts. And the other is that writers secretly hope that stacking these books up next to their laptop will somehow magically relieve them of the need to do the actual writing.

Now that I have my own marked-up copy of Thrill Me, I’ve also pulled my collection of writing-advice books off the shelf and picked up a few new titles suggested by friends. I know they aren’t going to do the writing for me, but I find it helpful to choose one from the pile and read a section ahead of starting to write.

I’ve had my copy of Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction for 20 years. Seeing a photo of it that I posted, she noted that mine is a fourth edition, and the ninth edition is in the works. Perhaps it’s time I upgraded, but then I’d have to re-highlight. I like it for the extended excerpts and practical commentary.

Even older is my copy of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, a funny and down-to-earth book that is written as though you, the reader, are sitting in her semester-long seminar.

My favorite feature of How Fiction Works by James Woods is that the top of every right-facing page contains a synopsis of the discussion at hand, such as “Grounded Skepticism,” “Absence in Characterization,” and “The Myth of Solid Characters.”

Madison Smartt Bell, a local author and writing teacher, gave us Narrative Design, which is worth studying for its methodical, structured dissection of a series of short stories in terms of plot, character, tone, point of view, and so on.

My stack contains a bunch of others; I think it’s helpful to find a few that speak to you, that touch on the issues you know are your personal trouble spots. Really, it’s all good advice.

Now, to apply it.

The Plot Thickens

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This column originally appeared in Jenny’s “Write Now” book blog in the Washington Independent Review of Books on February 15, 2018.

Yesterday, a friend tagged me in a tweet to offer up #firstlines, a popular hashtag that gets passed among writers. Her tweet offered the opening line of her upcoming novel. I looked at the first line of my work in progress, winced, and immediately went to find the beginnings of two of my favorite novels. Here they are:

“When the lights went off the accompanist kissed her.” Bel Canto by Ann Patchett (HarperCollins, 2001).

“On the morning after the Feds burned down her house and took her father, Havaa woke from dreams of sea anemones.” A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra (Hogarth, 2013).

So many questions erupt from both. There’s a frisson of sex and mystery in Patchett’s opening, with the sudden darkness and the lyrical tongue-twister of “accompanist kissed.” The missing comma underscores the suddenness.

Marra’s sentence juxtaposes horror with a jarring note of beauty and innocence, and its own poetry: “woke from dreams of sea anemones.”

It’s useful for a writer continually to remind herself of what brilliant writing looks and sounds like when she’s in the middle of trying to pull off the same thing — useful and often demoralizing.

But just as a junior tennis player gets better by competing against those higher on the ladder, every writer needs to read voraciously above her skill level to understand how it’s done.

I happened to read both Bel Canto and Constellation at about the same time, while I was working on my first novel. (I came late to Patchett, though I’ve since made up for that lapse by reading all her novels and a solid chunk of her nonfiction.)

Both books made a big impression. At the time, I was in particular awe of Marra’s debut, in which he demonstrates his trifecta mastery of language, character, and plot. In each case, though, it was the author’s ability to weave a complex, multilayered plot that truly stayed with me. Neither one was showy or loud, simply stunningly executed.

By definition, literary fiction is character-driven, but Patchett has made this point herself: Plot is the crucial differentiator between merely lovely writing and writing with a purpose. A writer needs to give her beautiful language and finely wrought characters a place to go.

Writers sometimes describe themselves as either planners or “pantsters” — that is, those who write by the seat of their pants. Perhaps because in my day job I get paid to plan, my writing is a decidedly seat-of-the-pants affair. But does that mean I can’t conceive and execute a tightly woven plot that gives my complex characters a run for their money?

We’ll see.

To be fair, though I don’t outline or storyboard, I typically do work things out in my head before I try to write. If the ideas percolate long enough, by the time I sit down to put them on paper, they have coalesced into something like coherence.

Interestingly, that’s exactly how Patchett wrote her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars. She composed it in her head over the course of a year while waiting tables at T.G.I. Friday’s.

