FIDELTY, a Belt Revivals series story by forgotten feminist Susan Glaspell

FIDELTY
SUSAN GLASPELL (intro. Sarah Blackwood)
Belt Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A classic feminist novel originally published in 1915, and set in Iowa in the early years of the 20th century, Susan Glaspell's Fidelity is a surprising, suspenseful work about the strictures that confine women, the risks those who want to flee them take, and the opportunities that await them if they do.

Ruth Holland, bored in her conventional small town, falls in love with a married man and runs off with him, shocking the community. A decade later she returns to cold shoulders and the disapproval of the town: she is seen as "a human being who selfishly—basely—took her own happiness, leaving misery for others. She outraged society as completely as a woman could outrage it ... One who defies it ... must be shut out from it."

What Ruth decides to do next will upend most readers' expectations, as will the cryptic scenes that take place in the doctor's office after Ruth becomes involved with her married lover. Ruth Holland deserves to be placed alongside other heroines such as Emma Bovary and Lily Bart, women who wanted "an enlarged experience" and were "zestful for new things from life." Fidelity will shock and fascinate readers today as its heroine did in her day.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: It will most certainly shock readers today, will this read; not for the same reasons and not to the same degree as the readers of 1915 were shocked. Nowadays we're watching, or y'all're watching because I sure as shootin' ain't, The Real Housewives of {Flyover Country} to get the equivalent shock value. (I sometimes long for the Hays Code when I read about the antics of these surgically altered weirdos that keep so many so entertained.) I too was shocked by Fidelity: How has Susan Glaspell disappeared from the awareness of 2026's readers?

Born on a rural Iowa homestead (this means something important, y'all follow the link) in 1876, by 1894 she was a paid journalist; she later became a college graduate (in philosophy!) at a time when the number of *men* who graduated college was a vanishingly small slice of the population; she was a staffer, full time and paid, at the Des Moines newspaper; then gave it all up...to become a bestselling novelist and short-story writer.

AFTER that, she fell in love with a married guy. He divorced whoever he was married to in order to put a ring on Susan's finger (and who can blame him?), and their union produced...more bestselling novels, as well as the Provincetown Players, Eugene O'Neill's career, several still-produced plays of her own...y'know, all the usual things a woman can expect to have happen to her when she's born into a nineteenth-century farming family. Her life as a radical socialist free-love advocate would shock and startle many in the US today, let alone then.

So Fidelity is probably more faction, or even a roman à clef if one knew the good folk of Davenport, Iowa, circa 1910 which I do not and, if this story is any guide, am delighted not to have done. I'm no small-town fancier in general, but the beady-eyed, small-minded and judgmental folk of the place evoked in this story made me panther-screechingly furious on the regular.

Equally irksome to my twenty-first century self is the lackluster critical reception of the time, doubtless symptomatic of the era's cultural unreadiness to examine its prudishness and misogyny. (I'm appalled to not these same objectively wrongheaded notions are being trumpeted as in the ascendant again. Well-timed, Belt Publishing!) I suspect some of the resistance then also stemmed from the multiple narrators whose ideas about "fidelity," that inherently coercive concept applied far more to women than men in marriage as we constitute it in the West, being rather transparently intended to counterpoint each other and reinforce the validity of protagonist Ruth's choice to elope with a married man.

Pace University Professor Sarah Blackwood's introduction alone might repay the cost of procuring the book. So much of Author Glaspell's life is footnoted in relation to the Provincetown Players' enduring legacy, despite her 1932 Pulitzer Prize for Drama meriting more than a simple "oh, by the way" footnote. Professor Blackwood makes a good case for why we should look for, and at, Susan Glaspell as a visionary life-liver and writer.

I don't really think this story of "infidelity" and sexual liberation despite its consequences will ever go out of relevance and ability to illuminate and elucidate how willful and calricious a thing the human heart is. It's more out of fashion in twenty-first century storytelling when its focus is not on the guilt and the transgression angles of attack. It might feel less minatory because there's no emphasis on punishment for the behavior, but to my mind this story is more honest about reality than modern salacious takes on the topic. There are consequences to the choices we make. They aren't always easy to endure. If you knowingly transgress your community's norms be ready to find a new community.

I think a lot of people, married or not, can relate to, resonate with, find fellowship in, that message.

A MURDEROUS BUSINESS, first Harriman & Mancini lesbian-led historical mystery

A MURDEROUS BUSINESS (Harriman & Mancini #1)
CATHY PEGAU
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Cathy Pegau's sharp, captivating historical mystery about two women in turn-of-the-century New York solving murder and fighting the heteropatriarchy.

There can be a blurry line between what is ethical and what is legal.

Margot Baxter Harriman took the reins of B&H Foods after her father passed. It’s not easy being a business woman in 1912, but she is determined to continue what her grandparents started decades ago, no matter what it takes.

When Margot finds Mrs. Gilroy, her father’s former assistant, dead in the office with a half-finished note confessing to nebulous misdeeds, she seeks out help from a very discreet, private investigator to figure out what's going on. Her company, and her good name, depends on determining the truth, otherwise she could lose everything, including her freedom.

Loretta “Rett” Mancini has run her father’s investigation operation since he started becoming increasingly forgetful. When Margot offers her the chance to look into the potential scandal with B&H, she jumps at the chance.

But the more the two dig, the more it becomes clear that Margot's company may be too far lost...and her life is at stake.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Superior iteration of a sleuthing odd couple, platonic edition. The lesbian protagonists are each trying to prove themselves by solving this crime. Rett Mancini's life partner, a nurse called Ceecee, is not terribly filled out as a character, but she isn't backgrounded...her existence is a source of stress between Rett and her private-dick dad. Her mother's not fussed, interestingly, by having an "abnormal" daughter.

Margot inherits her father's food-canning business, and bashes her nose into the harsh reality that she lives in a gilded cage. The canning business is in crisis due to an adulteration scandal. In 1912, that was huge news: next to the Titanic's recent sinking, the still-new Food and Drug Administration (FDA as we know it today) was still rooting out abusive and dangerous practices in the US food chain because of the rampant fraud that led to its founding. Discovering her father's retired right-hand woman dead, inside the office she so recently left, with an unfinished note to Margot that lacks specificity but hints at skulduggery, Margot hires Rett at the moment Papa Mancini chucks her out of the family detective agency for being unnatural.

Margot needs the business to stay open, for practical and ego reasons. Rett needs the spondulix from Margot to live, and wants badly to show her homophobic father he's wrong about her ability to do the work despite being abnormal. Rett summons a common stage entertainer, magicianesque Shiloh, to assist with the details of solving Margot's case. There blooms a lovely fondness between those ladies, as wealthy, sheltered Margot begins her journey out of closet and cage...within limits, I'll wager, that will present problems as Margot is already trying to run the canning business and date a common entertainer on the sly. What could add more spice to a love than that?

