BookBrowse Review

When Grace Marks was sixteen years old, she was accused of killing Nancy Montgomery and Thomas Kinnear. On the farm that Kinnear owned, Montgomery and Kinnear had snuck around in secret; they were lovers. After the crime (Kinnear was shot, Montgomery strangled), Grace fled to the United States under an assumed name and was captured. Post-conviction, she received a death sentence, which was commuted to life in prison.

Alias Grace is a historical novel based on this true story that occurred in 1843 in Upper Canada (now Ontario). Written by Margaret Atwood and published nearly thirty years ago, Alias Grace is brilliantly structured in its balance and pacing and lovely prose that explains how violence is built. One parent, one sadness, one jealousy at a time. Atwood supplies a quote before the first page credited to South African writer Eugène Marais: "I cannot tell you what the light is, but I can tell you what it is not." It makes sense to assume Atwood's inclusion of this quote is to explain at the very beginning that her protagonist isn't easily defined or understood, even by Atwood herself. While there is inherent darkness in the escalation of violent behavior, Grace Marks defies a single description, and Atwood isn't going to appease those who want simple classifications.

The novel begins eight years after the murder when Grace is assigned a doctor named Simon Jordan. He is eager to determine if she should be freed but he is also seduced by the science of Grace and the career opportunity she presents: "It is not the question of your guilt or innocence that concerns me. I am a doctor, not a judge. I simply wish to know what you yourself can actually remember."

Atwood navigates the central question of Grace's guilt or innocence by examining her life linearly. Alias Grace is not primarily a story of how Grace feels but rather what Grace remembers. Most of which is forlorn. For instance, when Grace and her family leave Ireland for Canada for better wages, her mother falls ill, and her lifeless corpse is tossed overboard in the middle of the ocean voyage. Grace is bereft. She feels like a refugee. The waves that bounce her mother's corpse into the horizon also carry Grace's dreams of a better life into oblivion.

Atwood implies that immigrants like Grace's family can never achieve happiness. The freight of poverty, displacement, isolation, and abuse are their continuing burdens. Take Grace's father. He is written as bitter and cruel, a violent man who overdrinks. Except for Grace's uncle in Ireland, who engineered a plan to get Grace's father out of the country and out of his hair, none of the men in the novel have redeeming qualities, nor are they moral. It feels ordinary, then, that Grace fantasizes about murdering her father with an iron pot that "could smash his skull open and kill him dead."

Desperate to escape him, she takes a job with the Parkinson family in a snobbish enclave of Toronto. She lives in the attic and shares a bed with Mary Whitney, who works in the laundry. Mary is the first friend Grace ever has, and they love and protect each other ferociously until Mary dies abruptly of a high fever after an abortion. While Mary lies on her deathbed, Grace hears Mary speaking to her, something Dr. Jordan will refer to as an auditory hallucination. Grace sells Mary's few possessions in the days that follow. She admits, "I cried as if my heart would break. I was thinking of my poor mother as well, who'd had no proper burial with dirt on top the way it should be, but was just tossed into the sea."

While Alias Grace is classified as historical fiction, it is also a study of grief, and what grief does to the traumatized mind. Trauma often triggers impulsiveness and violence and misremembering. Grace told multiple stories to the police about what happened to Nancy Montgomery and Thomas Kinnear, which could be the landscape of the liar or the outcome of the mistreated.

After Mary's death, Grace goes to work for Mr. Watson, a shoemaker. She soon discovers that a farmer named Thomas Kinnear is looking for a servant girl, and he pays a hefty sum, more than Grace is making. Grace is fascinated by the opportunity because the housekeeper for Thomas Kinnear is a young woman in her twenties named Nancy Montgomery who reminds Grace of Mary Whitney. She loves to laugh and has beautiful brown eyes. Because the pay is more and because Grace is starving for the company of someone like Mary, she swallows her anxiety about living in the country and takes a coach to Richmond Hill.

