BOOK REVIEWS

History reconsidered in fiction and nonfiction, by writers new and known

IN THE UPPER COUNTRY

by Kai Thomas (Viking)

The Underground Railroad didn’t halt abruptly at the U.S.–Canada border. It carried many past this country’s upper reaches, delivering them to rights just barely written into law when Parliament abolished slavery in 1833. Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, and the southern Ontario of Kai Thomas’s luminous debut novel saw settlements of free Blacks take cautious root—farmers and seafarers, craftsmen, teachers, and preachers going assiduously about new daily lives, their joys inevitably tempered by bitter memories, their senses ever alert to threats from their cruel pasts. Thomas’s village of Dunmore is one such place, a destiny and destination particularized by the presence of a young healer and aspiring journalist named Lensinda Martin, whose reportage for The Coloured Canadian puts into written word her neighbors’ news. But when a bounty hunter in pursuit of six Kentucky fugitives dies at the wrong end of a rifle barrel wielded by the very oldest of them, it’s suddenly a reluctant Sinda’s job to help build a defense for the accused that will bring powerful Abolitionists to the rescue and keep roiled white citizens at bay. “I wondered if it was the same in all promised lands,” Sinda asks herself, “there are green pastures and then there are chasms.” All she knows of the bent figure called Cash she’s sent to debrief in jail is that she has a hankering for a “nice bushel of pears” and stories within stories for Sinda to decipher into truth.

As these women face off over past and present, Cash makes further demands: a story for every story, a revelation for each self-disclosure, a personal history for secrets as intricate as the royal African ancestry the two turn out to share. Thomas identifies himself as “a writer, carpenter, and land steward.” He constructs the intensifying suspense of In the Upper Country from layered varieties of recitation: slave narratives and also frontier captivity chronicles, oral histories of unimaginable brutality and deathless devotion, lading papers and bills of sale for human cargo, wanted posters tracking freedom seekers on the run, finely bound documents in the library where Sinda was first taught how to read and write by a kindly benefactor nevertheless a slaveholder.

In the novel’s fully defined realities and mythologies, its lyrical believability, are flashes of Edward P. Jones’s The Known World, Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad, and fellow Canadian Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black. But it is its own work of art with its historically accurate typeface and its telling of the War of 1812 from the vantage point of the side that saw Tecumseh, the “Shooting Star,” a member of the Shawnee Panther clan, lead Canadians into battle against American invaders. Bursts of humor and gentle asides intersperse Sinda’s hardening mission to avert a miscarriage of justice. Kai Thomas keeps us close by her side and her determination to find ways to save a life, and, like Thomas, never let history become a forgetting. —CELIA MCGEE

MARGOT

by Wendell Steavenson (W.W. Norton)

Wendell Steavenson is an American journalist, and the author of three nonfiction books dealing with political upheavals, in Iraq, Egypt, and Georgia. In 2018 she published a novel, Paris Metro, about an Anglo-American journalist in Paris forced to confront the threat of terrorism to her own family. Margot, her second novel, is set in a very different time and place from her earlier books, and far from her experiences covering conflicts in the Middle East for ten years. Nonetheless, there are also explosions for Margot Thornsen, who spends the ’50s growing up sheltered between an apartment on Park Avenue and her family’s estate in Oyster Bay. A lab where the Radcliffe science major is at work will shatter; during the ’60s, she’s part of all manner of revolutions that break out; and she figures in many beautifully written pages of loud and funny conversations that involve her over the years. Steavenson unfolds this life in three parts she calls Beginning, Intermediate, and Advancing, layering them with observations and described experiences that make the novel at once a page-turner, a feminist guide, a science primer, and a vision of what forming the messy and rich life of community means.

Margot rebels against the assumptions about who and what she will be from an early age—that she will adhere to proper cultural protocols, marry well, make nice friends, and live a respectable life as a wife, Upper East Side hostess, and mother. But she can’t. She’s compelled to follow her curiosity beyond dancing school

and debutante balls, and pursue a life of science. She is always following her gaze somewhere else, seeking knowledge the way she climbed trees as a child, past the mossy reaches, catkins, bird nests, towards the palmate canopy of tree leaves under the blue sky, decked out in a party dress and Mary Janes. Blown out of the branches and onto the lawn by a gust of wind, she’s badly bruised. And undeterred. Her mother is furious. Older, she’s exuberant as she ponders the question, "How does the nematode on the flea on the dog look up and understand the moon?"

Margot also becomes a love story. It looks at deep and honest friendships, and it offers a passionate portrayal of how the fierce and furious relationship between a mother and a daughter can turn violent. It is in the tradition of novels about untraditional women—whether Middlemarch, Little Women, Mrs. Dalloway, The Golden Notebook, or almost anything by Cathleen Schine. Warm and witty, it carries its intelligence lightly, and feels like a friend for life. —CAthERINE tALESE

AFTER SAPPHO

by Selby Wynn Schwartz (Liveright)

To study the poet-musician Sappho (c. 630–c. 570 B.C.E.), scholars have mere fragments to consult. “We live/… the opposite/… daring.” “You burn me.” “Someone will remember us/I say/even in another time.” Her words catch the light, sometimes honey-golden, sometimes cool and silver.

