March
by Geraldine Brooks
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Book Reviews of March
Book Review: Beautifully written book.....not so great ending.
Summary: 4 Stars
I won't go into details about the plot; amazon has already done a pretty decent job at that. What I do want to do is address some of the other reviewers' comments and also talk a little bit about why I gave this book 4 stars and not 5.
First: This book is NOT a sequel to "Little Women." Anyone who complains that "as a sequel to 'Little Women' this book sucks" is, I'm afraid, an idiot who neither owns, nor has access to, a dictionary. "March" is what you would call a revisionist text -- it takes characters and storylines from one story (in this case, Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women"), and uses them to create an entirely new universe of the author's making.
Like most people who have read it, I love "Little Women." Unfortunately, it is somewhat hampered by 19th century conventions regarding what is and is not proper to write about. Written more than a century and a half later, "March" does not suffer from any of those pitfalls. We get sex, violence, and an abundance of passion -- none of which is gratuitous. Most importantly, we get to see the virtuous figures of Marmee and Mr. March, sketched in "Little Women," in a completely new (and far more complex, interesting, and realistic) light.
To get a few other things out of the way: stylistically, Ms. Brooks' writing here is nearly flawless. She has the voice of a poet, without being pretentious, schlocky, or needlessly verbose. On several occasions, her words brought me to tears. Don't trust the words of any reviewer who gripes that the book "is too long" or "drags way too much in the beginning" -- I'm fairly certain the person is either a callow teen or else a supremely ignorant adult who can only stomach things written by authors like Dan Brown.
Here is my beef with this book: SPOILER ALERT!
(1) I wanted to hear more from Marmee. I can't tell you how welcome and refreshing her point of view / narrative was after keeping company with the high-minded, highly naive, and somewhat exasperating, Mr. March, for so many chapters. Her realization that she has been betrayed and lied to for so many years, by her lover, her partner, and her confidante, was for me, the climax of the novel. How would she confront him, I wondered? Would she berate him, shame him, remind him of all that she sacrificed for the sake of his misguided idealism? Marmee never gets her day, unfortunately. A true martyr (more than Mr. March could ever claim to be), she bites her tongue for the sake of her daughters. She remains ever supportive of her husband during his recovery, and provides him with the love and physical comforts he needs to heal and come back home to his family.
(2) I realize that Bronson Alcott (and therefore, Mr. March), was an idealist, a philospher, an intellectual -- in short, a man of the mind, and not of the world. For the most part, I was able to go with the flow and accept him for what he was without judgment or censure. But towards the end of the novel, I started getting angry. While his loyal wife and expectant daughters waited for him to come home, he slowly recovered in a hospital in Washington only to....decide that he would follow Grace, his one-time love, in her duties as a war nurse?? And here's the kicker -- because he feels he is not WORTHY enough to come home to his family?! Selfish is what he is. Basically, we the readers are told that the only reason March goes back to Concord is because Grace tells him to. What a coward. What would his precious daughters think of him if they knew about his deceit, his disloyalty, his inconstancy? In the last pages of the novel he looks at each of his daughters and sees only the slaughtered slaves he left behind in the battlefields. What a father.
Don't get me wrong. This is an incredible book, and very deserving of all the accolades it has garnered. Much like its main character, however, it is imperfect. Read the novel, by all means, and revel in every beautifully crafted and heart-wrenching sentence. But do not expect to come away from the experience with anything less than the feeling that the novel, much like its protagonist, could have come to a better, and far more settling, conclusion.
Book Review: A short but deep reflection of the Civil War.
Summary: 4 Stars
March is Geraldine Brooks' take on what Mr. March, the absent father from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, was doing while the women awaited his return. The answer: quite a lot.
Mr. March is an idealistic cleric who joins the Union army as chaplain in a moment of self-righteous rapture. As we shall see, Mr. March's idealism presents many problems for him. After a hard battle in which a man Mr. March tries to help cross a river is born away by it, this idealism, which aggravates the soldiers in his unit, wins him re-assignment as a teacher on a cotton plantation. Though at first Mr. March is quite distressed by his rejection, the idea of being a trailblazer in the job of teaching slaves soon takes hold of his idealistic mind.
Taken over by the Union Army, the plantation is run by a Northern business man tasked with operating it as a business of profit and loss while treating the slaves as employees, which included paying them salaries. But when March arrives, he finds many of his idealistic notions about the experiment disabused. He finds that the businessman doesn't treat the slave much better than their owners had. He finds slaves stuck in their previous world, scared or unwilling to learn anything from him or break free from their bonds. He even finds slaves who are resistant to the Union's aims and stick with their owners rather than help the plantation. In fact, these conflicts finally come to a head when one such group of Rebels and former slaves invade the plantation and wreak havoc. In the end, Mr. March finds himself unable to protect those he wants so badly to help, and he ends up in a Washington hospital.