Grace reports to Nancy, who oversees all the household staff, and friction begins soon after Grace arrives. This is a country house; Grace is used to aristocracy. Gold watches. Chandeliers. Ballroom-sized dining areas. Her reactions to the house are noticed and to Nancy's way of thinking Grace is ungrateful. She is an immigrant housemaid Nancy has rescued. How dare she thumb her nose at Mr. Kinnear's way of life.

Grace is shrewd and picks up on Nancy's disdain and knows she has to be careful. Nancy is not like Mary Whitney, they will not be sisters or friends, but rather competitors. Nancy's moods are stark and inconsistent. The same woman who gives Grace the day off because it is her birthday calls her a slut because her hair is unpinned when she is scrubbing the floors.

The servant class is the cartilage of Alias Grace. The other side of wealth is the housemaids who work tirelessly, rarely with a day off, and are heavily monitored. The house has to look as if it runs itself, without effort. In the nineteenth century, working immigrant girls were relegated to being housemaids, laundry maids, or lady's maids. Atwood imagines the servants as mostly supportive and clannish, a united front against the accumulation of indignities from their employers.

I was riveted by the character of Grace Marks partly because she was accused when she was sixteen and I wondered what went wrong in her life. What happened to her? I liked the narrowness of the story, and its blatant subjectivity. That said, Atwood sticks to the basics and never tips her hand. She is an experienced storyteller and rarely overwhelms with too much information. What I appreciated the most was her respect for the reader's intelligence, the assumption that we can think for ourselves.

There is a thread of thought I disagree with that remains popular. Awful things happen to horrible people, and so their personal failures and tragedies are deserved. But I believe we have an innate responsibility to know one another, even when that includes the revealing of secrets, inconsistencies, and lies, when people's fragilities are exposed. That makes us more human, not less. The takeaway of Alias Grace is just that. Secrets will be unearthed when you least expect it. Lies will unravel. People do terrible things in silence. What matters is listening to what happened to them when they were supposed to be loved—and were not—before settling on a judgment.

Book reviewed by Valerie Morales

BookBrowse Review

"All men are equal on their holidays: all are free to dream their castles without thought of expense, or skill of architect."

In April 2020, several weeks into a stressful nationwide COVID lockdown in our resident country of Spain, I read an article in which novelists were asked to suggest books that would "inspire, uplift, and offer escape."

Many of the writers didn't seem to understand the assignment. "I don't go to novels for comfort," stated one. Others made decidedly harrowing recommendations, such as one novelist's suggestion of Chuck Palahniuk's bleak satire Survivor (the writer adding, "When I say fun, it's about a death cult, so it's not light fun"). This was not my idea of inspiration, uplift, or comfort—the very elements I craved at that particularly apprehensive moment in history.

Thankfully, Kazuo Ishiguro gave a superb recommendation: R.C. Sherriff's The Fortnight in September, a new-to-me British novel first published in the early 1930s. According to Ishiguro, the novel was "just about the most uplifting, life-affirming novel I can think of right now." Now here was exactly what I was looking for. I immediately ordered a copy, dove in, and lost myself in the story for a few days.

When I learned that BookBrowse reviewers were highlighting older titles in this issue, I remembered The Fortnight in September. While the lockdown phase of the COVID pandemic may be behind us (knock on wood), it feels as though recent tumultuous political events may once again stimulate readers' appetites for novels that provide uplift, escape, and—at least momentary—comfort.

Sherriff's novel follows the Stevens family of Dorset—Ernest, an accounts clerk; his wife, Flossie; daughter Mary (age 19), a dressmaker's assistant; and sons Dick (17), a stationer's clerk, and young Ernie (10)—on their annual two-week family trip to the southern seaside resort town of Bognor Regis (see Beyond the Book) to which they have returned every summer since Mr. and Mrs. Stevens first visited on their honeymoon twenty years earlier.

