This book just does not measure up, despite its Pulitzer Prize,
to this author’s Lark
and Termite and Quiet
Dell, both of which I loved.
The two timelines, 1864 and 1874, are very well delineated, but the
characters are somewhat one-dimensional—either all good or all evil. It takes
place in West Virginia and opens with an 1874 section in which “Papa,” whose
true colors will be revealed later, is delivering Eliza and her daughter
ConaLee to a plush mental health asylum.
He instructs them to use false names and not reveal their
mother/daughter relationship. When we revert to ten years earlier, we find that
Eliza’s beloved husband has left his family to become a sharpshooter in the
Union army. Their surrogate caretaker
will be Dearbhla, their “granny neighbor,” who raised Eliza’s husband and, to
some degree, Eliza herself. I liked the
plot, but, honestly, this book put me to sleep, as the plot seems secondary to
all the wordy descriptions and characters whose purpose is unclear,
particularly in the asylum. The most glaring example is a boy named Weed who
wanders the grounds and pops up in scene after scene. However, I could not
decipher what he contributed to the storyline.
Maybe he, the cook, another inmate and a few employees are meant to add
color to the ambience of the asylum, but they are just not that colorful. ConaLee, Eliza, a doctor, a raging inmate,
and, of course, the night watch, all have important roles, but the rest of the
asylum characters occupy way too many pages whose objective seems to be to
extend the length of the book. Does a
novel need to be a minimum length to win the Pulitzer for fiction? Also, there is a bit of magical realism that
is used to glue some events together.
Surely an author of this caliber could have come up with a better device.