The structure of this novel is interesting. The majority of the book is from Mr. March's perspective. We see his letters home to his family, which are less than honest about the horrors he sees. We are the only witnesses to that. Chapters are also interspersed that tell us of March's past. We see him in his early twenties as a guest on a plantation he'd tried to peddle his wares to and where he sees slavery up close for the first time. In his typically romantic way, he even falls in love with one. Then we also see him years later, meeting his future wife, Marmee, and raising his family amidst an absolitionist fervor that bankrupts them.
When March ends up in the Washington hospital, Brooks changes to Marmee's perspective and we learn the differences in how they see the things that have happened in the past. For example, in March's version of his decision to join the Union Army, he interprets Marmee's muted reaction as one of support. It is only from Marmee that we learn that she was in fact aghast at his idea and angry that he left her alone to run the family. It wasn't necessary for the story, but I thought adding Marmee's POV was a nice trick by Brooks that added depth.
Her prose is also quite good, especially the evocative images she conjures of war and its horrors. She's drawn some great character here too. March seems simple at first, but we learn over time how conflicted he really is. He is a man of good faith and intentions, rattled by guilt. For example, later he feels so much guilt for the man he let float down the river that he imagines he let the man go rather tried to help with all his might. Later inaction in a similar situation feeds this illusion until he's in agony. It would be hard not to see the humanity in him.
I found some of the dialect of the time to be a little stereotypical and some parts can be slow moving, but overall this is a great book. I would definitely recommend it to fans of Little Women, but also to anyone looking for a short but deep period piece.
Book Review: Idealism vs reality
Summary: 4 Stars
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott was the story of a family's growth. The four sisters and the mother grew and matured while the patriarch of the family was absent. March, is the backstory behind little women, with a focus on what Mr. March was doing away from his family.
Turns out that Mr. March was one of the great idealists of his time. He had always been an intellectual and a dreamer. We meet him in his earliest days as an 18 year old peddler working his way through the southern plantations in Virginia where he gets to see the horrors of slavery first hand. March is also a vegetarian and an avowed pacifist. These are very hard things to keep to in that era and time.
As a peddler, he makes good money eventually, invests it successfully and is able to pursue the hand of Marmee - who is a kindred spirit - and they settle in Concord MA, with their friends the Emersons and Thoreau and lead a genteel life. March loses his fortune and the Civil War starts and he decides to go off and help in the great abolition cause that he shares. As a pacifist, and as an older man, he is brought in to the army as a chaplain and the story intersperses his memories with his current duties and actions.
The main point of the book is to point out the conflict between idealism and reality. March is idealistic to a fault. He is a much more rabid abolitionist than the vast majority of the Union army and finds himself so outside the mainstream that he is re-assigned to a plantation operated by freed slaves. This is an experiment in social engineering that actually took place later on in the civil war than what's written here, but no matter, this is a fictional work. While there, his idealism serves him well in treating the freed slaves, but he also manages to get many of his charges killed when he foolishly attempts to reason with Confederate guerillas instead of taking on a gun and killing them.
The book points out his many failings and repeatedly shows how idealists can be turned into their own worst enemies by blindly following their ideas and ideals and not seeking the grounding of reality in implementing them.
The prose of the story is beautiful and it is written very much in the style of the period with flowery phrases and many descriptive passages rather than dialog to convey the scenery. Marmee is also an idealist and one set of chapters in the second half of the book points out the miscommunications that can take place even in the best of marriages when both partners misinterpret the actions of the other rather than talk to them about it. The main heroine of this book in my opinion, and the foil to March, is a freed slave named Grace Clement who appears in three different scenes. She is apparently everything that March is not, but we find out in the end that she has made some bad choices as well, and is suffering similar consequences to his.
The book ends with March's return home to Concord and to the loving embrace of his family. But, is this that same man that left? Clearly not. Seeing the evils of warfare and of mankind has changed this rabid abolitionst and idealist forever - just like it changes most every man and woman who has been involved in wars since time immemorial.
