Review: 'The Marriage Portrait'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

The Marriage Portrait
By Maggie O'Farrell
Literary Fiction
Knopf

She had
A heart—how shall I say?— too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.

Browning's "My Last Duchess" was the first poem I studied in college that caught my attention and imagination. The story it tells of a young woman who seemed kind and interested in the world, who was not appreciated by a world-weary aristocrat, who died and who was not mourned, whose portrait was a curio among many for her widower, floored me.

How could anyone be that callous? How could anyone not appreciate kindness and beauty? How could "a nine-hundred-years-old name" be worth more than those qualities? Is the male ego that fragile? Is is an aristocracy thing?

These questions came back to mind while reading Maggie O'Farrell's latest historical novel. The Marriage Portrait imagines the life of Lucrezia di Cosimo de' Medici d'Este. The middle daughter of Cosimo and Eleanora de' Medici was married to Alfonso II d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, at the age of 13. This happened after her elder sister, also promised to Alfonso, died before the wedding could take place. Lucrezia died at the age of 16.

She is believed to be the subject of Browning's poem about a dead young wife's marriage portrait. The actual painting of her that inspired Browning, which was on display near his Italian home, although it was apparently painted some time after the marriage, makes one wonder what she was thinking. O'Farrell has some ideas.

In the novel, Lucrezia is unlike her sedate siblings. She is not only the opposite of sedate, she also is curious and desires to know things, to see things, to understand things. As a child, she crept down to the family's courtyard during the night when a tiger her father had commissioned to be part of his private zoo arrived. Mesmerized by the fierce, caged beast, she later gets to visit the caged animals with her older brothers and sisters. As the odd one out, Lucrezia is skilled at fading into the background, and does so to go to the tiger's cage. To stroke its magnificent fur. She is discovered doing so and is dragged away. Later, the tiger is killed when the doors to its cage and those of the two lions already in the zoo are opened. 

That part of the story is factual. But like deeds surrounding her eventual husband, whether her father had something to do with what took place is worthy of speculation. 

To anchor Lucrezia's fictional character to the real portrait, and subsequent fame through Browning's poem, O'Farrell's protagonist is a talented painter. Brushstrokes, use of color, the fascination of creating underpaintings no one but the artist will see are all fascinating and satisfying to the Lucrezia of the novel. The way that O'Farrell describes how these aspects of creating art giving meaning to her character's inner life show another interpretation to the complaints of the widower in the poem, who is peeved at not being on some mythical pedestal. Instead, the novel's Lucrezia is lost inside her art.

The truth is, though, that she is still caught in the microcosm of her painting: that is the only place she wishes to be. All other sights, all ther worlds, will be dissatisfying to her until she finishes it, until the painting is complete and will release her back to where she belongs. Here, in this salon, waiting for her husband to appear, an embroidery hoop in her hands.

Added into the mix are Alfonso's troubles with his Protestant mother, who has angered the Pope, and his desperation for a child. (The real Alfonso married twice more after Lucrezia's death but had no children.) If Lucrezia feels a bond with a different man, that could well be the last straw for an aristocrat accustomed to getting his way.

It is easy to see that a would-be empire builder, in an age when Henry VIII would be doing the same, only in public, would think murdering a wife could solve some of his problems and perhaps soothe his ego.

How much any of this is true is not the purpose of the story. It is the wondering about what drives people, what inspires or motivates them, what controls them, that makes The Marriage Portrait a fascinating look at how people with so many advantages can fail at life on such a grand scale.

Review: 'Haven'

©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Haven
By Emma Donoghe
Literary Fiction
Little, Brown and Company

Three monks leave a comfortable monastery a thousand years ago to begin their own community. Two were chosen by the third, who dreamed of perfection in worship and contemplation in the wilderness, away from the evils of humanity. They find Skelling Michael and begin the work of making their prior's dream a reality.

In Emma Donoghe's Haven, Artt has traveled the known world and is now visiting an Irish monastery. The food is plentiful, the abbott has a comfortable family life, the monks are hard-working. But he is not content. He eats little and holds himself aloof. As a famous and mysterious figure, he is fascinating to young Trian. The growing lad, given to the monks when he was 13, is a pure soul who loves playing music with one of the older monks. Cormac came late to the religious life, after surviving both battle wounds and the death of his family to the plague. He is content to live out his days with his brothers.