In my head, I have worked through most of the plot points that drive the narrative of my current novel, including a critical one that’s been bugging me almost since I conceived of this particular story, and on which its credibility hinges. I kept asking myself, “Is it because…?” or “What if…?”

The answer came to me out of nowhere while I watched the bluebirds fluttering at the feeder. Maybe I could have gotten there faster if I’d storyboarded — I seriously doubt it — but then I would have missed the bluebirds.

So, what about that first sentence? I rewrote it before tweeting it out to #firstlines and immediately realized that I needed to rewrite it again. I’m sure I’ll rewrite it plenty of times before I’m done, attempting to invest it with intrigue, unanswered questions, and perhaps a little poetry of its own.

Write Now: The Year of Writing?

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Three years ago, one of my first-ever blog posts bemoaned my willingness to be distracted from writing because I love to watch the birds at my backyard feeder on snowy days. There was no good place to sit near the window, so I would keep hopping up from my desk to see what was going on.

I fixed that problem. I installed a window seat that overlooks my bird feeder.

Is there a dedicated reader in the world who doesn’t long for, daydream about, fantasize over having a window seat? I don’t know — maybe it’s a chick thing — but I’ve always wanted one. Mine is outfitted with a deep cushion, pillows, and a blanket, and it’s my favorite spot in the house. Whenever I snap a photo of what I’m reading for a #FridayReads tweet, you can be sure the book is on my window seat, where I will be joining it shortly.

So, what books will I be hanging out with in the window seat this year?

I know plenty of people who set reading goals for themselves and participate in numerous reading challenges during the year. Sorry — way too much pressure. Rest assured that plenty of books will be read, but I will not be attempting to meet a pre-ordained number. That is just not how I and my window seat roll.

Nonetheless, I can certainly tell you some of what I plan to read this year. Last time in this same spot, we visited my toppling TBR stack, which, for safety’s sake, is not in the same room as the window seat. There is, however, a short stack of six or seven books on the table next to the seat.

Reading for review: In a reading-taste shift that I would not have predicted, I find that I am drawn as much to nonfiction as to fiction in reading for review. More than half of what I read in 2017 was nonfiction, across an eclectic range of subjects. The last book I finished in December was Island of the Blue Foxes about early Russian exploration in the Pacific. Coming up are two that are due out in February: A Wilder Time: Notes from a Geologist at the Edge of the Greenland Ice by William E. Glassley, and Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker. I’m a bit less than halfway through Enlightenment, but I’ve already recommended it to a half-dozen people. Stay tuned to find out why.

Reading for a discussion panel: This May, at the Independent-sponsored Washington Writers Conference, I’m moderating a panel on debut authors, all of whom worked in different genres and went down different publishing paths. I’ll be reading their four books in the coming months, and you should feel free to follow along:

Reading for Research: Though I’m sure I’ll read a stack of fiction, since reading exceptional fiction helps to up my own game, I’m going to take a flyer and say that reading for research is where the bulk of my attention is going to be focused this year. Certainly, that’s where it needs to be focused. In the blog posting I mentioned earlier, I firmly stated that I was planning to shave a few years off the five years it took to write my first book. Tick tock, baby.

As I noted here last time, my current work in progress, though it only focuses on the years between 1913 and 1932, covers a whole lot of historical thematic ground. (One of the main characters is a journalist who’s chronicling the fight for women’s and minorities’ rights, the blatant, socially accepted re-emergence of the KKK, and a crackdown by an embattled administration that rails against agitators and paid protesters. I find that researching all this helps to take my mind off of current events.)

And though I’ve accumulated a stack of books on the various forces at work during my chosen slice of history, I plan to do much of my research in the newspaper morgue of the Washingtoniana collection, which is currently spread out in various nooks across DC while the MLK Library is under renovation — but also partly available online. Hurrah! If I play my cards right, I won’t have to move a muscle.