Which leads me to explain my rating. This is a good, cozy mystery, set in a time of upheaval and possibility. Some of the very best US institutions were created; some people were freer than ever before; and some were not. My tribe, the queers, were decidedly not included among the social-loosening winners for very long. The excitement of ever-improving quality of life inventions and products was heady. A hefty dose of that comes through in the alternating narration of chapters between Margot and Rett. Unlike most series-starting novels, Author Pegau resists making the central sleuthing duo a couple...thank all those useless gods for that! It felt liberating, and lifted my opinion of a well-written, interestingly placed, but not really surprising story up a notch. Had the main duo been made a romantic couple I'd've rated it a 3.5 and relegated it to a short review to be forgotten.

It took vision for Author Pegau to see how much more good, positive story-developmental material there was in making the couples in her lesbian-demimonde asymmetric in almost every way, but still show how true and heartfelt their interconnectedness is.

Kudos, Author Pegau, and when's the next one coming? Put me on the list, please.

ONE OF US, solid well-crafted not-too-gory horror vibes read

ONE OF US
DAN CHAON
Henry Holt & Co. (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A playfully macabre and utterly thrilling tale about orphaned twins on the run from their murderous uncle who find refuge in a bizarre traveling carnival, from master of literary horror Dan Chaon.

It’s 1915 and the world is transforming, but for thirteen-year-old Bolt and Eleanor—twins so close they can literally read each other’s minds—life is falling apart. When their mother dies, they are forced to leave home under the care of a vicious con man who claims to be their long-lost uncle Charlie, the only kin they have left. During a late-night poker game, when one of his rages ends in murder, they decide to flee.

Salvation arrives in the form of Mr. Jengling, founder of the Emporium of Wonders and father to its many members. He adopts Bolt and Eleanor, who travel by train across the vast, sometimes brutal American frontier with their new family, watching as the exhibitions spark amazement wherever they go. There’s Minnie, the three-legged lady, and Dr. Chui, who stands over seven feet tall; Thistle Britches, the clown with no nose, and Rosalie, who can foretell the death of anyone she meets.

After a lifetime of having only each other, Eleanor and Bolt are finally part of something bigger. But as Bolt falls in deeper with their new clan, he finds Eleanor pulling further away from him. And when Uncle Charlie picks up their trail, the twins find themselves facing a peril as strange as it is terrifying, one which will forever alter the trajectory of their lives. An ode to the misfits and the marginalized, One of Us is a riotous and singularly creepy celebration of the strange and the spectacular and of family in its many forms.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The dinner-party scene of Tod Browning's super unsettling 1932 film Freaks, only literatured to a fare-thee-well. It feels a little like those Victorian table skirts meant to keep the ladies ladylike and not inflamed with lust by...no one's ever been able to explain to me why women were supposed to be inflamed by a lathe-turned leg not a well-turned calf or a muscular thigh.

What stands out to me in this read is the appalling nastiness of the carnival/family unit's audiences, gawking at people for being different. Those different, often very different, people are Author Chaon's focus to the exclusion of more than...I would say "desultory" but it's so pejorative...unhurried action for half or more of the book. What that allows for is the kind of horror I most enjoy to build. There are no Big Scary Monsters or weird, spooky Happenings...there are people, not ruled by logic, being unpredictable and unnervingly cruel; there are the twins at the heart of the tale learning about and deploying their own difference as defense against ugly human greed. The consequences of that ugly human greed are what ultimately drive them, in despairing desperation, to run from their lives.

Ironically they run into their lives, their purpose, by doing this. Their place, their home, their haven. Like all havens, though, there are shadows. These shadows menace everyone in their found family. Eleanor can't really settle in among the freaks, feels herself different even among the different; Bolt has found his place, made his home, aligned with these freakshow folk to stand against the uneasy-making shadow of...whatever. It is always hard to see someone who's been part of you since you've had memories move away from your perspective, so Eleanor's struggles felt real and immediate to me, even while Bolt's sinking-in to the seductive group embrace we call "family" made all the sense in the world. He can finally feel that someone has his six.

The ending scenes of this book resolve the tensions that need resolution, while never being unfaithful to the creeping dread, the human-driven horror (with violence as its salt and pepper) that pervades the read. "Uncle" Charlie is just not going away with all he represents in the twins' lives (and the world at large they must navigate as Others); the release from threat dissipates some tension, but the World is still there...for me this was more the strange and spooky Carnivàle than the broader, flatter American Horror Story.

I found the author's note particularly enjoyable to read. Author Chaon delves a bit into some details of the inspirations for his story. It's a pleasure to have because I was thinking as I read the tale, "is this...did he...am I seeing...?" a lot. It ended up taking me from "this is a mixtape" to "how wonderful to have a creative mind that's inspired by so much."

I can't fill out that fifth star because I felt "Uncle" Charlie was, ironically enough, underplayed. His villainy was so thoroughgoing, ham it up even more, add a po-mo touch of self-aware baroque Javert-ness. As it is, he takes a lot of emotional real estate up with rather a flat affect.

Also either make the book a little longer (my choice) or move up the twins' running away sooner. A little too unbalanced; therefore feels rushed in that last third. But folks, this pleasure of a read very much deserves a shot at your TBR for #Deathtober!

THE PRESIDENT'S WIFE, historical fiction about very interesting relationship that helped change the Constitution & world history

THE PRESIDENT'S WIFE
TRACEY ENERSON WOOD
Sourcebooks Landmark (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$27.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The incredible story of the First Lady who clandestinely assumed the presidency

Socialite Edith Bolling has been in no hurry to find a new husband since she was widowed, preferring to fill her days with good friends and travel. But the enchanting courting of President Woodrow Wilson wins Edith over and she becomes the First Lady of the United States. The position is uncomfortable for the fiercely independent Edith, but she's determined to rise to the challenges of her new marriage—from the bloodthirsty press to the shadows of the first World War.

Warming to her new role, Edith is soon indispensable to her husband's presidency. She replaces the staff that Woodrow finds distracting, and discusses policy with him daily. Throughout the war, she encrypts top- secret messages and despite lacking formal education becomes an important adviser. When peace talks begin in Europe, she attends at Woodrow's side. But just as the critical fight to ratify the treaty to end the war and create a League of Nations in order to prevent another, Woodrow's always-delicate health takes a dramatic turn for the worse. In her determination to preserve both his progress and his reputation, Edith all but assumes the presidency herself.