The book opens with the flurry of preparations taking place the afternoon before the holiday begins, in recognition that anticipation can be the highlight of any journey. The rest of the novel relates the days that follow and in close character observation captures the family's delight in stepping away from routine jobs for two weeks of blissful freedom. What happens, you ask? Well, honestly, not much. Family members gather for meals, play games on the beach, attend a concert, walk along the shore, meet new friends, and attend a fancy lunch at the home of an insufferable wealthy family.

As the focus moves from one character to another, the reader begins to build a sturdy appreciation for the dynamics that create this highly functioning domestic unit. The novel's events are relatively mild, but as they become important to the family, they do to the reader as well. This is a family that shows its connection through small, non-cloying acts of thoughtfulness and kindness. The novel is narrowly focused and provides a compelling exercise in noticing modest joys and overcoming small hurdles.

The Fortnight in September was the first novel by Robert Cedric (R.C.) Sherriff, a young playwright whose 1929 play Journey's End had seen immediate success. The play was based on Sherriff's own traumatic experiences in the First World War; as second lieutenant in the Ninth East Surrey Regiment, he was severely wounded at Ypres (where a horrifying four-fifths of the original British Expeditionary Force were killed) and hospitalized for six months.

This was followed by The Fortnight in September, in many ways the exact opposite of a war novel but still speaking directly to the yearning that must have been felt by Sherriff and other young soldiers when they were stationed far from home. In the novel, Sherriff captures the quiet fulfilment of ordinary lives. "I wanted to write about simple, uncomplicated people doing normal things."

Perhaps this is what Ishiguro had in mind when he recommended the book during the COVID lockdown and why this novel is so enjoyable to read. During those early months of the pandemic, I found myself missing simple things most, like a casual lunch with a friend, a hike with my son, or even a friendly chat with the cafe barista. Comfort lies in reminding ourselves of the familiar, unspectacular moments of ordinary life. Sherriff understands, perhaps as only a veteran of trench warfare can, that in any crisis we most crave the quotidian over the extraordinary.

Book reviewed by Danielle McClellan

BookBrowse Review

Erasure by Percival Everett, first published in 2001, has reached great heights with its author's escalating fame and the 2023 film adaptation American Fiction. But it retains within the confines of its pages an odd smallness. Like much of Everett's work, it feels blunt yet malleable, static but approachable from multiple perspectives, like a sculpture meant to create optical illusions that depend on your particular distance from and orientation to it.

Protagonist Thelonious "Monk" Ellison is a middle-aged professor and writer of relatively obscure intellectual fiction. A significant part of the book centers on Monk's frustration with how he is limited as a Black author. As he struggles with sales, he witnesses others being rewarded with a place in a narrow field of literary success by appealing to white people's desire for representations of Black stereotypes, namely Juanita Mae Jenkins, made famous by her bestseller We's Lives In Da Ghetto. In response, he crafts his own "ghetto" novel that he supposedly intends to be a parody of such books (the full text of which is included within Everett's novel), first called My Pafology—later, Monk insists, under cover of the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, that the title be changed to Fuck. It follows a young man named Van Go Jenkins who turns to a life of crime. Surprisingly for Monk, the book is taken seriously by a publisher and picked up with a hefty advance.

In a simpler novel, the driving force behind Monk's writing of My Pafology/Fuck might only be Jenkins' book. But in the story-outside-the-story, that is, Monk's story, the inciting incident that seems to spur the plot into action is the murder of his sister Lisa, a doctor shot at her clinic serving a poor section of DC, probably by an anti-abortion extremist. Along with the family housekeeper, Lorraine, Lisa has until now taken primary responsibility for the care of her and Monk's mother, who is developing signs of dementia. Their father is long gone, having died by suicide years earlier. Their brother Bill has made a lucrative living as a plastic surgeon, but, having recently admitted to his wife that he is gay, he is in the process of losing nearly everything to her and their children in the separation, and becoming an emotional wreck. All of this leaves Monk to deal with the logistics and finances of their mother's situation, which he means to mitigate with his parody-turned-anticipated-bestseller.

