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Mar. 28th, 2020 06:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsFor something wildly different that also happens to be a story set during WWII about unhappy young women and bad parenting, I also just recently finished Laura Ruby's Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All.
The ostensible protagonist of this book is Frankie, a teen girl being raised in an Chicago orphanage with her siblings because her single father can't invest more time in them than one afternoon a week, until, eventually, he moves out of state with his new wife and cannot invest any time in them at all.
The actual protagonist is Pearl, the ghost who serves as the book's narrator, who spends about half the book following Frankie around and telling us what's going on with her -- not because of any particular connection between them, just because she likes watching the orphanage girls and finds Frankie interesting -- and the other half following her own ghost pursuits, such as spying on other favorite humans, reading The Hobbit over the shoulder of that one guy in the library, and having potentially unreliable flashbacks to her own life and death.
About halfway through the book she encounters another ghost capable of communication, another angry young woman whose story forms a kind of thematic third leg ...
... or so I think. The book is trying to do a lot of things, a great big messy outpouring of feelings about sexism and racism and war and grief and forgiveness and revenge and history and America; it's extremely interesting and compelling and I'm not one hundred percent sure it succeeds in pulling itself completely together, but I'm also not sure it needs to? The things it's talking about are big and messy, too, and there aren't easy life lessons to be pulled out of them. It's a book I'm going to be thinking about a lot, anyway.
(That said, it's definitely at its strongest when it's straightforwardly telling compelling personal stories, rather than when Pearl is ghost-omnisciently stressing about all of the manifold terrible things happening all across the world in the 1940s, at least for me. I know about all the terrible things! I want to know the things that are happening or have happened to these specific people!)
The ostensible protagonist of this book is Frankie, a teen girl being raised in an Chicago orphanage with her siblings because her single father can't invest more time in them than one afternoon a week, until, eventually, he moves out of state with his new wife and cannot invest any time in them at all.
The actual protagonist is Pearl, the ghost who serves as the book's narrator, who spends about half the book following Frankie around and telling us what's going on with her -- not because of any particular connection between them, just because she likes watching the orphanage girls and finds Frankie interesting -- and the other half following her own ghost pursuits, such as spying on other favorite humans, reading The Hobbit over the shoulder of that one guy in the library, and having potentially unreliable flashbacks to her own life and death.
About halfway through the book she encounters another ghost capable of communication, another angry young woman whose story forms a kind of thematic third leg ...
... or so I think. The book is trying to do a lot of things, a great big messy outpouring of feelings about sexism and racism and war and grief and forgiveness and revenge and history and America; it's extremely interesting and compelling and I'm not one hundred percent sure it succeeds in pulling itself completely together, but I'm also not sure it needs to? The things it's talking about are big and messy, too, and there aren't easy life lessons to be pulled out of them. It's a book I'm going to be thinking about a lot, anyway.
(That said, it's definitely at its strongest when it's straightforwardly telling compelling personal stories, rather than when Pearl is ghost-omnisciently stressing about all of the manifold terrible things happening all across the world in the 1940s, at least for me. I know about all the terrible things! I want to know the things that are happening or have happened to these specific people!)
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Date: 2020-03-29 02:09 am (UTC)Do you mind if I ask for details?
[edit] Have you read (and have I asked if you if you've read) Sheri Holman's The Dress Lodger (2000)?
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Date: 2020-03-29 04:27 am (UTC)I don't think I've read or heard of The Dress Lodger and would love to hear more.
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Date: 2020-03-29 04:58 am (UTC)More the latter? I'm obviously curious about the story of the third ghost, but I think more discussion of the giant mess of feelings.
I don't think I've read or heard of The Dress Lodger and would love to hear more.
The Dress Lodger is a historical novel set during the (I guess this needs a content warning now) 1831 cholera epidemic of Sunderland, England, which is simultaneously a sort of Hammer Gothic about morally compromised surgeons involved with beautiful streetwalkers and their anatomically freakish children and a revision of that same penny dreadful in which the beautiful streetwalker is the protagonist. Her name is Gustine; she's fifteen years old and the mother of an infant child whose heart is on the outside of his chest, fascinating the young Dr. Henry Chiver who still winces to hear his name coupled in street ballads with that of the infamous Dr. Knox. Too bad for him. The novel is not at all sentimental about the economics of empire and gender and industry. (Dress lodging is the practice of "renting" a costly, fashionable gown from one's pimp so as to be able to attract a richer grade of john, which sometimes only means they are more resentful about having to pay for it.) It's beautifully written also, with an omniscient, communal first-person narrator that at first sounds like a hand-me-down from Dickens and turns out to be wound deeply into the plot in a way that I still haven't seen anyone replicate. The narration is what made me ask.
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Date: 2020-03-29 12:18 pm (UTC)(SPOILERS, for anyone else who is reading and doesn't want them)
the things that link Pearl and Frankie are a.) the ways that their families/caretakers try to exert control over them and punish them for expressing independence and sexuality and b.) the ways that both of them have lost elements of their personal history (Frankie due to family cover-up and Pearl due to trauma) that they don't discover until late in the book; the things that link Pearl and Marguerite, the second ghost, are a.) the fact that both of their deaths were partly linked to their respective interracial relationships (Pearl is white and slept with a Chinese boy, Marguerite is black and fell in love with a white abolitionist) b.) their betrayal by people who claimed to care about them. But also, Pearl, a very angry ghost, does spend quite a bit of time sort of primal screaming about generalized world horrors, and there's also a central metaphor I haven't quite been able to process about a ghost-seeing fox that fixates on Pearl for unknown reasons, gets drawn into danger on account of her despite her best efforts, and then becomes a ghost itself and follows her around for the rest of the book.
We know from the beginning of the book, which is set after most of the rest of the events contained within it, that Pearl won't have moved on when it ends. Her presence helps Marguerite find closure and Frankie find independence, and there's a satisfaction in that -- Frankie's escape with her sister from her father's house is the last scene of the book -- but Pearl herself remains resolutely unresolved, a memory of anger and loss wandering the streets of Chicago. (She also can't respect Marguerite's closure; after Marguerite has disappeared, Pearl is still going to exact petty revenge on Marguerite's betrayer.) All of which feels thematically important, in a way that's difficult to boil down.
The Dress Lodger does indeed sound fascinating!
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Date: 2020-03-29 09:36 pm (UTC)Huh. Okay. Is it a sentient/supernatural fox or can it just see ghosts?
(She also can't respect Marguerite's closure; after Marguerite has disappeared, Pearl is still going to exact petty revenge on Marguerite's betrayer.) All of which feels thematically important, in a way that's difficult to boil down.
Agreed. (I shall file away for future reference the strong negative reaction I have to the concept of not respecting the decisions other people make about their pain.)
The Dress Lodger does indeed sound fascinating!
I recommend it, although I also respect not wanting to read about pandemic disease right now!