March: A Novel
- Book Review,
by Geraldine Brooks
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Brooks's luminous second novel, after 2001's acclaimed Year of Wonders, imagines the Civil War experiences of Mr. March, the absent father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. An idealistic Concord cleric, March becomes a Union chaplain and later finds himself assigned to be a teacher on a cotton plantation that employs freed slaves, or "contraband." His narrative begins with cheerful letters home, but March gradually reveals to the reader what he does not to his family: the cruelty and racism of Northern and Southern soldiers, the violence and suffering he is powerless to prevent and his reunion with Grace, a beautiful, educated slave whom he met years earlier as a Connecticut peddler to the plantations. In between, we learn of March's earlier life: his whirlwind courtship of quick-tempered Marmee, his friendship with Emerson and Thoreau and the surprising cause of his family's genteel poverty. When a Confederate attack on the contraband farm lands March in a Washington hospital, sick with fever and guilt, the first-person narrative switches to Marmee, who describes a different version of the years past and an agonized reaction to the truth she uncovers about her husband's life. Brooks, who based the character of March on Alcott's transcendentalist father, Bronson, relies heavily on primary sources for both the Concord and wartime scenes; her characters speak with a convincing 19th-century formality, yet the narrative is always accessible. Through the shattered dreamer March, the passion and rage of Marmee and a host of achingly human minor characters, Brooks's affecting, beautifully written novel drives home the intimate horrors and ironies of the Civil War and the difficulty of living honestly with the knowledge of human suffering. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Early in Louisa May Alcott's novel Little Women, the March girls receive a letter from their father. About this letter, Alcott writes, "little was said of the hardships endured, the dangers faced, or the homesickness conquered; it was a cheerful, hopeful letter full of lively descriptions." Mr. March spends much of Alcott's novel exiled from the story, serving as a chaplain for the Union during the Civil War.Geraldine Brooks's new novel, March, reverses this. March begins with that same letter as it is written, or one very like it. But in this book the stress falls on the cost of saying little about hardship, danger and homesickness. The effort of writing such a letter underscores one of Brooks's consistent themes -- that the distance between the man at war and the women at home is unbridgeable. Increasingly the family must be protected from what the man has seen and done -- protected from who the man has become. In one of his letters home, Mr. March, Brook's central character, chooses to focus on the natural world. "Spring here is not spring as we know it: the cool, wet promise of snowmelt and frozen ground yielding into mud. Here, a sudden heat falls out of the sky one day, and one breathes and moves as if deposited inside a kettle of soup." About another letter he says simply that though he promised to write, "I never promised I would write the truth." Today, when the reading of the names of fallen soldiers has been censured as an unpatriotic act, Brooks's decision to show both the details of war and the silence that grows up around those details is timely. In her previous book, Year of Wonders, a story set during the years of the Black Plague, Geraldine Brooks proved herself to be a wonderful novelist. March has all the same virtues -- clarity of vision, fine, meticulous prose, the unexpected historical detail, a life-sized protagonist caught inside an unimaginably huge event. It shows the same seamless marriage of research and imagination.When Alcott wrote Little Women, she created a confusion between the real Alcotts and the fictional Marches. Geraldine Brooks continues this fruitful confusion. Among the characters in Brooks's book are the historical (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Brown), the quasi-historical (the Marches), and the fully fictional (Grace Clement, a slave March knew as a young man and meets again during the war). Mr. March is something like Louisa May Alcott's father, Bronson Alcott, in conviction, though with differences in experience and temperament. Accounts of Mr. Alcott suggest that he was highly principled and maybe a bit parasitic, depending on frequent financial support from his friends and family. In Louisa May Alcott's (and Brooks's) depiction of the character, the principled half is emphasized. Brooks's March is a well-meaning man, highly tuned to the frequencies of his own guilt and inadequacy. The war gives him ample occasion for expiation. It also provides endless opportunities for disastrous new mistakes.Brooks's version of March's story is both harrowing and moving. She organizes her plot around four interludes. There is an episode from March's youth: At 19, as an impoverished Yankee peddler, he was a guest at a plantation in Virginia. Here he was briefly seduced by the leisurely life of books and philosophy that slaveholders could afford. A second storyline focuses on the abolitionists in New England. March meets the activist Margaret Day (the Marmee of Little Women) as well as John Brown and the Transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau.A third episode takes place in Union-occupied Mississippi, where an Illinois attorney has leased a cotton plantation. The plantation workers are ex-slaves, now entitled to wages, and under tenuous Union protection. As a chaplain in the army, March has proved too radical to suit either his superiors or the troops. He is sent here instead to organize a school for the newly freed and their children. The issue of the treatment of ex-slaves under Union occupation is one of the less familiar stories of the Civil War, and Brooks is most effective throughout this section. She details the compromises made and the compromises refused while the sense of danger threatening the little community grows ever more palpable. The final episode takes place in a Union hospital in Washington, D.C. For this part of the story, Brooks switches to Marmee's point of view, a move that brings us suddenly and nicely back to the world of Little Women. The Alcott book and characters have floated like ghosts all through March. That story of scorched gowns, amateur theatricals, pickled limes, balls and picnics and pianos provides a wonderfully effected, unstated but understood contrast to this story of the war. Brooks has taken a chance in evoking it so strongly at the end, but the chance pays off beautifully. March is an altogether successful book, casting a spell that lasts much longer than the reading of it. Reviewed by Karen Joy Fowler Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