Erasure is many different things. It is narratively challenging—including not just the internal novel but additional snippets of Monk's writing, bursts of Latin and French, and other textual tidbits not immediately obvious in meaning—yet still relatively straightforward, accessible enough to enjoy from beginning to end without picking apart too much. That is, if you choose not to dwell on Monk's notes and elaborations, and thereby miss out on the pleasure of getting lost in a Joycean thicket. It is a linear and entertaining, if dramatic and fever-dreamish, series of events. Its relationship to real-world culture has shifted, somewhat, since first publication. As Everett commented in 2024, the landscape of American publishing has changed in the ensuing years, though the simplified thinking around race that created the conditions featured in Erasure remains. Perhaps partly because of this, it doesn't seem outdated, but another reason for its ongoing relevance is its seemingly endless layers.

One of these is the significant presence of guns, which may not appear significant at first glance because this is a basic reality of America that hasn't shifted much, if at all, since Erasure's release. In Monk's novel, Van is set on obtaining a gun, with which he intends to rob the store of a Korean man he has a grudge against. Monk's father, a veteran of the Korean War, shot himself, and Monk will later find that he was keeping a secret related to his time in the military. One of the events that pushes Monk to finally have his mother committed to a care facility is a nerve-wracking incident in which she aims a loaded gun at him. And of course, Lisa is killed by gunfire in her clinic. A reader can analyze Monk's conscious or subconscious reasons for integrating firearms and certain parallels into his fictional narrative the way he does, to consider what his choices say about the American military's overseas reach and its role in immigration, who is incentivized to join the military, America's cultural weaponization of East Asian immigrants against Black people, and so on. One can also consider the irony that alongside Van's participation in gun violence within his impoverished world, Monk, an educated man from a well-off family who seems to make no habit of being around guns, has been unable to avoid a brush with at least the strong possibility of every type of firearm tragedy: accident, suicide, murder.

But more notable than any of this is that we don't see Monk, a highly analytical thinker, comment on these elements or ponder how he may have put his own experience into his book. What he does dwell on is how the hype around the novel threatens his artistic self. As he attempts to navigate his new universe, appearing in various forms as Stagg Leigh—behind a screen on a talk show, in dark glasses at a meeting about movie rights—he operates as a split personality, and considers how to resolve this. The answer seems obvious. As his agent Yul remarks, his other books will probably sell better once he comes out as the author of this one. But Monk tiptoes around this inevitability like it's an impossibility.

One of Erasure's textual interludes consists of a dialogue between the artists Robert Rauschenberg and Willem de Kooning, based on real events. Rauschenberg offers to fix de Kooning's roof in exchange for a drawing, saying that it doesn't matter what it's of because he intends to erase it. Weeks later, Rauschenberg informs de Kooning that he has erased the drawing, taken credit for this "Erased Drawing" himself, and sold the "erasing."

What is the erasing in Erasure? Stagg Leigh's novel and its hype blotting out the multiplicity of Black literature and existence? The publishing industry and mainstream white readership doing the same and patting themselves on the back for it? Monk erasing himself as a writer with the persona of Stagg Leigh? Or is Everett just messing with us by hinting at there being any one particular parallel to this cute philosophical vignette? The book, with what it leaves out, doesn't allow any of these interpretations to be the only story. With all that's packed into Erasure—its madcap pace, its series of urgent situations, its literary doodlings—it's easy to be distracted, to not notice what's missing. For instance, despite being inside Monk's head, we know so little of his conscious intentions, what he was thinking as he wrote his novel. And what was he thinking and feeling following the death of his sister, a death barely remarked upon, a death inevitably bound up in politics and race but that can finally be assigned no meaning? A better question might be, who would want to think or feel anything about that? To have thoughts and feelings about an event whose reasons or causes do nothing to mitigate its stark, undeniable result, a devastating, violent event whose full impact on Monk we never see—except, of course, in how it seems part of all we do see.

Book reviewed by Elisabeth Cook