Recent Reviews
Unravelling by Elizabeth Graver
Elizabeth Graver’s 1977 novel, Unravelling, is intense, raw, sensual, and psychologically astute. Set in the 1820’s in rural New Hampshire, this book is one of the best coming-of-age stories I have read. Graver penetrates the complex inner lives of her characters and imbues them with words and deeds that impart insight and inspire empathy.
Aimee Slater, an older woman, narrates the novel. She tells a mesmerizing tale of how she came to live in a hunting shack on the edge of her parents’ property with limited family contact and minimal social interaction.
As a young girl Aimee lives and works on her family’s farm. Though her family experiences many hardships, Aimee’s relationship with her parents and siblings is positive. Aimee is perceptive, precocious, intuitive, and intelligent. But when she moves into adolescence and begins to have her own opinions, Aimee’s mother withholds her love and her father harshens his tone. Aimee begins to observe the various ways people navigate their feelings. She wonder about her mother’s relationship with her father, “What did she know of the man she lived with? Was he a gentle man with sudden, rare spinnings into rage, or an angry man who mostly held himself in check?”
Aimee and her brother Jeremiah are close in age and spend a lot of time together. As they begin adolescence, the siblings have a sexual encounter in the hayloft of their family’s barn. It is consensual, childlike, brief, and singular. Shame and embarrassment infiltrate their lives and they are never quite the same. In a different era, they might have gone to therapy or talked with a religious figure, but confusion corrodes their relationship. For relief, Aimee decides to leave the farm to work in the mills of Massachusetts. Without understanding Aimee’s motivations, her parents feel rejected and emotionally turn away.
Many tragedies befall Aimee and at age 17 she copes as best she can. She works hard in the mills and lives in a boarding house in Lowell. When she becomes pregnant, Aimee has no one but her family. Instead of sending love and support, her mother sends her a letter filled with judgment and wrath. The letter ends, “Do Not Come Home.” Rather than provide unconditional love, Aimee’s mother’s provincialism and religious superstitions determine her actions. After giving birth, Aimee returns to New Hampshire and does not lie or apologize. And like Hester Pryne in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Aimee is shunned. Yet, as the decades pass, she creates her own little family with a disabled man from the town and a traumatized girl named Plumey. Reading about the unraveling of Aimee’s life haunts me. Yet Aimee’s accumulated insight and compassion over the years allow her to understand herself and attempt to reconcile with her elderly mother. As Aimee says of Plumey, “It is the deepest mystery what goes on inside anybody’s head.” Elizabeth Graver succeeds in delving into her characters’ heads and writing a novel filled with emotional and psychological nuance and poignancy.
The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
Kristin Hannah’s enthralling novel The Nightingale explores the impact of the German occupation of France in WWII on the lives of two sisters, Vianne and Isabelle Rossignol. The book opens with Vianne, now an elderly woman living in Oregon, viewing artifacts from her life during WWII, a life that she never shared with her surgeon son because it would cause them both grief and despair.
Hannah then transports the reader to 1939 and the story of how each sister responded to the escalating tensions in France. Vianne, the older sister, struggles with her rambunctious, bold, and brash younger sister who suffers from grief over their mother’s death and the pain of their father’s abandonment. Hannah fully captures the complexity of the sisters’ relationship. As the Nazis begin their occupation of France each sister responds to the ensuing horror differently, but both heroically. Though Vianne believes her sister leaves their small village in the Loire Valley to pursue a love affair, Isabelle actually joins the Resistance and smuggles downed pilots from France over the Pyrenees into Spain. Isabelle’s code name is The Nightingale.
Vianne’s courage is just as compelling. While Vianne’s husband is off fighting the Germans in Russia, Vianne wrestles with the agonizing choice of whether to abandon the family farmhouse when the local Nazi commandant takes over a room in her home. She decides to stay in this sadistic situation. When the Jews in the village are being rounded up, her best friend Rachel begs Vianne to save her son Ari. Vianne does so at great risk and raises Ari as her own. Saving Ari gives Vianne the courage to participate in a clandestine effort to help other Jewish children escape extermination.
The novel depicts the methodical and incremental cruelty enacted by the Nazis in French towns. Jewish citizens are forced to accept one humiliating edict after another, each time hoping that that it will be the last. Initially, Jews are only able to stand in the food lines after all the non-Jews. Then they are prohibited from working certain jobs and, before long, all Jews in Vianne’s village have been rounded up and put on trains to the concentration camps. Though some villagers attempt to defend their Jewish neighbors, the Nazi’s brutality affects every person. It is a horror show.
The end of the novel is quite satisfying as Vianne does get her wish. I won’t reveal the specifics, but Vianne’s son finally learns about his mother’s prior life. She says, “I have spent a lifetime running from it, trying to forget, but now I see what a waste that it was.” Kristin Hannah's ambitious story explores family dynamics, the horrors of the Holocaust, the brutality of the Nazi occupation, the bravery of some people and the cowardice of others, the important and often-unacknowledged role of women in wartime, and the way extraordinary circumstances reveal a person’s moral character. As Vianne states at the end of the book, “If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: in love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.”
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Colson Whitehead’s novel, The Underground Railroad, captures the horror of slavery. The writing is exquisite and complex while the plot is both straightforward and sprinkled with magical realism. Cora, a young woman, lives on a cotton plantation in Georgia with an overseer as cruel as Simon Legree. Cora escapes with a fellow slave named Caesar to catch a train heading north on the Underground Railroad. In Whitehead’s telling, Cora boards an actual locomotive running beneath the ground. The novel follows Cora as she stops in different states, each with a different approach to dominating and exploiting African Americans. At every stop, Cora experiences humiliation and degradation and lives in terror that Ridgeway, the slave catcher, or someone else will capture her. The draconian Fugitive Slave Act punishes anyone who assists escaped slaves.
There are some Underground Railroad stations that are located in states that treat African-Americans relatively better. Yet each state has its own approach to denigrating African-Americans through emotional, physical, or spiritual torture. And as if the terror of being sold and separated from family isn’t enough, the brutality of the violence Mr. Whitehead describes is grotesque and gruesome. He writes, “Cora had seen men hung from trees and left for buzzards and crows. Women carved open to the bones with the cat-o’-nine-tails. Bodies alive and dead roasted on pyres. Feet cut off to prevent escape and hands cut off to stop theft.” In one scene, the plantation owners’ guests are served lunch while one of Cora’s fellow slaves is whipped in front of them and then he is doused with oil and roasted. Who are these people? Psychologically speaking, it is hard to make sense of their atrocious actions. How have they convinced themselves that this abhorrent behavior is acceptable? Though they think of African-Americans as barbarians, it is these plantation owners, overseers, slave catchers, and acquiescent Southerners who are the barbarians in this horror show as they project their own barbarism onto their slaves. It is a painful book to read.
A couple of decent folks emerge in the book, but it is dark from beginning to end. I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been for Colson Whitehead to write this book. He is a deserving recipient of both the 2016 National Book Award and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize. All Americans should read this book. It is yet another reminder that our government has offered no formal apology or financial reparations to the descendants of slaves. Though in a different form, the scourge of racism persists today. Only when the United States government and its citizens confront and engage with this horrible history will we, as a country, heal and move forward.
