BookBrowse Reviews A Dangerous Business by Jane Smiley

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A leisurely mystery intersects with a young woman's journey to maturity in 1850s California.

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Jane Smiley, author of the Pulitzer-winning A Thousand Acres, among many other books, begins A Dangerous Business with an amusing note: "I would like to dedicate this novel to all the copy editors who, over many years, have steered me down the path to an understandable and readable book."

Sure enough, A Dangerous Business is nothing if not digestible. Historical fiction for adults, it takes on the guiding, matter-of-fact tone of classic YA literature in the vein of Little House on the Prairie, though the subject matter is quite different. Smiley's novel relates the story of Eliza, a young woman raised in a strict Covenanter (a branch of Presbyterianism) family in Kalamazoo, Michigan, who traveled to Monterey, California during the Gold Rush with her new husband, a brutish man named Peter. After Peter was killed in a bar fight, Eliza accepted an offer of employment from Mrs. Parks, who runs a brothel in town. She subsequently found herself with the independence to enjoy her life free of the expectations that had come with her upbringing and marriage.

In the midst of this new existence and a budding friendship with fellow sex worker Jean, Eliza becomes aware of a possible pattern of violent deaths involving women of their profession. Jean has introduced Eliza to the work of Edgar Allan Poe, and Eliza uses the story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (see Beyond the Book) as a sort of guide when the two begin to investigate the local killings.

In combining these two threads — a coming-of-age tale and a murder mystery plot — Smiley deftly focuses the narrative on her main character's newfound curiosity about the world around her. Eliza wants to find out who has been killing women, but she also wants to better understand herself and others. Her attunement to the details of her surroundings and people she encounters therefore serves a dual purpose: gathering evidence and simply engaging in new experiences and observations. The mystery itself almost receives secondary attention as Eliza's days and nights unroll at a leisurely pace, the narration describing her absorption in the coastal landscape of the area, her meals at a local restaurant called the Bear, and the quirks and backstories of her customers.

While Eliza's relative naivete allows the book to take on an educational tone concerning social and political issues, much of the ensuing commentary doesn't quite land. Discussions of slavery appear with an air of importance but remain surface-level and fail to meaningfully address Eliza's feelings about race as a presumably white woman, and a late revelation about the racial background of another character seems like a well-meaning but shallow effort to insert an element of diversity. Additionally, the supposed difference between the situations of Jean, who is portrayed as gay and works in a brothel that services women, and Eliza, who works with male clients she sometimes feels attraction towards, is starkly and unnecessarily emphasized. Sex between Eliza and her customers is described frankly, while Jean, who is otherwise unselfconscious and worldly, only speaks of her own work to say that the women who come to her place of business are often simply seeking small gestures of affection, resulting in a watered down and generalized view of sapphic sexuality.

A Dangerous Business succeeds best in its quiet focus on the nuances of Eliza's psyche and her growth as a person, which include natural revelations about how the concepts of guilt and innocence are not so clear-cut within an unequal society. When the truth of the murder case is finally revealed, it comes across as fairly anticlimactic, and this is partly because of her mounting understanding of the broader culture of male violence — that "everyone who could have done it…might have done it."

It's also because A Dangerous Business is not primarily the story of the murdered women or the mystery surrounding them, but of Eliza. She understands that she could easily end up a victim herself, and is determined to make the most of the life she has for as long as she has it. Her sober but optimistic attitude imbues Smiley's novel with an off-kilter inspirational appeal: "The tree rustled in the breeze, and Eliza made her New Year's resolution—that, even though she could be one of those who didn't make it to 1854, she did plan to keep her eyes open and do her best to get there."

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in January 2023, and has been updated for the November 2023 edition. Click here to go to this issue.