Book Review: PG Rating Turns R with Geraldine Brooks' Return to Little Women
Summary: 5 Stars
Geraldine Brooks' novel March revisits the beloved March family, first brought to us by Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. This book provides readers with Mr. and Marmee March's perspectives, untold in the original story. We journey south with Mr. March as he ministers to the young soldiers of the Civil War, witnesses the gruesome reality of war and consequently, reevaluates his past, his values and his sense of self. Next we catch up with the righteous Marmee who begins her voyage to D.C. to nurse her wounded husband. She recounts her own past and battles her raging temper and intense jealousy, denouncing her sainthood status granted in Little Women.
The familiar reunion at the end of Little Women turns bittersweet as March confesses his inability to be happy after his experiences in the war. Marmee too does not enjoy the memorable happy ending as Beth's illness drives her away from her husband and places her on a train back to Concord before the two are able to resolve their troubles. Thus, readers are left pitying the young March girls whose happiness after their father's return from the war is shadowed by a dimension of restless discontent. Readers also may also find that the original picturesque Christmas gathering of the Marchs' now appears feigned in this new version.
However, in offering readers the parents' perspectives, the novel adds dimension to Alcott's noble but otherwise flat characters, geared as it is for an older audience with scenes involving adultery, war, death and premarital sex. Fans of Little Women will likely be shocked at the dark secrets of the Marchs' past which creep into their present troubles.
Brooks enriches the novel with American history, granting readers insight into the Marchs' involvement with abolitionism, the Civil War and transcendentalism. The book also mixes both romantic and post-modern qualities. Brooks achieves an appropriate syntax with elaborate language and metaphor, formal politeness, and lengthy descriptions, so familiar to that time period. But she also employs distinctly post-modern techniques of dual narratives, nonlinear approaches, meta-literary elements, and an inconclusive ending.
Brooks defamiliarizes these beloved characters, forcing her readers to re-examine them. While readers may mourn for the idealized parents they grew to love in the original story, re-acquaintance results in a more genuine fondness for the Marchs' as they come alive with both thoughtful benevolence and imperfect humanity.
Sprinkled with enough familiar events to make the story recognizable as a version of Little Women, Brooks adds an interesting dynamic to this well-known story. Open-minded readers who value the postmodern concept that "there is more than one way to tell a story" will enjoy this different take on the familiar tale. However, fans who expect unfaltering righteousness and perfect altruism usually found in Alcott's work, will be sorely disappointed.
Book Review: March - The Protagonists' Absent Father
Summary: 5 Stars
I absolutely loved reading "March", the operative word here being "reading". It has been a long time since I have thoroughly enjoyed the activity of reading, per se. I approached "March" with some trepidation, having previously read Geraldine Brooks', "People of the Book", which I bought in hard cover, thus spending a chunk of change on it, and in the end was somewhat disappointed. "March" does not disappoint. It is the story of what happened to the father in Louisa May Alcott's classic "Little Women". To enjoy this book, you don't need to have read "Little Women", however, I've heard it said that in March, one can find echoes of "Little Women". It is written in language, styled from its day, early 1860's, and at times reads as poetry. The book is about Mr. March's (the father of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy) experiences in the Civil War, as a Chaplain in the Union army, positioned below the Mason-Dixon line. It moves between New England, where the family lives, and the places of war. There is no lack of demonstrating the savagery of war and the savagery of Slavery and racism. War is neither idealized, nor demonized. It is simply told in the voice of Mr. March.
The author uses two techniques that I love to find in fiction. The first is mixing in real historical characters among her fictional ones (reminiscent of E.L. Doctorow's "Ragtime" and "The Book of Daniel") giving the reader the feeling of getting to personally know them, in this case... Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who are neighbors of the March family. You get to see John Brown, the famous abolitionist who advocated insurrection as his means of ridding the country of slavery. The author has Brown basically tricking Dr. March into lending him a huge sum of money and consequently losing it all, which proved to be the financial downfall of March and his family. It is a very interesting interplay of fact and fiction. The other device, that I have always loved, is the use of letter writing as a means of moving the story along ( this for me is reminiscent of one of my all time favorite novels, "A Woman of Independent Means", by Elizabeth Forsyth Hailey). It is in March's letters that some of the most beautiful descriptions and eloquent use of language can be found. Here is but one example...
"There was a little barge-ferry then, that would stop on request, at a jetty on the island's northern tip. I had alighted there on a whim and walked the mile and a half to the house whistling the song of the boatman who had poled the crossing. The white dogwoods were in flower all the way up the drive, and the air seemed viscous and honey-fragrant, unlike the mud-scent of a chill May morning on Spindle Hill."
It is no wonder that Geraldine Brooks won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. I highly recommend this book.