March
by Geraldine Brooks
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Book Reviews of March
Book Review: High concept but only middling history or fiction
Summary: 3 Stars
I loved the first two chapters of March. The description of the rout at Ball's Bluff and March's failure to save a fellow soldier was harrowing. The discrepancy between his letters and his thoughts promised a novel with secrets, irony, and hard-won truths. The unexpected kindness and complexity of the white Southerners in chapter two suggested that the book would offer a fresh perspective on more than just Louisa May Alcott. But despite all that, the novel started to flag somewhere in the third chapter. I enjoyed watching March reconcile his ideals with reality, but after a while that process seemed thematic rather than genuine. The language, which initially seemed rich, started to look like research. When Brooks started paraphrasing Thoreau and lifting stories from Twain, her prose paled in comparison. It made me pick up Little Women, which sounded much better to my ear.
Grace was a fascinating character, but it felt like Brooks was teasing us with her relationships, lies, and secrets. After a while I lost any hope that she would keep her secrets or possess any mystery. Eventually Brooks would use those secrets to make points or to amaze the reader. I wanted more from Grace and March. The sections on contraband presented a new and disturbing aspect of the war which I never knew. Ms. Brooks's research throughout the novel was fine, but ultimately it felt like her passion was history rather than real life. Some say that ideas take firmer hold when they're attached to the emotion of a story, and I'm sure that's true for many readers of March, but I felt manipulated, perhaps because the research and the facts came first. The characters seemed to tag along behind.
Part 2 began encouragingly because Marmee's voice was a welcome change, but soon enough she started doing the author's bidding: I started to wonder whether she sounded at all different from her husband. I wasn't curious enough to put her language to the test - she probably did speak differently - but I never sat up and appreciated her speech as much as I liked her thoughts. In the end the ironies and plot twists felt willed, the metaphors and epiphanies obvious and programmatic. The ending was appropriately sentimental - I got misty-eyed - but that owed as much to a return to Little Women as to the cumulative effect of the horrors that March endured. Thankfully, Brooks didn't put a band-aid on his trauma. I admire her ideas and feelings about non-violence, truth, and the complexities of love. My big complaint is that they drive the novel which never seems to have a life of its own.
Book Review: I Loved Meeting Mr. March And Hearing His Story
Summary: 5 Stars
This is one of the most Pulizer-worthy novels I've read in a long while. The novel tells the previously untold story of the absent father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (Signet Classics). In Little Women, the reader only gets to know Peter March through his letters sent home to his family from the Civil War. Of course, in the interest of sparing his family the details of war, his letters are more cheerful than his reality. Geraldine Brooks uses the novel March to tell of Mr. March's early life as a traveling salesman, of his first kiss with someone other than his future wife, of the meeting of his wife, of his connections to Emerson and Thoreau, of his strong abolitionist sentiments, of the war that changed him both physically and mentally, and of misunderstandings and wrongs that were never made right in his life. Brooks draws heavily from the journals of Alcott's own father, Bronson Alcott, in order to flesh out the character of Mr. March. Since the "little women" in Alcott's novels were based on the members of her own family, it makes sense that Mr. March would be based on her father and that the March family would be acquainted with the same people they were. The Alcotts were, after all, contemporaries and acquaintances of many of the transcendentalist thinkers and writers of the time such as Emerson and Thoreau.
This is definitely the best prequel written by a different author that I've ever read. I remember being completely disappointed trying to read sequels or prequels by different authors for books such as Gone with the Wind. The author's journalistic background definitely helped her to give attention to the proper details needed to research such a book.
I initially did not recognize the name of the author as being the author of Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women, a book that I loved so much that I ... er ... bought it from the library pretending that I'd lost it (in the days before amazon.com made any book accessible for purchase). Nine Parts of Desire is a work of non-fiction that she wrote as a journalist. So I'm thrilled to see that she has such a beautiful piece of fiction out there as well. Halfway through the book, I found myself saying to myself, "wow, this is a good book" and hoping to read something else by her soon.
Book Review: Sometimes a Good Man Is a Weak Man
Summary: 4 Stars
March is told largely in the words of Mr. March, father of all those "little women," and it encompasses the year that he spent as a Union chaplain during the early part of the Civil War. Ever the idealist, one who at times refused to recognize the demands of the real world or to compromise his principles in order to better get along with others, March quickly managed to get on the bad side of both the men to whom he hoped to minister and that of his superior officers. As so often happens during war, March lived a lifetime during his one year of service, a year in which he learned more about himself than he really wanted to know. He came to realize that his ideals and principles did not necessarily come with the courage to do the right thing when to do so put him in personal danger. He ended his year a broken man, one barely alive and, more importantly, one who considered his year of service to have been a disaster for himself and everyone he tried to help.
