now finished: March by Geraldine Brooks
up next: something written by a woman because I am reading only books written by women in 2022
Well, damn me if there isn't trouble and forgiveness all around, and within, us.
That is my takeaway from my gal Geraldine's book here. Including that this mirrors my very reading of it. At first (say, 70 to 80 pages in), I was put off, uncomfortable, thoroughly not into her taking this silent side character and imagining him whole, totally disturbed by Mr. March's objectifying of women, of Black women, of people enslaved. I went so far as to not like the book at first. My, how the pages changed me. Because, you will see when you read it, Brooks has done something quite intense in depicting our awfulness without shying away from it, while also solidly reinforcing my very favorite themes:
1. Is redemption possible?
2. Life is a mess, an absolute total mess.
3. You will absolutely fck things up. You will. And you must go on, keep stumbling forward, and try to do better the next day.
(This is the part where I once again cite my favorite MILD SPOILER line from the fantastic film In Bruges SPOILER: "Well, save the next little boy!" I mean, sometimes it's all we can do.)
I am very specifically not going to spoiler March at all, and I hope that you will read it. If you have already read it, feel free to talk to me privately, or talk without spoilers in the comments here, because I would love to know your thoughts.
I am simply going to say that I changed in the course of reading this book from being so powerfully uncomfortable with it existing to realizing the talent and raw power of what Geraldine Brooks has done. And do I now want to read every damn word she has ever written? I do. Do I now regret shelving her and stacking her and mindlessly touching her books over the years without getting around to reading them? I do.
It was inevitable that I would read this one sooner rather than later because hello, Pulitzer. But now I want them all. And I also love reading about her, and ahout how she wrote this book, and about her Bronson Alcott research, and her Australian, worldy, and UnitedStatesian-ness, and her marriage with Tony Horwitz, and how he brought her in some literal and figurative ways to see so much Civil War history.
This book is vivid, and hard to bear. (Do I really need to say it? LIKE LIFE.)
And the insight she has about war with her foreign correspondent experience is next level, combined as it is with her artistic and emotional genius.
Little Women has always, always been about so much more than it might initially seem, and I do think many people realize that, which is good. Despite my resistance to taking it, that something-more aspect, and all the layers of Louisa May Alcott and Concord, are part of why this book March works, too.
Stunned, I immediately wanted upon closing this book to go walk around some Civil War battleground and feel the ghosts. And guess what, turns out that living in Georgia as I randomly do now, I can do just that. But it gets better: where I am in Decatur, in DeKalb County, I just learned, the majority of residents voted in January 1861 to NOT secede, unlike neighboring Atlanta/Fulton County. And during the Battle of Atlanta, Confederate troops attacked General MacPherson's Union troops near the Decatur Courthouse (walking distance from my house), driving them back down the North Decatur Road (my intersection).
I mean... as Amy (Ray, Indigo Girls) sings, "...before I realized / everywhere I stand..."
Amy Ray being from Decatur and having taken those names Jonas and Ezekiel from tombstones she saw one day in a slave cemetery...
My godz but we are all so fortunate to get to live and learn and feel pain and grow and read and write about it.
Interpersonal relationships (as other Indigo Girl Emily Saliers would say) are so hard.
Geraldine Brooks has scarred me. She's wondrous.
