March
by Geraldine Brooks
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Book Reviews of March
Book Review: If you are a Little women devotee you will want to read March
Summary: 4 Stars
If you are a Little Women devotee you will surely want to read March. This Pulitzer Prize winning novel is the story of Peter March the father of the March clan. While March is an absent father in Little Women, his life story is the basis of this novel. His character is loosely based on Louisa May Alcott's father Bronson Alcott. The first part of the novel is narrated by March. He is introduced as an itinerant peddler working though the southern states in the years before the Civil War. We meet him as a young man; see his courtship and marriage of Marmee and the birth of his children. He is an idealistic abolitionist preacher who is influenced by his friendship with Thoreau and Emerson (neighbors in New England) and his partnership with John Brown, the violent abolitionist to whom he loses his fortune. In a fit of patriotic fervor March enlists as a chaplain to accompany Union troops. His naiveté and impossibly high ideals soon run afoul of his coarse Union companions. Caught in an embarrassing situation with a black slave who he had meet earlier in his travels he is reassigned to a plantation now operated by a northern manager and manned by freed slaves or "contraband" as the free blacks are known. His assignment is to teach the freed slaves reading and writing. The crux of the novel occurs on this plantation. March's idealism is challenged by the everyday cruelty and racism of both Northern and Southern soldiers. The harsh plight of the slaves seems unchanged when their "freedom" is achieved. A Confederate attack on the plantation lands March in a Washington DC hospital and then the first person narration switches to Marmee. Marmee recounts a different version of prior events and reacts to the knowledge she gains about her husband's life. Her difficulty in dealing with her rage and disappointment in March rings true. The return of Marmee and March to the idyllic setting of their New England home masks the changes in both of them; he the shattered and scarred dreamer, she the newly wise wife and mother.
The dialogue throughout this novel is firmly rooted in the 19th century but seems very easy and straightforward. The depth of description of even the minor characters allows the readers to know them. The plantation manager is anything but one dimensional, while he seems a petty, cruel tyrant we gradually learn of the struggles he has in managing the plantation. The difficulties in communication that March and Marmee have seemed timeless and could easily be attributed to a 21st century couple. This is a very different Civil War novel but I think will please many readers. This type of novel is among my favorites - historical fiction that has a well told story peopled by sympathetic but not perfect characters that have depth, emotions and passions that are universal.
Book Review: Grace, Salvation and the Hubris of Middle-aged Man
Summary: 5 Stars
March was one of the best novels of the decade. One of the Amazon reviewers actually wondered why it received the Pulitzer Prize. Reviews tend to be personal impressions of the literal narrative, assuming every book is commercial, without regard to the allegorical, moral and sometimes mystical meaning, as if literature doesn't exist today. As in all literature, this book is subtle and complex.
Rather than using an epigraph, Geraldine Brooks sets up the theme by embedding two books that Peter is reading in his journey through the Anti-bellum South: Pilgrim's Progress and Dante's Divine Comedy, two books about man's search for salvation. To better understand the story, the reader needs to use the old historical-biographical literary analysis: understand the time and subject (read a brief summary of transcendentalism) and know the author's background. (Brooks was a Christian who converted to Judaism upon her marriage.) She is very knowledgeable and understanding of the complex precepts of religion, particularly the flux that occurred between the Second Awakening and the Civil War.
The idealistic preacher Peter, a man of failed dreams, hobnobs with the great leaders of transcendentalism and is intimated by their accomplishments and celebrity as well as being jealous of his strong wife's accomplishments in the Underground Railroad. Emerson: "Those who are capable ... of aspiration, stand already on a platform that commands ... action and grace." In a midlife crisis, Peter joins the Union army to instill the troops with divine inspiration to slaughter the satanic South to end the mortal sin of slavery. He believes that only through his works (that nagging concept of Calvinism) can he attain admiration from his friends and wife and ultimately seek salvation in the eyes of God. But his mission only results in his repeated failure and subsequent descent into the depths of hell when he is attacked by rebels, is wounded and hides like a rat in a woodpile. Did he descend into Dante's seventh circle for his violent sins or ninth circle for his malicious sins? Is the slaughter of your fellow man in order to end slavery a sin or a good work?
Then, in a mystic scene of surrealism, Peter is saved by a raped and ravaged, mute slave girl, the embodiment of God's grace, as she transports him to purgatory. Is man only saved by his good works or can he only be saved by God's grace? The novel's voice is then taken over by his wife who sees him shattered and helpless, saying he is unconditionally loved as a husband and father regardless of his failures. Can he reject his family because of his humiliation? Can he accept the grace of his wife? Must he crawl to God to ask for forgiveness? Has he sinned or simply failed?
Book Review: Brooks' Civil War 'March.'