But in his dream of a new brotherhood, Artt sees Trian and Cormac as his followers. Although he resists the title of abbott, it's clear he considers himself the leader because he is the one who was given the dream. While Cormac and Trian want to take care of the basics, such as food and shelter, Artt wants to make a cross of stone and an altar. Because they trust his extreme views as faith, they obey.

As the conflicts between reality (eating, shelter) and divine (worship, copying manuscripts) take root, Donoghe also delves into the practical. She chronicles just how Cormac and Trian solve problems of survival with the little at hand. This fascinating narrative of how people created what they needed to get by in pre-industrial times grounds the overlying parable of how one determined man tries to make his vision real.

And that's what Haven is, a parable that delves into the differences between faith and religious doctrine, between perception and reality, between being in charge and being a leader. As the author gives the reader looks at their situation from each character's perspective, it is clear that all three are sincere in wanting to serve God. But they all three approach this sincere wish differently, because of who they are.

Trian loves being one with nature. The idea of being like a bird, able to exist in air, on water and on land, appeals to him. Having grown up in a fishing family, he is adept at scaling the rocks of Skellig and swimming.

... he finds himself wondering what it would be like to be equally at home on land, in water, and in air. To be powered by the breeze, wheeling and soaring, free from the weight that keeps other creatures shackled to the earth.

Cormac is a builder, a gardener and a healer. He accepts people for who they are.

After recounting a story in which time passed by while a holy man listened to an angel's song, Cormac shows a love of humanity:

It strikes Cormac now what a sad story this is. To be soothed with music and given a heavenly reward, but in exchange you've lost a century and a half in a blink, and all your friends are dead and buried ... If he'd been Mochaoi, he'd have preferred to sweat over every beam of that church than to dream away his whole life in an afternoon. Once childhood is over, don't the years pass too fast already, rollling over a man as fast as waves?

Neither one of them are prone to judge.

Artt is all about judgment. The scores of birds on the island drive him crazy. Cormac's stories drive him crazy. The two monks' wishes to create music, shelter, heat and food sources, to not be adept copiers of manuscripts, drive him crazy. It soon becomes clear that all of humanity and nature drive him crazy. Artt appears to wish, above all, to be pure spirit in worship. His desire leads, of course, to acts of hubris.  Does he have a death wish for him and the two men he called to join him in this quest? As he tells one of the monks:

Why dread sickness and death at all, when we should rather trust God to do with us what he will?

Artt's ego is definitely involved:

Artt finds himself wondering if perhaps tales will be told about him. Is it arrogance to think it?

The way he punishes himself also is ego-driven. No wonder when one of the others falls ill, his brother prays:

Don't dare die on me, our first season. Don't leave me here alone with a saint.

The real Skellig Michael has been home to monks for centuries. It's probably better known now as a key location in the last three Star Wars movies. The setting serves the story well, whether Donoghe's initial aim was to explore how and why monks first settled on that beautiful, harsh, remote isle, or whether she set out to explore the differences between love of humanity and love of God. Regardless of the inspiration, Haven is a calm and forceful look at the nexus of faith and love.

Review: 'Marigold and Rose: A Fiction'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Marigold and Rose: A Fiction
By Louise Glück
Literary Fiction
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

What is it like to become aware, to start to understand that there are things to see, to hear, to feel, to know?

Those ideas are explored in Nobel Prize-winning Louise Glück's Marigold and Rose: A Fiction. 

The Marigold and Rose in the title are twin baby girls. One is thoughtful and already shows she was born to be a writer. The other is beloved by all and draws people to her without even trying. They consider themselves half of a whole person, while always recognizing their differences. That they are different does not mean they are in conflict, and that is a lovely idea to see.

The slim volume begins with Marigold, the writer-in-residence, poring over an alphabet book of animals. It may seem like she is reading, at first, but Glück shows what the real situation is by revealing:

Of course she wasn't reading; neither of the twins could read; they were babies. But we have interior lives, Rose thought.

And oh how lively those interior lives are!

Besides the differences in themselves, they study Mother and Father in detail and love them for the different beings they are. And, just as they seem themselves as both a unit and as individuals, so they see their parents. It's a facile way of describing family dynamics that is more complex than first appearances seemingly reveal.