Now, Edith must contend with the demands of a tumultuous country, the secrets of Woodrow's true condition, and the potentially devastating consequences of her failure. At once sweeping and intimate, The President's Wife is an astonishing portrait of a courageous First Lady and the sacrifices she made to protect her husband and her country at all costs.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Charming historical fiction about two people of riper years whose love for each other is tested, re-tested, and ultimately short-lived due to death.

So many things about Woodrow Wilson are awful to me. A racist, an ivory-tower academic without the track record to be the strong-arming law-ramming president thr first World War demanded; but most of all the man who gave away the keys to the economy to the banksters of Jekyll Island's cabal in 1913, thus dooming us to cycles of boom and bust that would only get worse every time the banksters clawed more money from our pockets to feed their greed and gambling addiction.

*ahem*

That not being what this book's about, let me tell you about it, not him.

First of all, it's a novel about two older people whose lives are mostly behind them finding comfort and companionship at the end. That one of them is the president of the US is, in a strange way, tangential to their story. They had a true connection to each other as people, as a man and a woman left alone by the deaths of their spouses. Author Wood gives us the sense that, had they met without this central fact being present, they likely would've had an affair because they were so simpatico. The way their relationship played out, so very publicly, and at such high volume, meant that the end of the affair was inevitably going to be marriage...nothing less would assuage the "moral standards" of the day. Edith Bolling was, thank goodness, a practical person, aware of the world around her and its demands; also to be praised is her full belief in Wilson's political and social progressivism (as far as it went, anyway), so her voice was added to his, not in conflict with it in the battles he was waging.

The Great War, as World War One was called at the time, was only one item on Wilson's plate and isn't the major focus of the book. More weight is given to the all-important enfranchisement of women. This is the one unqualified success of Wilson's presidency. Edith Bolling Wilson was influential on the president's support for this amendment to the Constitution.

Again, more important than the history lesson of the book is the close relationship between these two people. The background of their lives together was always public, and the work they did together was consequential to this very day. But they themselves, as people, are Author Wood's focus. She does not present them as superhuman archetypes. Thy are believable characters, strong people with powerful convictions, who found each other in the last act of the play that is a human's life. Their needs and their interests matched so well that it feels, to this elderly reader, as though they each found the satisfaction of an entire lifetime's search for their best partner.

It's a fine story, about interesting people, and it's told well. Enjoy it soon.

A POSITION IN PARIS, romantic historical novel with gay leads

A POSITION IN PARIS
MEGAN REDDAWAY
Kindle original
$2.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The (Self-)Publisher Says: Paris, 1919. World War One is over, and wounded hero James Clarynton is struggling to face life without one leg, one eye, and the devilish good looks he had before the conflict. Now he must pay for affection, and it leaves him bitter. He’s filling the time by writing a book—but it’s the young man who comes to type it who really intrigues him.

Edmund Vaughan can’t turn down the chance to be secretary to the wealthy James Clarynton. He’s been out of work since the armistice, and his mother and brother depend on him. But he has secrets to hide, and the last thing he wants is an employer who keeps asking questions.

As they work together, their respect for each other grows, along with something deeper. But tragedy threatens, and shadows from the past confront them at every turn. They must open their hearts and trust each other if they are to break down the barriers that separate them.

I RECEIVED A REVIEW COPY FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: It distresses me a bit that this is marketed as a gay romance. The genre's stalwart legions of readers are going to come away disappointed because this is an historical novel, not a romance. The men at the center of the tale fall in love and overcome absurdly bad communication exacerbated by pride and fear. That's not enough to be called a "gay romance" in today's marketplace. There's zero on-page sex. None. Zip zero rien nada. So buyer beware.

What you will receive for your dollars is a well-written and historically accurate vision of post-World-War-One Paris. What you will experience, via the journal entries of the two men whose love story this is, is a wonderful and tender story of falling in love and finding your soul mate. In a time when that was both forbidden and fraught with peril, that is a whole lot to find.

The French have always had a more-or-less indifferent response to gay male love. Tuts and frowns and lack of inclusion are a far cry from the English-influenced countries' thundering condemnatory revilement, torture, and murder. These English folk, arrived in an oasis of rational thought, bloom as far as they'll allow themselves to bloom. James, our war hero, is wealthy and has inherited still more of the world's goods with the death of his gay great-uncle. An apartment, a carriage, a lifestyle of enviable luxury; younger and poorer Edmund has less, needs more, and hides a genuinely tragic stain on his family's character from his war-hero employer.

Needless to say, the entire fakakta mess could be solved if the men would ask direct questions and answer them truthfully, but then again that's the entire problem in the human world. Politics is the art of obfuscating the essential simplicity of human troubles so a few can steal money and value from a lot. But I digress.

James's personality, unsurprisingly, is dominant and take-charge. Edmund is more retiring yet more stubborn and prideful than James is accustomed to dealing with as an aristocrat and an officer. Edmund's idiotic pride presents an enormous obstacle to James, smitten and eager to help his beloved. Quite unsurprisingly, James isn't particularly aware of his overbearing and domineering personality's effect on lower-class, shy Edmund. While it is true that Edmund's idiot pride is the major stumbling block to their communication, James's lack of experience with equality in his relationships needs addressing as well.

These problems being universal among human beings, they're deeply relatable to relationship fiction readers. I fear that placing two men at the center of a relationship fiction, the author won't find those readers; I've already mentioned the issue with the romance readers' expectations. So the resolution to the tale, one that involves an astonishing and moving act of bravery on James's part, is perfectly designed to appeal to an audience I fear will not notice the book.

There is so much to love in the story of two proud, scared, stubborn hearts coming to love each other, to care for and about each other, to form a solid and (one expects) enduring partnership, that I wish I could open your eyes to the reality of the tale's market position. Don't go in expecting A Romance. Go in expecting Romantic Relationship Fiction a la Georgette Heyer or Margery Sharp. Your expectations will be met.

IVY, The Life of I. Compton-Burnett is a dry dry dry book

IVY: THE LIFE OF I. COMPTON-BURNETT
HILARY SPURLING
Columbia University Press
$22.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 2* of five

The Publisher Says: It is a real cause for celebration when the best and most subtle literary biography of our time comes back into print, and in a single volume instead of the original two. What Hilary Spurling does, in a beautifully-written book, is to relate the life of Ivy Compton-Burnett intimately to the work and show in fascinating details, and with wonderful perception, how her subjects characters mirror aspects of her own nature. The book sends one back to read or re-read the novels - unfashionable, toweringly original tragic-comedies - the most individual novels, it may be, of our time.

My Review: Why would I, a charter member of the “Eradicate Ivy Compton-Burnett” Society, have and read this book? It all started as a joke.