Summary: 4 Stars
Inspired by Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (Signet Classics), in her compelling second novel, Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Geraldine Brooks (Year of Wonders), imagines the Civil War experiences of Mr. March, the absent father in LITTLE WOMEN. (In Alcott's novel, the March girls receive a letter from their father: "little was said of the hardships endured, the dangers faced, or the homesickness conquered," Alcott writes about the letter; "it was a cheerful, hopeful letter full of lively descriptions.") Brooks' extraordinary novel reveals the hardship, danger and homesickness inherent to war and the silence typically surrounding the details of war. In writing to his wife Marmee, Brooks' protagonist says that he never promised her he would write the truth of the war around him, but instead writes about his longing for home and his four beautiful daughters. From his narrative, we learn that March enlists in the army as an idealistic Concord clergyman and abolitionist, influenced by his contemporaries, Thoreau, Emerson, and John Brown. A year later, he finds himself a changed man, waking every day in a sweat, in a condition of uncertainty: "One day, I hope to go back. To my wife, to my girls, but also to the man of moral certainty that I was that day, that innocent man, who knew with such clear confidence exactly what it was that he was meant to do" (p. 184). Chronologically, Brooks' novel follows March through four major events in his life. At age 19, when he was an impoverished Yankee peddler, March was first introduced to the life of a Virginia slaveholder and to Grace, the beautiful slave who gave him his first kiss--a kiss that changed his life. Later he meets the New England abolitionists, Margaret Day, John Brown and the Transcendentalists, Emerson and Thoreau. Then, as a chaplain in the army in Union-occupied Mississippi, March learns his politics are too radical for the leased Clement cotton plantation where he is stationed, so he is ordered to organize a school at Oak Landing for the newly freed slaves and their children. The final episode of Brooks' novel is set in a Washington, D.C. Union hospital, where March recuperates from a near-death experience, and where Grace re-enters his life, only to tell him to "Go home." Although MARCH is a Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, it does not quite measure up to the standard set by Brooks' first novel, YEAR OF WONDERS, which explains why I've given it a four-star rating instead of five.
G. Merritt
Book Review: No Little Women
Summary: 5 Stars
Although I greatly admired Geraldine Brooks' earlier novel, YEAR OF WONDERS (despite its slightly rabbit-from-the-hat ending), I was wary of starting this one, since I knew its title character, March, was based upon the absent father in Louisa May Alcott's LITTLE WOMEN, a book that I have not read. I need not have worried; Brooks' novel stands confidently by itself and supplies any back-story that is necessary. I have always been put off (perhaps in my ignorance) by what seemed an aura of Victorian sentimentalism surrounding the Alcott books, so when MARCH began with a letter home from the battlefield written in exactly this vein, I almost threw it down. But again I need not have worried; the general tone of MARCH is far from sentimental; one of its major themes, indeed, concerns what CANNOT be said in a letter home, and the unbearable pressures and unintended dishonesties which result from the wholesome desire not to bring pain to those one loves. Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy may be safe with their mother Marmee in their simple home in Concord, but the experiences of their father further South are anything but a children's tale.
Brooks wries that her novels are about "faith and catastrophe"; this was true of THE YEAR OF WONDERS, but it comes much closer to home here. While ostensibly filling in the story of the fictional March father from LITTLE WOMEN, absent with the Union army in the Civil War, Brooks goes way beyond some literary what-if. Extending the quasi-autobiographical nature of Alcott's book, she draws upon the real-life character of the novelist's father, Bronson Alcott, a transcendentalist philosopher, educator, and utopian idealist, the friend of Emerson and Thoreau. But since this is fiction, the character may be made younger and emotionally vulnerable, thrust into the fighting, and, even more searing for him, brought into contact with the "liberated" slaves on former plantations. The result is to expose the moral ambiguities of the war and slavery in a manner approaching the power of Edward Jones' THE KNOWN WORLD, and test the emotional honesty and moral courage of this noble but imperfect man of peace almost to breaking point.
A rich and complex book, highly recommended. For further discussion, see my review of E. L. Doctorow's THE MARCH.
Book Review: A travesty
Summary: 1 Stars
I wish I could say that I enjoyed this book. After all, as a Pulitzer-Prize winner loosely based on a character from Little Women, and written by Geraldine Brooks, whose vision brought a glow to Year of Wonders, it had everything going for it. Imagine my shock and horror then when I picked it up, settling down for a long, rich read, and looked up after two pages with a dreadful sinking feeling. For anyone who read and loved Little Women as a child, this book is not merely a travesty - it's a nightmare. And for anyone who loves good literature, it's that worst of all things - a book that should be magnificent, and isn't. Quite apart from the fact that the moral, upright, warm and loving father and dedicated army chaplain from Little Women is transformed into a womanizing, lying, deceitful, weak man whose only real belief rests in a complete disillusionment with the world(a character quite incapable of being the center of a classic)the entire novel is written in his voice, one of the few I've ever encountered that inspired an actual loathing in me. Brooks' style in this book, conveyed through this man's endlessly self-pitying, whining, and over-formal point of view, is strained and ultimately intensely unconvincing. This flaws in character and style could even have been forgiven however had not this entire book been written with one apparent purpose, and one only - to propagate a particular agenda. Every author, particularly the great ones, conveys in their novels some deeply held belief or question. But what makes them great is that their vision, their novel, transcends the narrow limits of this purpose - they write for all humanity, and thus deal with issues and characters that speak to and of all humanity. March is a narrow, self-limiting book utterly consumed with the self-absorption of its narrator and the mindless cruelty, racism, and godlessness which the author apparently believes were a characteristic of many, if not most, of the people in the Civil War, particularly but not limited to the soldiers of the Northern side. Attacking what has often been seen and projected as the "good" side - the North, in this case, and the whites, is a author's trick that has been used before to gain attention, but never with this particular brand of blatancy; a backwards form of stereotyping. It's a book written for the times, hence the Pulitzer, but will last no longer than the few years it takes for the world to forget that it once won the highest award the literary world has to offer. Having read many great past Pulitzer-winning novels, from Sophie's Choice to The Hours to, recently, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, this book is a travesty.