Marigold is a character who it would be fascinating to revisit throughout her life. Books are her great love, because she has already discovered one astounding truth about them:

Books did not judge you, Marigold thought, because they were full of animals. She knew from the dog animals did not judge you.

As someone who loves books because they don't let you down the way people can, and as a lifelong dog lover, oh how this resonates.

During the course of their first year, the babies disover and muse over the outdoors, incuding bunnies and flowers, Mother's feelings about a house compared to an apartment and going back to work, stairs and learning how to drink from a cup.

As throughout the work, the evening of their first birthday, when the party is over and night has fallen, is both descriptive and philosophical. Glück's poetical prowess shines in her writing and, because of the power of poetry, each word counts.

Review: 'My Government Means to Kill Me'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

My Government Means to Kill Me
By Rasheed Newson
Literary Fiction
Flatiron

A young man leaves his affluent Indianapolis home in the 1980s, lands in New York City and seeks well, not fame and fortune, but some of the lustier glories of the big city. And since he is a young Black gay man with unresolved sorrow in his heart, a flamboyant attitude and a quick mind, he can only be Trey Singleton in Rasheed Newson's My Government Means to Kill Me.

Trey is a teenager when his life in the Big Apple begins. He knows he stands out. Sometimes, he embraces it and sometimes, he acknowledges that it is not half of who he is.  From his first job as a bicycle messenger, Trey knows he doesn't fit in. He also knows he is going to have to take it if he plans to stay. There is an acknowledgement and honesty to Trey that is immediately endearing. 

Although he knows that "the average person was never going to bestow pity or mercy on me", he also quickly learns that "We are not so narrowly defined as society would have us believe."

Trey soon discovers Mt. Morris, a bathhouse that has not been closed down because of its mostly Black clientele. There, he cruises for quick sex and becomes friends with Bayard Rustin. This Rustin feels and sounds like the little I know of the real Rustin, whether he would ever have been in such a setting or not. Like all the real people mentioned in the novel, each chapter, or lesson, has a footnote when they are introduced that is factual. (Excuse me for a moment. Footnotes! Oh joy! Rapture! My nerdy little heart was delighted.)

Rustin is one of several characters who serve as anchors while Trey bounces around discovering the ups and downs of life in the big city. Rustin serves as both advisor and Greek chorus, telling Trey and the reader of how far things had come even back in the 1980s.

When Trey and his roommate can't pay rent, Trey plows through the old-fashioned kind of research, when one dug through paper documents in dusty basements. He then finagles his way into a rent strike against the landlord who is, of course, Fred Trump. The portrayal of that despot is both a clue into why his son turned out the way he did and a portend of things to come. It is brilliantly written, as are other setpieces with prominent conservatives of the era.

As Trey becomes more involved in his New York life, he is drawn toward activism. The rent strike is the tipping point. In this and all the outer things that happen to Trey, his observations about himself apply not just to the action at hand, but to him. To wit:

If we never meet our despicable adversaries, we'd never be forced to find out how brave, resilient, and cunning we can be.

This bit of wisdom applies to the trauma Trey carries from his childhood, when something happened that he was at least in part responsible for and which is the main reason he left home. In between episodes that portray 1980s New York City and the explosion of the AIDS crisis, Trey deals with his past. It will affect his future. And it will involve confronting demons, both those in his head and those in his family. But one of Trey's great strengths is his self-awareness and knowledge:

We could blame it all on our families, but then we'd never find the keys to unlock our cells.

This self-awareness and knowledge also leads to one of those big "oof" reading moments when the air can leave the reader's innards and tears may come to one's eyes:

What flesh-and-blood man was ever going to immediately recognize the inner beauty and value in me, then make the effort to machete his way through the thorny thickets of insecurities and defense mechanisms surrounding my heart?

As Trey becomes involved with ACT UP, the reason for the book's title comes to the fore. It is a brutal realization that this is how dire things were. And a reminder that we're not that far from seeing how dire things are close to being again:

The point is to let your bruised and bloodied bodies serve as evidence that the government means to kill you, if you so much as protest its bigoted policies.

The novel is not all doom and gloom though. Through all the ups and downs in Trey's life and those of his friends, there is a cheekiness, an earnestness and an honesty to the story that thoroughly anchors it. My Government Means to Kill Me is not only a brilliant historical novel of those times, it is a bold statement of how someone who could have been an outcast doesn't settle for being left out. 