I once lived with someone whose dislike of Icky Crumpet-Burnoose matched or exceed my own. What better way to cause her pain than to cause her to see Icky's malevolent mug on her nightstand, with a note attached: “For relief of insomnia”?

Gratifying shrieks of outrage and stomps of fury from her bedroom assured me of the success of my evil plot. Subsequent hurling of this massive artifact at me (no mean feat! Must weigh 5lbs!) let me know that my humor was properly received and appreciated.

So why not just return the damned thing to the liberry and call it good, a prank well done? I got curious. So many bad things happen when I get curious that you'd think I'd've learned not to scratch that bump. Ha.

Turns out that Icky had a more interesting life than any portrayed in her fiction! (Not that this is a difficult feat.) The oldest child of a Victorian homeopath's second family, she was a bossy, albeit cheerful and fun older sister to her family, gradually losing all semblance of humor and kindness as her extremely weird mother made ever-increasing demands on her to run the family. Her eventual position as head of household was a disaster for her personally, resulting in the suicides of her two youngest sisters and her (far too) belovèd brother's alienation from her by marriage to a woman she didn't seem to like a whole lot. He then dies in WWI, and she drifts personally and professionally for a good long time. She has no money worries, so it's only on the emotional side that this matters.

So then she meets an older woman, more established than she as an independent professional writer and historian of furniture, called Margaret Jourdain. Their love affair lasted some 35 years, spent living together and traveling together and going to parties together. And, according to Spurling, not having sex. They said they didn't, protests Spurling! And yet, in other instances, the mere saying of something is determined by Spurling to be simple misdirection, Icky saying something to deflect or distract someone from learning details she didn't want to give. Other people said they weren't, corroborates Spurling! And yet, in other instances, eyewitness reports are discounted because the people involved were prejudiced or insufficiently informed or what-have-you.

Now, I don't belong to the school of readers who want salacious details of characters's lives, even subjects of biographies. I don't need to know what others do in their bedrooms, any others, unless in some way it expands my knowledge and appreciation of a character. And I am actively revolted by the idea of lesbian sex, unlike most males; I outgrew my juvenile need for female genitalia a long time ago and would prefer not to be reminded of them at all, thank you. I am also not one of those gay people who seeks spurious validation in claiming people from earlier times as members of the gay community before such an identity, let alone community, existed.

But if Ivy and Margaret weren't big ol' dykes, who on this earth is? And why should we for a moment believe that they never so much as kissed? Women, contrary to what most men and their female converts seem to think, have intense erotic urges that (in my experience, at least) they very very very badly want to satisfy. Most men are inept at doing so, sadly, so the myth goes on that these urges are nonexistent. Spurling does these women, raised in a homophobic and reticent culture, a disservice by denying them (posthumously) even a suggestion of a sex life. I think it's bosh, and I think it's dishonest, and Spurling and her ilk should be ashamed that their minds can't encompass the idea that two women in love could find satisfaction and pleasure in each others's bodies without wanting to make it a public display or even discuss it with others. There are anecdotes of Icky saying she'd never made love, and then going on to have quite thoroughly informed and detailed conversations with married women about sex and desire. This, says Icky's biographer, is a testament to the authoress's imaginitve powers.

Oh for God's sweet sake! Grow up, woman, and realize she wasn't that imaginitive!! NO ONE IS. You can't, even in today's world of instant and astoundingly diverse gratification, know what desire and its satisfactions are about until you've been there! Really now.

But oddly enough, I was interested enough in this life to keep reading about this writer whose tiny talents I disparage with vim and vigor at every opportunity. I wouldn't recommend it to any but her most ardent dupes, I mean fans, because it's simply too long to be useful to anyone only mildly curious. Spurling's style is clear, I suppose, though I can't say much more for it than that. It was no great pleasure to read, but it was a life lived on her own terms in a time and place where that was a very, very novel (!) and difficult achievement.

THE HEAVENLY TABLE, latest grit-lit tale of violent woe from Donald Ray Pollock

THE HEAVENLY TABLE
DONALD RAY POLLOCK
Doubleday & Co. (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$13.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From Donald Ray Pollock, author of the highly acclaimed The Devil All the Time and Knockemstiff, comes a dark, gritty, electrifying (and, disturbingly, weirdly funny) new novel that will solidify his place among the best contemporary American authors.

It is 1917, in that sliver of border land that divides Georgia from Alabama. Dispossessed farmer Pearl Jewett ekes out a hardscrabble existence with his three young sons: Cane (the eldest; handsome; intelligent); Cob (short; heavy set; a bit slow); and Chimney (the youngest; thin; ill-tempered). Several hundred miles away in southern Ohio, a farmer by the name of Ellsworth Fiddler lives with his son, Eddie, and his wife, Eula. After Ellsworth is swindled out of his family’s entire fortune, his life is put on a surprising, unforgettable, and violent trajectory that will directly lead him to cross paths with the Jewetts. No good can come of it. Or can it?

In the gothic tradition of Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy with a healthy dose of cinematic violence reminiscent of Sam Peckinpah, Quentin Tarantino and the Coen Brothers, the Jewetts and the Fiddlers will find their lives colliding in increasingly dark and horrific ways, placing Donald Ray Pollock firmly in the company of the genre’s literary masters.

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME AN ARC. THANK YOU!

My Review: Pollock whipped out his ten-inch dick of the imagination and wailed on me again. Lots of n-word use, perfectly in keeping with the period but really uncomfortable to me.

What isn't uncomfortable, and this sounds weird, is the way Author Pollock puts the hurt on every-goddamned-body in this story. No one has it easy; no one catches a break; no one ever gets anything they don't pay double for. It's just like life: Poor folk pay, rich folk skate. And when the moment comes for someone to redress the imbalance, it's going to be hideously expensive to all who can least afford it.

So three bank-robbin' brothers? Two of 'em not too swift on the uptake? What's your bet, will any of 'em make it out alive? Read it and gasp.

As far back as he could remember, there hadn’t been a day when he wasn’t yearning for something he didn’t have. And that wore a man down after so many years, fighting that feeling day after day without any letup. Why couldn’t he ever be satisfied?

The fact is that there's never gonna be a day when these folks catch a break. Luckily they don't expect to...all that yearning does is beget yearning, until the day Cane (meditate upon the boy's name for a moment, appreciating the author's wicked sense of humor) rallies his newly-orphaned siblings around the notion of emulating their dime-novel hero's exploits to go whoring and bank-robbing (in that order). The truth is they get away with the bank robbing because they flat do not give a shit what happens. They were starving when they lived an "honest" life, so being in prison couldn't be any worse now could it? Food and shelter for free is fine when liberty = death.

These lads form the backbone of the book but there is a lot of meat on the carcass. Take, for example, one Bovard the closet queer military man.