One thing I learned well in writing my previous book, though, is to do writing-driven, just-in-time research. Yes, understand the outlines of the historical forces and timeline, but don’t drill down until you have to. Otherwise, the research swallows the writing.

So, more than any book or online archive, in 2018, it’s my laptop that I’ll be inviting to join me in my cozy little window seat. Writing is what I need to be doing this year. Writing is the reason I installed the window seat in the first place. I still love watching the birds.

Write now.

This column originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 11 January 2018.

The Joys and Sorrows of (Writing) Historical Fiction

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This post originally appeared in Late Last Night Books on 20 September 2017.

A friend of mine is an author whose favored genre is contemporary noir fiction—hard-boiled, edgy, dark. Since that’s what he writes, that’s also what he reads. Without prompting, though, he read my novel of historical fiction set in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Washington, D.C., a story that could never be described as “edgy”. Graciously, he told me what he liked about it, but concluded by saying, “I write fiction so I can make [stuff] up. Historical fiction seems like way too much work.”

He’s got a point. Fiction is supposed to be fictional, right? Why go to the effort of having to do a ton of research and ensure detailed accuracy (because you know how those historical fiction fans are about that) when the story is supposed to be invented?

Sometimes I do find myself envying my contemporary fiction peers, who seem to have a much easier job of it. Historical novelists could pump out books a whole lot faster if they didn’t have to slow down for all that pesky research.

But even contemporary writers need to do research depending on the subject. If they’re writing about an unfamiliar field or area of expertise, or a different culture or geographical region, all of that takes investigation to get it right. But putting any of those issues two hundred — or two thousand — years in the past increases the extent and complexity of research by orders of magnitude.

Consider Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel, Homegoing, a bestseller that received the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Leonard Award for a debut, along with many other accolades. The novel is astonishing in its sweep: not only does it span three hundred years, it spans three hundred years in parallel on two continents, inhabits multiple cultures on both continents, and changes the characters it follows with each new chapter. Even for an historical fiction writer, that’s an exceptionally tall order. But that scope was critical to the book she wanted to write, which shows the reverberations and repercussions of slavery across time, geography, culture, social fabric, and — most importantly —people.

When it comes to research, the danger for writers of historical fiction is knowing when to say when. Most learn to let the story drive the research, doing just-in-time homework to understand historical context or events, and to fill in the details.

The other peril of research is the author’s being so proud of what she’s learned (or having spent so much time learning it) that she wants to shoehorn it all in. The mark of a talented writer is that the story is infused with a sense of the time and place, and that any details are organic to the story and placed correctly in time — so that a character in 1920 would button a garment rather than zip it.

The trick for authors is to understand for themselves what something looked like, how it worked, or how it was used at that time so that the words they choose are appropriate. No contemporary fiction author would describe what a telephone looks like, and neither should an historical fiction author, but he needs to be capable of picturing the phone his character is using, and to be aware, for example, that the phone is connected to a party line.

Historical fiction tends to go in and out of popularity over time. Twenty years ago, when Richard Lee established the Historical Novel Society (HNS), he says, “it was a genre everyone said was dead. Or if not dead, it was at the nadir of fashion.” Now, a reader can find historical fiction in every single sub-genre imaginable: romance, mystery, horror, thriller, YA, LGBT, sci-fi, and fantasy. Westerns are by definition historical, as is Steampunk, a relatively new addition to the histfict cannon. Of course, there is also the “alternative history” sub-genre of historical fiction.

I write reviews for the Historical Novels Review, HNS’s quarterly publication. Each issue contains hundreds of reviews, organized by general time period, beginning with prehistoric, and moving through biblical, classical (that is, ancient Greece or Egypt) into the centuries from first through twentieth, then on to the hard-to-categorize, such as “timeslip” — think Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series. A committed reader could read nothing but Edwardian or Regency-era fiction and never run out of books; I’ve heard (but have no evidence myself) that books of U.S. historical fiction, particularly early to mid-twentieth century, are especially “hot” right now.

So when people tell me, “Oh, I love historical fiction,” it’s a natural impulse for me to ask, “Yes, but what kind?”