Review: 'Night of the Living Rez'

©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Night of the Living Rez
By Morgan Talty
Literary Fiction Short Stories
Tin House

A young boy, living on the Penobscot reservation with his older sister and mother, gets older but doesn't seem to grow up in a beautifully written set of connected stories. Morgan Talty's Night of the Living Rez centers on David, or Dee, at different ages in a non-linear arrangement. Talty takes advantage of that narrative construction choice to show how, regardless of what is going on in our young narrator's life, there are some constants that affect everything about his life and the lives of his family and friends.

These constants are mostly not positive, which makes the positive parts stand out all the brighter. The stories also show how strongly connected the positive and not-positive are. In "The Blessing Tobacco", a young David visits his grandmother at her house. She is starting to suffer from Alzheimer's and thinks David is her long-dead brother, Robbie. 

Grammy keeps passing him cigarettes at the kitchen table. He hasn't smoked and is pretty sure he'd get in trouble if he did, but his mother told him to just go along with Grammy if she wasn't herself. So he smokes them and she keeps passing more to him, getting more insistent that he smoke them. So of course he's soon sick. Turns out Grammy was punishing Robbie for taking something that happened years before David was even born.

His mostly quiet mother and his usually distressed sister nurse him and he is sent back to fill his grandmother's wood box. The slight guilting, the quiet back-and-forth conversation that sends him back and the ensuing chat with his grandmother are realistically and quietly portrayed. It is real life. As they sit back down at the kitchen table, Grammy is herself and tells David a joke he finds so funny that he has her repeat it.

When Grammy has a bad spell later, the arguing that David's mother and sister had been doing is dropped as they unite in taking care of of their elder. She again mistakes David for her dead brother. Later, David dreams that he knew Robbie and has memories of them hunting or fishing together. The way the end of the story is written is indicative of why this book can take hold of one's heart and head:

"... and after all that we walked away through mud or snow until I stopped walking but he kept on going and going and going out there in quiet strides through a dark-pined forest until he was gone."

Gone in more ways than one.

David spends a lot of time with his friends. Whether they're playing an elaborate game of sticks and stones, or smoking, drinking and even doing drugs, the boys are together or looking for each other. They are just as apt to steal from each other as they are to give each other things. It's fascinating that they don't hold grudges and fall right back into hanging out together. David even spends significant time living at their houses when he and his mother cannot abide each other.

His father is mostly out of the picture. David's parents divorced when he was quite young and his dad moved away. He isn't a good provider and doesn't come to visit his kids, but when something goes wrong someone usually reaches out to call him and make him part of what's happening. And one of the other family members shuts him out. Again, the pattern is repeated.

The other major character is Frick, his mother's boyfriend who first appears in his role as a medicine man when Paige has a crisis. His role within the family has a most definitive trajectory:

He was a medicine man who had been forgetting to pray in the mornings and at night, forgetting to feed the spirits once a month.

For the most part, the fights and quarrels and bickering and hurtful things separate the characters. But then something comes up and, for the most part, they are there for each other. Throughout everything that happens to each family member in Night of the Living Rez, that love underneath the trauma holds:

Mom had driven fast. Real fast, and she watched me most of the time during the drive, as if I had been her road the whole way to our new home.

Review: 'Olga Dies Dreaming'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Olga Dies Dreaming
By Xochitl Gonzalez
Literary Fiction
Flatiron Books

Olga is a successful high-end wedding planner, daughter of Puerto Rican activists, and sister of a media star congressman. What's most important to her right now? Some dodgy paperwork to present her cousin with expensive, heirloom-worthy linen napkins at her upcoming wedding.

So, is Olga Dies Dreaming, the new novel by Xochitl Gonzalez, a frothy tale about a woman and her familia? Let's just say it has a lot to say about family dynamics.

Olga and her brother, Prieto, were left by their mother, now a fugitive activist fighting for Puerto Rican independence. Their father, a Vietnam vet, died of AIDS as a broken-hearted junkie who loved music and his children, but who loved the needle more.

Their grandmother raised them with unconditional love. Both are accomplished, successful adults who are close to each other. Of course they are both hiding pain. And as the story deepens, the reader learns about the what and why of their pain. And how it affects what happens in the rest of the novel.