Trained in classics, he had entered the military with abnormally high expectations, but unfortunately, the men he had encountered so far were a far cry from the muscle-bound sackers of Troy or the disciplined defenders of Sparta that he had been infatuated with since the age of twelve. Still, even though the draftees had been a sore disappointment, both physically and mentally, he had quickly learned to deal with them. It was simply a matter of lowering one's standards to fit the circumstances. After all, how could one expect any of these poor, awkward, illiterate brutes to have even heard of Cicero or Tacitus when at least half of them had difficulty comprehending a simple order? In just a matter of days, he went from trying to form a Latin reading club to thinking that a lowly private who still had most of his teeth and could name the presidents was practically a paragon of good breeding and sophistication.

Just awful to imagine such potential going to waste...and waste is absolutely what's going to happen to (almost) everyone in this violent, terribly nihilistic book. Yes, there are survivors; no, they aren't unscathed; and one questions how long the survival will last when the fact is that there's a pandemic on its way! How many malnourished people survived the Spanish Influenza of 1918-1919?

That's the hell of it all...as these seekers keep moving and searching, as they do the best they can (and sometimes that is just flat HORRIBLE and vile), the outside world in its utter indifference to them, to their hopes and dreams, is winding up for another punch in the gut. The closest read I can think of to this one, for me at least, is The Sisters Brothers which I wasn't at all fond of. What failed me there was what succeeds so well here: Author Pollock is a superb wordsmith and a talented tale-spinner. This redemptionless and violent world is of a piece with his other creations; the volume's been turned up to eleven, though.

If you've read Knockemstiff and/or The Devil All the Time, you already know what Author Pollock can do; now he's gon na show you what he's been holding in reserve for when he's trying to go proper bleak.

And yeah...he does exactly that. Totally worth the squirms and the winces for the way he pulls off a dénouement so condign you'll forget how gross the trip actually was.

A SCARLET PANSY, 84-year-old call for tolerance by emulation

A SCARLET PANSY
ROBERT SCULLY
Fordham University Press
$19.95 paper, available now

Rating: 4 quizzical stars of five

The Publisher Says: First published in 1932, A Scarlet Pansy is an extraordinarily vivid and richly textured depiction of American queer life in the early twentieth century, tracing the coming of age of androgynous Fay Etrange.

Born in small-town Pennsylvania and struggling with her difference, Fay eventually accepts her gender and sexual nonconformity and immerses herself in the fairy subculture of New York City.

A self-proclaimed "oncer" - never tricking with same man twice - she immerses herself in the nightclubs, theatres, and street life of the city, cavorting with kindred spirits including female impersonators, streetwalkers, and hustlers as well as other fairies and connoisseurs of rough trade.

While reveling in these exploits she becomes a successful banker and later attends medical school, where she receives training in obstetrics. There she also develops her life's ambition to find a cure for gonorrhea, a disease supposedly "fastened on mankind as a penalty for enjoying love."

A Scarlet Pansy stands apart from similar fiction of its time -- as well as the ensuing decades -- by celebrating rather than pathologizing its effeminate and sexually adventurous protagonist. In this edition, republished for the first time in its original unexpurgated form, Robert J. Corber examines the way in which it flew in the face of other literature of the time in its treatment of gender expression and same-sex desire. He places the novel squarely within its social and cultural context of a century ago while taking into account the book's checkered publication history as well as the question of the novel's unknown author.

Much more than cultural artifact, A Scarlet Pansy remains a uniquely delightful and penetrating work of literature, resonating as much with present-day culture as it is illuminating of our understanding of queer history, and challenging our notions of what makes a man a woman, and vice versa.

THE PUBLISHER APPROVED MY NETGALLEY REQUEST IN EXCHANGE FOR AN HONEST REVIEW Thank you to the press and to NetGalley!

My Review: I am gobsmacked by several facts about this book: That it was *published* in 1932! and that it remains pretty much unique in literature as being told, unapologetically, from the PoV of a real flamer, a pansy, a nancy-boy...that is to say, an effeminate man. So much emphasis...so very, very much emphasis!...is placed in today's mainstreamed gay world on "passing" or being a "straight-acting" gay man! Our leaders are preaching tolerance, acceptance, inclusion, and the rank-and-file put up sex ads for "straight-acting" sex objects. What in the world does this convey except internalized homophobia? Is mainstreaming to blame for this? No. But believe you me, the disappearance of the gay ghetto, or at least its depopulation, is down to the mainstreaming efforts of the past 30 years. That makes the world a little bit *ironically quirked eyebrow* less safe for the effeminate men and the butch women in our community.

Fay Etrange would be no more welcome in a public panel on Gay Issues now than she would have been in a medical school lecture hall in the 19th century. Very much a queen, her passage through the world as presented by "Robert Scully" was a busy one, bestowing royal favors on a grateful American manhood:

This first meeting with a strange man was almost prophetic. For the rest of her life she was to meet his kind, wherever and whenever she travelled--always seeking her and the favors she could bestow.

This set-up makes sense to me, since I've never lacked for the company of "regular guys" in my own transit of gay life. It's been my design, willingly subscribed to by the parties of the second part, to educate and inform the unimaginative males of the USA of their other options. Sometimes the teachings took, sometimes not so much. But in all the attendant mishegas, I did my dead-level best not to make assumptions but let the situation teach me as much as it did him. Fay is the most unusual kind of character in non-romantic gay fiction, in that she practices this behavior as well. In a strange way it was a relief to me to have the intimate details of Fay's affairs left to the imagination. It's not that I'm squeamish, perish forbid!, but the fact that Fay isn't in first-person narration would make any detailed description of the various acts and positions feel peculiarly and unpleasantly prurient.

Fay arrives at this sort of thinking by attending to her own inner moral compass, and educating herself broadly though never at the expense of delving deeply into topics that fascinate her:

Electing to take religion as one of her college courses, she had obtained a wide knowledge of the teachings of the East. Practically all began with assumptions of infallibility, which, though unproven, the disciples then proceeded to teach as basic facts. Their leader, she found, ignored the selfish reasons which led them on and caused them to set aside reason and endeavor to inculcate blind faith. She had no faith. She could see no reason to have faith. She was happier without it. Nothing was explained ultimately; why accept puny, childish explanations?

Soul sister! I know from several deep conversations with my gay uncle, a sailor as it happens, that people aren't products of their times and stations unless they choose to be. Even in what we view as unenlightened, hag-ridden by gawd, times there were mental and even social non-conformists. The past is made up of once-living people; history is indeed (sometimes lamentably completely) his story; we're really not unique in our deepest selves as we're all human. This is always a welcome reminder for me, find it where I may.

