March by Geraldine Brooks (2005)
I wanted to read this book, and I stupidly mentioned this fact to my co-worker. She then lent it to me and now I've got to finish it before I return it to her. How did this win the Pulitzer Prize? Not only is the prose bad (sometimes fairly laughable), but there's not one original or interesting idea in the entire novel.
March is based on Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. It follows the father of the Little Women, Mr. March, (Geraldine Brooks doesn't give his first name) in 1861 and '62 as he acts as a chaplain for the Union army and later as a teacher to emancipated slaves. The story is told in first person and alternates between his war experiences and his memories of his earlier life. Unfortunately, as told by Brooks, March is a sanctimonious prig (I'm hoping this is intentional and that he'll stop being so insufferable by the end). As an example, he supposedly loves his wife deeply, but most of his memories of her involve him "curbing" her temper and letting her know how a good wife should behave.
In the present narrative, he runs across a lot of terrible Southerners and Union soldiers and is always pleading for justice and kindness with no success. He's almost completely ineffectual at helping people. In Geraldine Brooks' afterward she talks about how she based him on Louisa May Alcott's father, but I hope Amos Bronson Alcott was not such a boob. (One small thing that really bothers me - March is a vegetarian and he's always refusing meat and things cooked with meat or lard. Now, he's in a serious situation and other people around him are starving, and he's turning up his nose at food because it's cruel to eat meat? It's just a bit too nice. I'm also a vegetarian, but this galled me.)
The language in March is very pained and worked over. Here's how Brooks describes a romantic encounter between Grace, a former slave, and March when they meet again after 20 years:
I took Grace's face in my hands and looked into her brimming eyes. She broke away from me.
"What is it?" I whispered.
"It's too late," she said, her voice trembling. "You are not the beautiful, innocent vagabond walking toward me under the dogwood blossoms, with his trunks and his head full of worthless notions. And I am not the beloved, cherished ladies' maid..."
Who describes someone as a "beautiful, innocent vagabond"? And EVERYONE in the book talks like this. Each character sounds not only pompous and erudite, but also like he or she spent weeks working out exactly what to say.
And the plot is so predictable. Every time March arrives at a new place in the South, you just know that some kind of inhuman cruelty is going to take place soon, and then, like clockwork, it does. There is nothing interesting in this book. Nothing that hasn't been shown (in better movies and novels) about a thousand times. The Civil War is pretty well covered territory in the U.S. consciousness, and I think an author should have some kind of new take on it if she's going to write a novel about it. Unfortunately, Geraldine Brooks is not only unoriginal, she's also got the sensibility of a melodramatic teenager. What the reader is left with is a juvenile story riding the coattails of a much better book.
March is based on Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. It follows the father of the Little Women, Mr. March, (Geraldine Brooks doesn't give his first name) in 1861 and '62 as he acts as a chaplain for the Union army and later as a teacher to emancipated slaves. The story is told in first person and alternates between his war experiences and his memories of his earlier life. Unfortunately, as told by Brooks, March is a sanctimonious prig (I'm hoping this is intentional and that he'll stop being so insufferable by the end). As an example, he supposedly loves his wife deeply, but most of his memories of her involve him "curbing" her temper and letting her know how a good wife should behave.
In the present narrative, he runs across a lot of terrible Southerners and Union soldiers and is always pleading for justice and kindness with no success. He's almost completely ineffectual at helping people. In Geraldine Brooks' afterward she talks about how she based him on Louisa May Alcott's father, but I hope Amos Bronson Alcott was not such a boob. (One small thing that really bothers me - March is a vegetarian and he's always refusing meat and things cooked with meat or lard. Now, he's in a serious situation and other people around him are starving, and he's turning up his nose at food because it's cruel to eat meat? It's just a bit too nice. I'm also a vegetarian, but this galled me.)
The language in March is very pained and worked over. Here's how Brooks describes a romantic encounter between Grace, a former slave, and March when they meet again after 20 years:
I took Grace's face in my hands and looked into her brimming eyes. She broke away from me.
"What is it?" I whispered.
"It's too late," she said, her voice trembling. "You are not the beautiful, innocent vagabond walking toward me under the dogwood blossoms, with his trunks and his head full of worthless notions. And I am not the beloved, cherished ladies' maid..."
Who describes someone as a "beautiful, innocent vagabond"? And EVERYONE in the book talks like this. Each character sounds not only pompous and erudite, but also like he or she spent weeks working out exactly what to say.
And the plot is so predictable. Every time March arrives at a new place in the South, you just know that some kind of inhuman cruelty is going to take place soon, and then, like clockwork, it does. There is nothing interesting in this book. Nothing that hasn't been shown (in better movies and novels) about a thousand times. The Civil War is pretty well covered territory in the U.S. consciousness, and I think an author should have some kind of new take on it if she's going to write a novel about it. Unfortunately, Geraldine Brooks is not only unoriginal, she's also got the sensibility of a melodramatic teenager. What the reader is left with is a juvenile story riding the coattails of a much better book.