Olga has shut her heart up. She has an ongoing relationship with the rich owner of a chain of hardware stores, but she isn't in love with him. Olga had one other serious boyfriend as a young girl. Reggie is now a wildly rich music mogul with diverse investments and a renewed interest in his own Puerto Rican heritage. And now there is a new man who has appeared. Matteo is his own true self, even when it comes to admitting his flaws and fears.

Prieto is divorced and has a young teenage daughter. He's been hiding his homosexuality from even himself, but that's no longer an option. He is afraid of how his family will react, even more than the voters or the media.

Both sister and brother have received letters from their mother over the years, although she's never visited or even called them. She exhorts them to remember who they are and to not sell out. Nothing they do is ever good enough, because they are not as committed to her cause as she is. 

By the time the personal, professional, racial and cultural aspects of their story propel each other to some potentially disastrous decisions, it is difficult to not be worried for both Olga and Prieto. It's easy to see how badly things can do. So easy to see that it would be understandable if one decided to put the book down and, say, listen to music for a spell.

But it is so worthwhile to return to the novel. To find out what happens. And so see what happens when even people who love each other acknowledge that they haven't been brave enough to be completely honest in the past, but they're trying now. 

At one point, Olga wonders about someone who collects so many certain objects that the word hoarding is apt. What pain caused that hole in the heart that the objects are an attempt to fill it back up? What Olga doesn't know at the time is that she, too, has a hole in her heart. Every main character in the novel does. And the ways in which they seek to fill those holes show both how loving and how wounded, how willing to heal and how wounding, people can be.

Olga Dies Dreaming is a fascinating look at how the personal is part of the larger story -- of a family, of a culture, or a heritage that all can serve as foundational and supportive for someone to become their best true self.

Review: 'Fire Season'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Fire Season
By Leyna Krow
Literary Fiction
Viking

Before Washington Territory was granted statehood, a fire swept through downtown Spokane Falls. The cause was never determined and the town was rebuilt larger and more grandiose than before. One way of looking at why the town burned underlies the story in Leyna Krow's Fire Season. 

The story of the fire is not the subject of the novel, however. But it does serve to illuminate the story of a woman of a certain kind, as Roslyn is dubbed by her father. The fire also sheds light on how damaged men would control such women, and what happens when they try.

On the eve of the Great Fire of 1889, Barton Heyward runs the only bank in town. He's certain no one likes him, no one respects him and he just got the worst haircut of his young life. Not even his favorite prostitute, Roslyn, likes him more than she likes the drink. So perhaps he'll just kill himself. He chickens out, the town burns the next day and he comes up with a way to enrich himself. If he can't be loved he can find another way to make himself feel better. Writing fake bank notes and charging hidden interest fees makes him feel clever.

That includes keeping Roslyn at his house under the pretense people think she set the fire. People don't actually think this, but Barton isn't just deluding Roslyn. He's deluding himself, convincing himself that she is his great love, that she loves him and that they will go away together to begin a beautiful life. As Roslyn begins to clear her head from its alcohol-fueled fugue, she begins to think for herself.

Soon, another young man arrives in Spokane Falls. He is even less impressed with the people he meets than Barton. Quake Auchenbaucher was sent for because of his reputation for solving fire investigations as a federal government inspector. That's not who he really is, but Quake is ready to once again size up a situation, tell people what they want and make a tidy profit.

Barton seems a ready-made patsy for Quake's scheme. And the sooner Quake can get out of Spokane Falls, the happier he will be. The local police are a drunken gang, the town is full of stupid people and the only thing people seem excited over is the fare of a local waffle shop.

What Quake doesn't know is that Roslyn will come into his life, too.

And what both men don't initially know is that Roslyn, well, she can do certain things. Because she is a woman of a certain kind. Hints about what she can do appear during interludes between the sagas of the two men. Hints about women who can fly, who can intuit, who can have visions and who can levitate beyond their bodies.

As more is revealed about Roslyn and how she ended up in a Spokane hotel, more is shown about the ways in which women have to make the most of whatever gifts they have. And ways in which they can be punished for having those gifts. But Fire Season also shows that for a certain kind of woman who perseveres, grace is possible.

Fire Season does a superb job of portraying the aftermath of the Great Fire. It gives a feel for what Spokane Falls and other Western towns were like, in addition to their people. These portraits serve the greater story very well. 

Although there are serious themes displayed, there also is whimsy in this novel.