Of course it's one thing to remember that people been people forever, that our own "unique" needs and desires are only unique in our limited experience:

The avenue seemed full of gay people these days, persons as happy as she. At intervals were stationed the mounted traffic police. Their splendid figures, their neat, well-fitting uniforms, their highly polished puttees protecting perfectly formed legs, the thigh outlined by pressure against the horse's side, all combined to make a picture which she found irresistibly appealing. She found herself looking for the mounted police. She formed preferences for one or the other. She thought of the Aztecs with their idea that men astride of horses were some kind of god,and she smiled to think that her poetic sense was interpreting these horsemen in the same light. She liked especially to view the officers from the back, the torso, the carriage, the outline of the leg all accentuated.

...hmmm? What was that? Oh sorry, I went to mental Bermuda for a moment there. Yes, well, do you need any further evidence that we're all sisters under the skin? Some details tweaked, or twerked, and this statement of admiring desire fits in the mind of any one of us bald bonobos. The slightly namby-pamby modern mantra "love is love" is a short and punchy reminder that we're all sexual creatures. Desire, love, need, any and all of these things, are organizing principles in our own little lives, and we're well advised to protect others in their exercise of them if we wish to be protected in our turn. I think this statement would be whole-heartedly seconded by Fay Letrange, and the pseudonymous "Robert Scully" who created her.

With this realization comes a further revelation of the commonality of human experience, that of the honest and fearless and searching moral inventory. Know yourself as you really are, not as you and others would like you to be (or insist that you are):

"Perhaps it's natural to them; what is natural to them may not be natural to another. Imagine them married. What would their offspring be? Probably even more erratic. Perhaps they are fulfilling their destiny by not marrying. Did you ever consider that? I often think that people who do not wish to have children should not be criticized, for brobably there is some basic instinct which prompts them not to be parents. Perhaps they are really not fit to be parents."

Amen! That this conversation was put into the mouth of a person created by a Victorian writer, and set in the very earliest years of the twentieth century, was a small shock of surprised recognition to me. I've always kicked hard against the Cult of the Mother, the ascription to all females, ladies, womyn, uterus-havers of an innate and all-powerful desire to give birth to and nurture young. I applaud those with the self-knowledge to say "no, thanks" and the strength to stick to it. It isn't easy to swim against the tide, which makes most of us leery of doing it. How much more difficult, we think, it must have been for those poor benighted children who came before us! Stuff and nonsense. Reading this transgressive book from the past is listening to a voice shouting reason and reasonability. That it feels as transgressive today as it would have 84 years ago is more a statement of human nature's irreducible commonness throughout history: Bow to the Vox Populi, speak only the Norma Loquendi, or be marked out as Strange. But don't kid yourself that it was harder, easier, whatever then or now.

"You are sure you mean bliss?"

"Yes, an island or some place where we could all live or go to easily whenever we pleased and do all the things we wish to do without thought of the narrow-mindedness of others."

"You are asking too much. Oh, for the Isle of Crete! You are wishing a return to the good old Pagai times when all honor was paid even to prostitutes."

"No, not asking too much, just asking for a natural morality, a thing which varies with each bird, beast, and human and for which due allowance is not made in lawmaking."

We all long for Paradise. Some are willing to allow others into it with them. I like those of the latter opinion the best of all.

It seems as if the world considers a climate of tolerance to be asking too much these days as well as in those days. I don't need to give examples of events springing from the external pressure imposed by intolerance, or of the personal price paid by those subjected to it. I'm equally sure I don't need to give examples of those expressing their internal conflicts by mismatched rhetoric and inner monologue. I think this passage pretty much sums up the disconnect:

The professor would describe all sorts of aberrant types, their prominent, wild eyes, their too thick or too narrow chests or hips and their too thin or too heavy leg muscles; he would illustrate the swagger of the feminine type and the mincing short-stepped swaying gait of the masculine, the fluttering, so called; he would tell of their nocturnal amusements and occupations, and when he had finished he had so enthused his entire class that they were ready to go down town and start a laboratory course at once.

Heteronormative locker-room raillery, complete with ill-willed imitation, as medical school education. Charming. The response of the students isn't unusual, which is in and of itself unusual. Things really have changed little if this passage still speaks to the ordinary experience of the different. But then again, compared to fifty years ago, the intolerance of such a scenario is worth remarking on because it isn't simply the "oh well" resignation of the narrator but his sharp-eyed attention to the eagerness of the audience to go find some action for themselves that's a ray of hope. Soon dashed, of course, as is the way of things in an imperfect world:

"Have a sense of humor. Remember, Gawd must have his little jokes on the human species."

"I feel bitter, bitter against the half-men who make our laws. Come on, let's legislate against the tides too."

"Be practical," suggested Miss Bull-Mawgan. "The only recourse is to see that every ecclesiastical student is properly seduced, and thus liberalized. The pulpit, after all, makes the laws in this country."

I'm happy that I live in a state where marriage equality is law. I am sad to live in a world where that equality of access to the law's protections, duties, and rights is so controversial that such a protection is necessary. I can barely imagine what the gay men of 100 years ago would think of such a protection! Impossible dream! And now that it's a given in some places I wonder how it was ever not. The scary monsters are out in the open, and whaddaya know! They're the neighbors.

Not everyone is comfortable with that. The neighbors are supposed to be much like us, after all, that's why we elect to live in certain places and not others. I can see that. After all, not everyone can hold up their end in the stereotypically gay witty, dirty badinage:

"Aunty Beach-Bütsch, control yourself! I shall lend him out to friends and near relations. We are coming back in two years."

"And I shall have drunk myself to death by that time," wailed old Aunty Beach-Bütsch. "But Mason, we shall be friends to the end."

Another opportunity for Miss Savoy. "Which end? I didn't know you loved Mason so much, Aunty Beach-Bütsch!"

"Love him? I love every inch of him, from the ends of his hairs to the tips of his toenails. Why I love his very guts!"

"That's a very vulgar but adequate description of the depths of your passion, Aunty Beach-Bütsch!"

Need I mention that the female monikers are hung on males? Mason, on the other hand, is a man, and a newly married one, being bartered off by his blushing bride Marjorie, née Dike, as she is known from that moment on. It sounds like ordinary conversation to me, but the people I tried it out on were flustered and taken aback. No wonder straight people fear the gays buying the house next door! They speak Camp, and there's nothing scarier than having the neighbors speak a different language from yours, right?