By throwing the dreamer John March into America’s Civil War, Brooks explores in detail how one man struggles to live honestly, let alone live, through wartime. Her second novel is “a moving and inspirational tour de force,” says the Los Angeles Times critic Heller McAlpin, and he’s certainly not alone. Reviewers were almost universally won over by, and emotionally invested in, this memoir-like tale. Brooks doesn’t hesitate to plumb the morally gray complications of war; in fact, many critics call the darker undertones a significant and mature strength, especially when compared with Little Women.Other pluses: minor characters are exquisitely rendered and include several real-life figures, and Brooks’s prose is lush and evocative. The writing style, while true to the time period, might strike some readers as overly elaborate, but it also demonstrates the author’s painstaking research.Admittedly, Louisa May Alcott’s story has been labeled sentimental. So it’s no surprise that a few critics find some schmaltzy missteps in March. Grace’s storyline, in particular, has the feel of a historical romance. The New York Times critic Thomas Mallon calls the treatment of African-Americans throughout the novel “treacly and embarrassing,” but he’s the only one to cite this problem. Overall, March offers a provoking, intimate portrait of life during wartime and the difficult questions we face about loyalty, morality, and love. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From Booklist
Brooks' first novel (Year of Wonders, 2001) was a straightforward historical novel of the plague. For her second novel, she has come close to creating a new genre; she imagines the life of Captain March, the father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. This technique has been done before, most famously in Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea. Brooks, however, has combined this idea with two other genres, historical fiction and fictionalized biography. The results, however, are mixed. March appears, much like Bronson himself, as a man whose convictions tread a thin line between admirable and aggravating. He is pure to the point of being ineffectual, and noble to the point of stupidity. The nineteenth-century writing style is accurate and entertaining, but it may be too ornate for some readers. The best moments in the narrative are the peeks inside the mind of the long-suffering Marmee, and thus we learn where Jo gets her famous spunk. Marta Segal
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Los Angeles Times
A beautifully wrought story about how war dashes ideals, unhinges moral certainties and drives a wedge... between [spouses].
Chicago Tribune
A very great book. [I]t breathes new life into the historical fiction genre... I give it a hero's welcome.
Denver Post
A spell-binder. March [is] an engrossing, thought-provoking tale.
Portland Oregonian
A gripping story of an impossible time, and a neat deconstruction and reconstruction of one of American literature's best-known families.
Christina Schwarz, Atlantic Monthly
Inspired... Brooks dares to create a man of his times.
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
Brooks' talent lies in her ability to bring life and personality to history.
Christian Science Monitor
A wholly original and engrossing story.
Book Description
As the North reels under a series of unexpected defeats during the dark first year of the war, one man leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause. His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs. Riveting and elegant as it is meticulously researched, March is an extraordinary novel woven out of the lore of American history. From Louisa May Alcott’s beloved classic Little Women, Geraldine Brooks has taken the character of the absent father, March, who has gone off to war, leaving his wife and daughters to make do in mean times. To evoke him, Brooks turned to the journals and letters of Bronson Alcott, Louisa May’s father—a friend and confidant of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. In her telling, March emerges as an idealistic chaplain in the little known backwaters of a war that will test his faith in himself and in the Union cause as he learns that his side, too, is capable of acts of barbarism and racism. As he recovers from a near mortal illness, he must reassemble his shattered mind and body and find a way to reconnect with a wife and daughters who have no idea of the ordeals he has been through. Spanning the vibrant intellectual world of Concord and the sensuous antebellum South, March adds adult resonance to Alcott’s optimistic children’s tale to portray the moral complexity of war, and a marriage tested by the demands of extreme idealism—and by a dangerous and illicit attraction. A lushly written, wholly original tale steeped in the details of another time, March secures Geraldine Brooks’s place as an internationally renowned author of historical fiction.
About the Author
Geraldine Brooks is the author of Year of Wonders and the nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence. Previously, Brooks was a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, stationed in Bosnia, Somalia, and the Middle East.
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