For anyone asking why an author would bother with the extra labor that comes with historical fiction, part of the answer may be that there is a huge market for it. But for most writers, I think, it’s that even the most cursory glance backwards can generate a lifetime of compelling story ideas. So often, a writer will catch a snippet of an historical account and just know there’s a great story in there, with just “a little” digging. Author Carrie Callaghan saw a seventeenth-century self-portrait of Dutch painter Judith Leyster hanging in the National Gallery of Art. Carrie’s debut novel, A Light of Her Own (due out next November from Amberjack Publishing), is a direct result of that encounter.

I look for ideas everywhere.  I review a lot of non-fiction, both for HNS (yes, even the fiction guys read non-fiction sometimes) and for the Washington Independent Review of Books. Often, I choose books because I think I’ll find interesting historical information that might be useful later, such as in Greg Jenner’s A Million Years in a Day: A Curious History of Everyday Life from the Stone Age to the Phone Age, and Steam Titans: Cunard, Collins, and the Epic Battle for Commerce on the North Atlantic, by William M. Fowler Jr. — and, yes, I did, in both cases.

For myself, I write historical fiction to remove myself — and, I hope, my readers — from the clutter of the known, everyday “here” and to go to a different place, to be, as it were, transported. I also find that it’s sometimes more effective to make an observation about the lives that we live today by approaching that point from a remove, through the reflection of history. My current project takes place in the U.S. of the early twentieth century, but I’m drawn to the specific topics because of the parallels to today’s social, cultural, and political climate. Writing a contemporary story about these same issues, while we’re in the midst of them, would, to my mind, feel too raw, and would overshadow the story I want to tell. Coming at a subject obliquely allows readers to put their guard down and simply let the story seep in.

And no matter what kind of fiction an author is writing, any reader knows: we just want a good story.

Book Review: The Weight of Ink

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This review originally appeared in the August 2017 issue of the Historical Novels Review of the Historical Novel Society.

In modern-day London, a cache of mid-17th-century papers is found, apparently untouched for three centuries, in a house under renovation. The Hebrew and Portuguese writings bring in Jewish-history expert and ailing academic Helen Watt to assess their provenance. Pressed to assist her is stalled American Ph.D. candidate Aaron Levy. Temperamentally mismatched, they nonetheless begin to uncover the mystery of an anonymous scribe working for a blind rabbi in pre-plague London.

Rachel Kadish offers an impressive achievement here in her latest novel. She ties together complex concepts of metaphysics and theology from the days of philosopher Baruch Spinoza, along with a mid-20th-century love story set in Israel, and a modern-day academic treasure hunt. The book offers a surprisingly taut and gripping storyline for one that spends much of its time in a dark study or a research library.

The true central character here is Ester Velasquez, a brilliant young Jewish woman whose family took refuge in Holland to escape Inquisition-wracked Portugal; she later finds herself in 1650s London serving as secretary to Rabbi HaCoen Mendes. Education for women was considered unseemly, and Ester’s work as a scribe renders her unmarriageable—a state she prefers. Ester’s wide-ranging intellect pushes her to read voraciously and ask questions, in particular about the nature of God, man, and the universe; those questions are extraordinarily dangerous.

Helen knows this is her last opportunity to redeem the choices that she’s made, and she and Aaron work against another academic team and her own worsening illness in a race to find and fit the last pieces of the puzzle in order to understand Ester’s true identity. The Weight of Ink has the brains of a scholar, the drive of a sleuth, and the soul of a lover.

 

Book Review: G-Man

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This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 23 June 2017.

Bob Lee Swagger is getting older these days. It’s to be expected, of course, given that we’ve known him now for almost 25 years, ever since meeting him in Point of Impact (possibly better known to folks by its movie title, “Shooter”).

In this 10th in Stephen Hunter’s popular series, Bob is now 71 and taking inventory of the many ways his body is starting to betray him. Puttering around his Idaho homestead, he obviously needs a project. One lands in his lap when he hears about the strongbox that’s been unearthed on his family’s old place back in Arkansas.