But in the end, we all succumb to a common malady, that of falling in love. She's been a "oncer," a one-fuck-and-bye bye gal, since her earliest years. But that changes because the pressures of going to war, being under fire, trying to do her duty as a doctor in service of men shattered by modern munitions. It's grueling work, most often sad in its outcomes; watching a generation of men vanish before her eyes makes Fay susceptible to a sentimental attachment that she would have rejected only a short time before. Her medical studies having taken her to Berlin, her first true love is a German officer; after his tragic death in her arms, Fay falls head over heels for a soldier boy on his way to the front in France's trenches.

His body was sweet and clean smelling. As she finished [massaging his dislocated shoulder], Fay bent and gently kissed him on the neck, that part where the skin is so soft abd sensitive, midway between the angle of the jaw and the hair line at the back of the neck. He opened his eyes, startled, then smiled as he murmured, "Oh! It's you. That's all right." He folded his arms about her, bringing her head close to his, then like a contented child sank into a deep sleep. His clean body odor gave her keenest delight. She hesitated to attempt to alter their relationship, and possibly lose him entirely. He had accepted her as a pal, that she would be.

Some variation on this sentiment is familiar to everyone who is an adult. It's amazing to me that anyone could grudge this simple rapture to another soul. Because that's what homophobia is, denial of the commonality of the experience of love, loving, cherishing someone for their inner being while reveling in the sensory pleasures of their outer being. How is that a good thing in anyone's mind? Shouldn't we all be promoting anything, anything at all, that can stitch us tighter into the social contract of being alive and a player in the world's arena?

Here's an eighty-four-year-old reminder that this should indeed be our goal. How amazing to find such validation for a "modern" world-view here. It's also a bit sad to need this reminder in the twenty-first century. We are all as Heaven made us, the Confucian quip goes. Let's aspire to be that commonsensical in our dealings with the Others who make up our entire world.

THE BLASPHEMER, WWI meets plane crash meets philosophical atheism...only fun!

THE BLASPHEMER
NIGEL FARNDALE
Random House
$6.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: On its way to the Galapagos Islands, a light aircraft ditches into the sea. As the water floods through the cabin, zoologist Daniel Kennedy faces an impossible choice - should he save himself, or Nancy, the woman he loves?

In a parallel narrative, it is 1917 and Daniel's great grandfather Andrew is preparing to go over the top at Passchendaele. He, too, will have his courage tested, and must live with the moral consequences of his actions.

Back in London, the atheistic Daniel is wrestling with something his 'cold philosophy' cannot explain - something unearthly he thought he saw while swimming for help in the Pacific. But before he can make sense of it, the past must collapse into the present, and both he and Andrew must prove themselves capable of altruism, and deserving of forgiveness.

The Blasphemer is a story about conditional love, cowardice and the possibility of redemption - and what happens to a man of science when forced to question his certainties. It is a novel of rare depth, empathy and ambition that sweeps from the trenches of the First World War to the terrorist-besieged streets of London today: a novel that will speak to the head as well as the heart of any reader.

My Review: Of the three books in here, I like the First World War narrative the best, followed by the London story of academic backbiting and relationship angst, and least of the three the underdeveloped metaphysical events connecting those two. One character says in the course of stitching the stories together that Darwin described angels as creations of Man, which "...have been described as the most beautiful conceit in mortal wit, and I would go along with that."

And that, me hearties, is that.

Daniel, our modern main character, sees his great-grandfather Andrew as he swims to safety. The World War One soldier was a deserter, which is a deeply shocking and shaming thing in the context of the day. Daniel's decision to save himself and not his pill of a baby-mama struck me as most tolerant of him, since I'd've taken the chance to shove her deep into the wreckage so as to be shut of the nightmare carping whinging misery-guts once and for all.

What unites these men across the generations is their cowardly self-preservation, a trait that ultimately lets each create a future for himself and for unknown descendants. It's hard to fault the men. It's hard for them to forgive themselves. It's an interesting counterpoint that Farnsdale sets up: Andrew saves himself from mass insanity and all-but-inevitable senseless death, and Daniel saves his own hide from an accident that will imperil few. Are either of the men "correct" or "justified" in their actions/inactions?

I'm still thinking about them a year after reading the book for the second time. That's a damn good sign.

But I can't go over 3.5 stars of five. The messiness of the story lines is just too egregious for me to go up, and the inventiveness and intriguing premise are too involving for me to go down. It felt to me like the subplot of Daniel's dying father needed to be pruned out, and the characters of Hamsi the teacher and the twirling-mustachioed villain Wetherby were so broadly drawn as to be uninteresting. So while not unflawed, the book was a good, solid read with interesting philosophical points jabbing the soft, lazy parts of one's novel-reading brain.

ROOSEVELT'S BEAST, damn near perfect father-and-son novel

ROOSEVELT'S BEAST
LOUIS BAYARD
St. Martin's Griffin
$22.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: 1914. Brazil’s Rio da Dúvida, the River of Doubt. Plagued by hunger and suffering the lingering effects of malaria, Theodore Roosevelt, his son Kermit, and the other members of the now-ravaged Roosevelt-Rondon scientific expedition are traveling deeper and deeper into the jungle. When Kermit and Teddy are kidnapped by a never-before-seen Amazonian tribe, the great hunters are asked one thing in exchange for their freedom: find and kill a beast that leaves no tracks and that no member of the tribe has ever seen. But what are the origins of this beast, and how do they escape its brutal wrath?

Roosevelt's Beast is a story of the impossible things that become possible when civilization is miles away, when the mind plays tricks on itself, and when old family secrets refuse to stay buried. With his characteristically rich storytelling and a touch of old-fashioned horror, the bestselling and critically acclaimed Louis Bayard turns the story of the well-known Roosevelt-Rondon expedition on its head and dares to ask: Are the beasts among us more frightening than the beasts within?

I RECEIVED THIS BOOK FROM THE PUBLISHER AS PART OF LIBRARY THING'S EARLY REVIEWERS PROGRAM

My Review: Listen to this:

After all these years, his best friend is malaria.
Even on the brink of an Alaska summer, it comes calling: a bone-deep chill one night, a ministry of sweat the next. Calling him back to old battles.

And we're off, down the River of Doubt with Kermit Roosevelt and his famous father (of whom Kermit's eldest half-sister, Alice, said, "Father wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral") and somebody scientific who, frankly, interested me not at all.

Kermit tells us about this factual trip in moderate detail, enough to make the facts of the journey come across as lived, not reported. That's a frequent issue I have with historical fiction, the author's telling of the tale sounds like a highly embellished report and not a novel. Enough is here to make the atmosphere come humidly to life; not so much as to feel ponderous. Here, like this, listen:

Here was the thing about traveling down an uncharted river: You could only say how long you'd been traveling; you could never say how long it would be.