Only one complete poem from her nine books remains, we learn in the prologue to After Sappho

As Ian Frazier, a long-standing colleague at The New Yorker, notes in his introduction, Malcolm was ambivalent about autobiography and considered it indulgent. In keeping with this, in reflecting on her life, she chose to rely once more on photography so as not to fall into any revising of personal history. Each of her chapters features a single photograph from a particular time in her life, an entry point into her memories. First, we meet schoolmates as her Jewish family moves from Prague to New York in 1939, escaping the Holocaust; then, a gritty portrait of her girlhood and a direct, if not detached, assessment of her parents (the more affectionately treated is “Daddy”). As she matures, there are her early romances, and, later, her encounters with authors ranging from fellow writers for William Shawn’s New Yorker like Joseph Mitchell and J.D. Salinger to Hannah Arendt, Dwight Macdonald, and Kenneth Tynan, plus reflections on her marriage to the magazine’s courtly Gardner Botsford, and musings on Freud, Roland Barthes, and Chekhov, among others. We get a sense of New York émigré culture, often laced with sardonic Eastern European humor. Malcolm never waxes nostalgic, and not only frequently laments her “bare bones” knowledge of a relative, but regrets her ability to conduct a proper live interview. A journalist above all else.

The very best chapters are those which reprise the unmistakable voice of her brilliant profile of the artist David Salle, “Forty-One False Starts,” or Diana & Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography, to ask: What does the viewer project onto an image? What is true? And exactly how much distance is necessary to see objectively? Malcolm deconstructs the mystique of images so astutely here that it’s hard to believe she was battling cancer at the time, and would soon lose that fight. In the afterword, written by her daughter, Anne Malcolm, we learn that she didn’t get to finish all she intended, and the book was compiled chronologically on her behalf. The pages are honest and vivid, and show Janet Malcolm once again recording life like no one else. —LILy LOpAtE

by Selby Wynn Schwartz, the rest disintegrated to these dactyls. Schwartz’s heady debut novel, longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, channels Sappho’s voice through a chorus of women in Europe and the United Kingdom at the turn of the 20th century. They are poets, actresses, painters, and writers. They fashion themselves and their lives, choosing who to be and whom to love, against laws and attitudes that dictated otherwise. The poet Lina Poletti discards her given name, Cordula, which sounded “like a heap of rope.” The actress Eleonora Duse plays the character Nora in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House—in life and in performance “clicking the door shut on a century of women whose only verb had been to marry.” For Sarah Bernhardt, also an actress, the ordinary is irrelevant: “She slept in a coffin and sailed in a hotair balloon over Paris.”

The chorus that Schwartz assembles gains strength in numbers: Sibilla Aleramo (formerly the obedient Rina Faccio), Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Colette, Isadora Duncan, Eileen Gray, Romaine Brooks, Natalie Barney, and Eva Palmer, among many others. Daringly they test the contours of their worlds, taking on Sappho’s mantle, working toward becoming the women of her words: “not one girl I think/who looks on the light of the sun/will ever/have wisdom/like this.” After Sappho unfolds as a scrapbook of short, pleasurable passages. The stories intertwine, interspersed with Schwartz’s playful readings of manuscripts, articles, plays, civil codes set in context, and, of course, Sappho’s lyrics. The protagonists’ voices start soft, uncertain, selfconscious: “We began writing odes to clover blossoms and blushing apples, or painting on canvases that we turned to the wall at the slightest sound of footsteps.” But they change, curious and emboldened: “We had ivoryhandled knives and were no longer girls. In Odéonia we were acquiring manuals, atlases, translations of Greek tragedies with the choral parts printed on pages we cut open ourselves.”

This unified voice both maintains its ancient register and molds to the times. “Henceforth, we told Natalie Barney, Sappho would wear our clothes with buttons and collars. Sappho would drive our motorcars and write our novels.” As the novel moves from the 19th into the 20th century, it has notes of Katie Roiphe’s Uncommon Arrangements—both books feature the lives of Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge—and an undercurrent of Virginia Woolf, who is instrumental to Schwartz’s project. Woolf wrote, “I want to make life fuller and fuller,” and the line reappears in After Sappho. Full lives are shifting, contradictory, wrestled. We are lucky when their fragments endure. —MELISSA RODMAN

STILL PICTURES: ON PHOTOGRAPHY AND MEMORY

by Janet Malcolm (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Janet Malcolm’s work was, and remains, unsentimental, profound, and precise. Throughout her illustrious career she wrote deeply researched journalism, criticism, and essays, and her gift for language elevated reportage to literature. In addition to writing such seminal books as The Journalist and the Murderer, she enjoyed a nearly 60-year career at The New Yorker. She died at the age of 86 in 2021.

Malcolm frequently wrote about photography, which she decided was a “medium of inescapable truthfulness… The camera does not know how to lie.” And so it’s fitting that her final work, Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory, published posthumously, is centered on that medium. Featuring photographs, letter excerpts, and quotes that also span family history, the book offers a privileged look into Malcolm’s life of the mind, and how she saw the world in her last days.