The contents obliquely point to Bob’s enigmatic grandfather, Charles, but present a puzzle. In part, the box holds an old-but-mint-condition gun, an uncirculated $1,000 bill, an apparent treasure map, and a badge from the Division of Investigation — the short-lived name for what soon became the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It was only called the Division for a single year, in 1934.

That year was both formative and legendary for the brand-new federal organization. In the teeth of the Depression, notorious bank robbers were using jurisdictional boundaries to evade local law enforcement, which demanded the use of a new federal force charged with the pursuit of these public enemies across all borders, to capture or kill.

A small problem, though: “Our Director…envisioned a scientific national police force, incorruptible, untainted by ego, vanity, and politics. Alas, as we have learned, that also meant untainted by experience, toughness, cunning, and marksmanship. Lawyers make poor gunfighters.”

Enter Sheriff Charles Swagger, steel-willed marksman who has already made his chops in battle during the Great War and by singlehandedly taking out three bad guys in a gunfight earlier in his career. Charles is a no-nonsense man who keeps a low profile, and G-Man inserts him into the ambush that killed Bonnie and Clyde in May 1934.

His desire to stay out of the papers puts Charles on the radar of the Division, which — after a disastrous gun battle with John Dillinger’s gang at Little Bohemia that April — understands it is in desperate need of men who know how to shoot.

Shooting, of course, is what the Swagger men know how to do. Bob grasps this well, though he never knew his grandfather, or even very much about him, since his own beloved father Leon never talked about him.

Bob finds the thought of Charles vaguely frightening; the one thing he does know is that his grandfather ended up a hopeless drunk. But the strongbox is a direct link to the man, and, really, who could resist trying to solve this mystery?

Hunter has some fun with the structure of the story, which follows three primary characters: Bob in the present sleuthing through scant clues to piece together what happened with his grandfather in 1934; Charles as he joins Melvin Purvis and Sam Cowley in the manhunt for Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, and the rest; and Lester Gillis himself — devoted husband and father, and gun-crazy killer, who usually punched or shot anyone who dared to call him Baby Face, a nickname he despised.

Those three characters, along with their author, share an appreciation for well-made firepower, and parts of the book read like a dreamy-eyed love letter to the massive, manly guns of old — a Thompson machine gun with a full drum weighed something like 50 pounds — and readers are treated to an apprenticeship in gun-smithing and craft.

For the Swaggers, they find beauty in the precision engineering and craftsmanship, joy in the working of the instrument. For Les, holding a gun simply brings on a blood fever to use it. He is the most dangerous man among the outlaws.

Bob is a fascinating guy, but his detective work — and his being trailed by two nasty fellows who want what he’s got — can’t compete with our experience of riding shotgun with both the G-Men and the gangsters, which is where the story sizzles.

Our interest in the present is further hindered by the fact that we end up knowing far more than Bob does about what went on with Charles, so we can feel a little smug as we sit back and watch him try to piece it together.

Ultimately, there is something unsatisfying in how Bob finally learns the full story, on top of which we know he doesn’t learn the full story. Bob never gets to know Charles the way that we do — his principles and moral code, the high standards that drove him and the demons that plagued him. Only Charles knew that, and he wasn’t talking.

Perhaps, though, that unfinished business lays the groundwork for the next Bob Lee Swagger story. After all, there’s still plenty of Swagger left.

Jenny Visits MWA Montgomery County

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Join me at the Montgomery County chapter of the Maryland Writers’ Association this Saturday, July 15 (Mid-county Community Recreation Center, 2004 Queensguard Road, Silver Spring) from 10:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. for the July meeting and I’ll be discussing “Publishers, Publicists, and a Reading Public”, to share what I learned in my publication journey, including:

  • the pros and cons of publishing with a small press
  • understanding the publication calendar and using that time wisely
  • knowing what to expect when working with a publicist
  • using every tool at your disposal to connect with readers.