It's the precise sort of thing I'd expect the clever son of an overwhelmingly larger-than-life father to say, to focus on distances and travels and quotidian concerns because his giant of a father (Roosevelt was maybe 5'8" in body but 12'12" in spirit) has sucked up the glory-hounding until he's simply got nothing else to think about.

And then on an overnight stop, Kermit and TR are kidnapped by a previously uncontacted native group (I do so loathe the locution "undiscovered tribe"—and who, might one inquire, determined that being contacted was being discovered, like their lives before Europeans showed up weren't real?). Their freedom can only be bought by ridding these people of their monster, a killer of Grendel-ish horrific-ness. Two days the men seek and revoltingly find the Beast's results, and only when they are living out a nightmare of misery and a cleansing, purifying agony of memory and rage do they really encounter the Beast...within, as always.

Both are shattered and neither is ever the same after this trip. (Factual again, after the invented Beast interlude.) Kermit succumbs slowly to the depression and addiction that killed his paternal uncle, and TR himself gives up, defeated for the only time in his life...and by himself, as in the end are we all. TR can't face the even the notion that anyone will ever so much as hear a whisper of his ordeal (oh, and Kermit's, but you know whose rep is foremost on TR's mind):

“You are asking us to lie, Colonel?"
"I am asking you to omit. Surely, amidst the...the infinite gradations of human venality, that particular sin ranks low." The old man kneaded the folds of his throat. "What happened out there belongs out there. The jungle has it; let the jungle keep it...”

A novel of fathers and sons, of myths and monsters, and of identity and fate. It's written in Bayard's accustomed voluptuous prose, and it's got the usual peaks and valley in plotting. I myownself wish that the Beast had been nailed down, shown to be either real or a projection of mass psychosis or a deeply experienced malaria dream. Nonetheless, I'm sure many will find this blurring of borders exactly to their taste, and even those among us for whom that's not the draw to the story needn't let it cause us too much pain. Simply decide for yourself what interpretation you want to put on it, and do so. Bayard's story will support it.

And that's about the best compliment I can give a writer, that one there.

TransAtlantic, Colum McCann's polyphonic piece of Irish Abolitionism meets Aeronautical Achievement meets the End of the Troubles

TRANSATLANTIC
COLUM MCCANN
Random House
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.85* of five

The Publisher Says: National Book Award-winning novelist Colum McCann delivers his most ambitious and beautiful novel yet, tying together a series of narratives that span 150 years and two continents in an outstanding act of literary bravura.

In 1845 a black American slave lands in Ireland to champion ideas of democracy and freedom, only to find a famine unfurling at his feet. In 1919, two brave young airmen emerge from the carnage of World War One to pilot the very first transatlantic flight from Newfoundland to the west of Ireland. And in 1998 an American senator criss-crosses the ocean in search of a lasting Irish peace. Bearing witness to these history-making moments of Frederick Douglass, John Alcock and "Teddy" Brown, and George Mitchell, and braiding the story together into one epic tale, are four generations of women from a matriarchal clan, beginning with Irish housemaid Lily Duggan. In this story of dark and light, men and women, history and past, fiction and fact, National Book Award-winning novelist Colum McCann delivers a tour de force that is his most spectacular achievement to date.

My Review: This is an ambitious book indeed. McCann refines storytelling techniques he used in Let the Great World Spin, and layers in more complexity than he created in that National Book Award-winner. For that reason alone, I'd give him high marks.

But as a work of social commentary on Ireland, on its colonial past and its enraged present, the book comes alive. Without ever leaving his focus on the personal lives of people, he limns the results of the struggle of his homeland to be its ownself. Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, is in Ireland to raise money for Abolition in the USA. Isn't that a nice cause for turn-about, with the IRA raising money in the USA for its militancy?

Webb took him out onto the verandah by the elbow and said: But Frederick, you cannot bite the hand that feeds.

The stars collandered the Wexford night. He knew Webb was right. There would always be an alignment. There were so many sides to every horizon. He could only choose one. No single mind could hold it all at once. Truth, justice, reality, contradiction. Misunderstandings could arise. He had one cause only. He must cleave to it.

He paced the verandah. A cold wind whipped off the water.

The water, the recurring use of the water, the wind off the water, being in the water, all of it the Atlantic, all of it marking transformation and immersion in the moment of transformation for each character...that's lovely.

The toughness and surivorhood of Ireland's women is a major part of the story. So is the deep-seated need of the Irish to Be Irish.

She stood at the window. It was her one hundred twenty-eighth day of watching men die. They came down the road in wagons pulled by horses. She had never seen such a bath of killing before. The wheels screeched. The line of wagons stretched down the path, into the trees. The trees themselves stretched off into the war.

She came down the stairs, through the open doors, into the wide heat...The men had exhausted their shouts. They were left with small whimperings, tiny gasps of pain...One soldier wore sergeant's stripes on his sleeve, and a gold harp stitched on his lapel. An Irishman. She had tended to so many of them.

So is the quixotic character of men, pushing boundaries that separate them (in their minds) from Glory. (The transAtlantic flight of the title...so very male in its pointless bravado, and in its gauntlet-flinging results of commonplace transAtlantic air travel.)

It was that time of the century when the idea of a gentleman had almost become a myth. The Great War had concussed the world. The unbearable news of sixteen million deaths rolled off the great metal drums of the newspapers. Europe was a crucible of bones.

That's plain old-fashioned beautiful phrase-making.

But in the end, the story large and small is about the strength of women to carry on. The struggles of men against the futility of their existence, a mere accident of evolution's need to stir the pot to keep the soup of life boiling merrily instead of burning irretrievably, are as ever and as always propped up, supported, allowed to exist, by women, evolution's one essential ingredient, carriers of whatever life the planet holds and makers of whatever future the men leave alone in their ceaseless tinkering.

The tap of his cane on the floor. The clank of the water pipes. She is wary of making too much of a fuss. Doesn't want to embarrass him, but he's certainly slowing up these weathers. What she dreads is a thump on the floor, or a falling against the banisters, or worse still a tumble down the stairs. She climbs the stairs before {he} emerges from the bathroom. A quick wrench of worry when there is no sound, but he emerges with a slightly bewildered look on his face. He has left a little shaving foam on the side of his chin, and his shirt is haphazardly buttoned.

...The ancient days of the Grand Opera House, the Hippodrome, the Curzon, the Albert Memorial Clock. The two of them out tripping the light fantastic. So young then. The smell of his tweeds. The Turkish tobacco he used to favor. The charity balls in Belfast, her gown rustling on the steps, {her husband} beside her, bow-tied, brilliantined, tipsy.

Worry for the present...nostalgia for the past...awareness of the short horizon of the future. She will bear it all. He will be borne to his bourn-side bier on the shoulders of this woman.

And the wonder of it is...it goes on.