Along the way, March unexpectedly finds himself revisiting a plantation he remembered from his days as a young traveling salesman trying to build the nest egg he hoped to invest for the remainder of his life. Some twenty years after his first visit, the home is now an emergency hospital for Union troops and life there is nothing like the one he remembered from before. But one thing has not changed. Grace Clements, the mulatto slave woman he was so attracted to on his first visit, is still there and he is still powerfully attracted to her. Grace Clements comes to be one of the two most important women in March's life, in fact.
Having so consistently irritated the troops to whom he was assigned, March is assigned to spend the bulk of his war at a cotton plantation teaching liberated slaves to read and write. This is my one quibble with the book. While, in fact, some southern cotton plantations were leased to northern entrepreneurs during the war so that much needed cotton could be brought to market for benefit of the North, this did not occur nearly so early in the war as portrayed in March. Despite the fact that the heart of the story takes place on this plantation, I could never completely forget just how unlikely it would have been for March to find himself on such a plantation during his particular year of the war.
But that's a minor thing because March has so much to offer. It is filled with the kind of period detail that marks the best historical fiction and fans of Little Women will very likely find it to be the perfect companion piece to one of their favorite novels.
Book Review: Definitely not Alcott's "Little Women"
Summary: 2 Stars
I started reading this book expecting to like it - it's historical, related to Little Women, won the Pulitzer, doesn't feel like fluff, etc. However I had a really difficult time getting into the book.
For one, the language sounded much more pretentious than historically accurate. I've read other works from the time period she's supposed to be writing in, and rather than feeling in keeping with that era, this book felt indicitive of someone who makes full use of her thesaurus.
Also, I haven't read her other book so i didn't enter this novel with a trust for the author. Consequentally, I found that as she mentioned connections to Little Women, I became defensive. She had not proven to me that she had the right to use this work. In some of her character choices, such as one of the first encounters between March and Marmee (I'm not going to go into details so as not to spoil the scene), I believe that she made a radical departure from anything that Alcott would have written of her characters, and that Brooks really did not stay true to the original.
The first half of the book is also really dry. This could just be my personal taste, but the first half moved so slowly! The book started to pick up about half way through. Overall, the story being told and the Civil War aspects weren't bad, and could be a decent story in their own right if she'd just speed things along at the beginning.
However, I think Brooks did the book a major disservice by linking it to Little Women. I bristled every time she mentioned an individual from the book, because she was really changing their characters (other than Aunt March). The choices that Brooks' characters made were not in keeping with choices they may have made in Alcott's book.
In the afterward, Brooks discussed her research and how she actually based the March family and particularly Mr. March more on the Alcott family itself than on the characters from Little Women, even commenting how the March Family in Alcott's book isn't very interesting, and how "Nobody in real life is such a goody-goody as that Marmee." If she felt that way, then why use them as the basis for her book? Seen in that context, her earlier *huge* liberties with Marmee's character seem to just be a way to "stick it" to Alcott: "ha ha, look how much more realistic Marmee is now!"
Book Review: Battle Scars
Summary: 5 Stars
If you enjoyed Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, take yourself to the next level by reading this book. Be prepared however, that unlike Little Women which paints a prettier picture of the Civil War era, this book is gutted with grave rawness and moral dilemna that reflects more accurately this period in history. Nevertheless, Brooks does justice to Little Women by creating a believeable adult version of the characters while still holding true to the storyline of Alcott's timeless novel. Although I would recommend reading Little Women first to get this whole effect, it really isn't necessary. While Little Women gives you the perspective of innocent girls protected to some extent from the vulgarities of war, in March the moral dilemnas and the tumultuousness of the Civil War era are blatant and haunting. Mr. March is what I like to call a reckless progressive. A vegetarian preacher, he puts his ideals and those he seeks to save before himself and his family. Although noble, it is foolhearty, and as we find out, reflective of guilt. Although the March girls are seemingly protected from this trauma, largely in part due to Mrs. March, we do see the effects of this recklessness in the battle scars of Mr. March and in the toll it take on the March marriage. More importantly, the book was a grave reminder of the tragedy of war. Although, the Civil War is often immortalized in the minds of Americans as a war for freedom from slavery, we often forget that this freedom came at a huge cost for everyone, slaves included. Like all wars, we tend to forget these costs and remember only the glory and the heroism of winning. In March, we are reminded of the skirmish, the haphazardness, and the physical toll it takes. Although the union was viewed as liberators, the majority of northerners shared the view that the war was only to preserve the union. Many were apalled to think otherwise. It was only a few, the Marches included, who were in it because they reacted to the atrocities and evils of slavery. As a result, we see that the freed slave were often worse off and that there was no real plan in place to transition them. I believe we are still paying the price for this today. I also couldn't help to think of how history repeats itself. Does a haphazard war, in the name of freedom, that is seemingly without a clear plan sound familiar?