Tag: historical fiction

Day 410: Inheritance

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Cover for Southern Son: InheritanceIt seems extremely difficult to write a novel about an actual historical person. The writer must strike some kind of balance between doing justice to the person and to actual events and inventing details and dialogue to make the novel interesting. As well as having to invent huge swaths of the subject’s life, I am guessing that the author sometimes has to struggle with whether to include all the known events, especially if they don’t fit in with the author’s view of the subject’s character.

Inheritance, the first book of a trilogy about John Henry (Doc) Holliday, shows evidence of a great deal of research. It begins when Holliday is ten years old, shortly before he finds out his mother is dying from tuberculosis, or consumption. The novel follows his life until his departure from his home state of Georgia for Texas when he is twenty-one.

The engaging Doc by Mary Doria Russell, which I read a few years ago, revealed Holliday as a much-misunderstood individual, demonstrating how his reputation as a gunslinger was exaggerated by the press from a few incidents, showing his innate courtesy and all his contradictions. Despite its obvious intentions, Inheritance had the opposite effect on me, at times making me lose a considerable amount of my sympathy for him.

One false step is taken, I think, by starting the story so early in his life. He is supposed to gain our sympathy as a motherless boy with a stiff and judgmental father, but the depiction of children in this novel is not convincing. In fact, at the beginning of the novel I was troubled by flat characterization, as most of the main characters’ relatives and acquaintances have only one quality. His cousin Robert is competitive, his mother and cousin Mattie are loving, and so on. Only very slowly do some of the characters develop a few other dimensions.

The novel is written in a workmanlike style, a little too given to clichés, but certainly fluent enough except for a tendency to use “refugee” as a verb. There is some evidence of this usage as a colloquialism, especially during the Civil War, but it is used here in the narrative as well as in the dialogue.

Although the point of view appears to be third-person limited, at times it slips into third-person omniscient, which causes some confusion and a problem. Certainly, I do not hold with changing a person’s views to make that character more acceptable for the current time. Even when a fictional historical character has too modern a viewpoint, that bothers me. Holliday is definitely depicted as a racist who treats African-American characters even worse than I would expect from a character self-described countless times as a “gentleman.” So, when the reader cannot always discern the attitudes of Holliday from the attitudes of the narrator, the effect is unfortunate.

Overall, Inheritance is a novel that balances a great deal of knowledge of its subject with some inexperience in writing.

I received this book through a giveaway from Unabridged Chick.

Day 407: This House Is Haunted

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Cover for This House Is HauntedThis House Is Haunted fittingly begins when Eliza Caine and her father decide to attend a reading by Charles Dickens of his ghost story A Christmas Carol. Unfortunately, Eliza’s father takes a chill as a result of this outing and dies.

It is not long before the landlord informs Eliza that, rather than owning the house she has lived in all her life, her father had been leasing it, and the rent is exorbitant, too much for a schoolteacher to afford. Grief-stricken Eliza rather hastily decides that she wants to change her life, so she applies for a job as governess at Gaudlin Hall.

With this Dickensian beginning and the title of the novel, it is no surprise that Eliza will soon find herself living in a haunted mansion.

In fact, things become strange before Eliza even arrives at the house. In the station at Norwich, she feels someone push her in front of a train, and she only survives because a Mr. Toxley pulls her back. When Mr. Toxley and his friendly wife learn of her destination, however, they react oddly.

Eliza is especially taken aback by her reception in her new home. After being dropped at the house by Heckley, the surly and taciturn coachman, she is received by the children, Isabella and Eustace Westerley. No adults but Heckley are anywhere to be seen. She was engaged by an H. Bennet, whom she believed to be the master, but no one by that name resides at the Hall. When she finally gets a chance to talk with the Gaudlin solicitor, Mr. Raisin, he is evasive. The villagers behave oddly when they find out who she is. And the situation soon gets a lot worse.

All of this is a lead-in to a pleasantly creepy ghost story of a Victorian nature, with reminders of Jane Eyre and The Turn of the Screw. The narrative style is convincingly appropriate, more inclined to the descriptive than the conversational and old-fashioned without being difficult for the modern reader.

image for NetgalleyIf I have any complaint at all, it is that the title itself telegraphs a little too much too early. I did not feel the chill that I sometimes feel when a ghost story takes me by surprise. In addition, the style of writing itself promotes a lightness of tone that never led me to dread. In general, though, I found the novel entertaining and endearingly old-fashioned in style and tone.

Day 405: The Child’s Child

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Cover for the Child's ChildEven though The Child’s Child is a relatively short novel, it seems to take a long time to get to the payoff. Although Barbara Vine’s novels are more character studies than thrillers, they always involve a certain amount of suspense.

This book uses a novel-within-a-novel structure, with the exterior novel taking place in 2011 while the interior one begins in 1929. The themes of unwed motherhood and homosexuality and the extent to which both are stigmatized are the same in both stories.

Grace Easton is a graduate student working on a thesis about the portrayal of unwed mothers in literature. She and her brother Andrew have inherited a house and impulsively decide to share it instead of selling it. However, they have not discussed issues such as how to deal with prospective mates, and soon enough Andrew, who is gay, has brought home James, a writer. Grace and James do not get on, and she begins to feel uncomfortable in her own home.

One evening Andrew and James witness a brutal crime against a gay friend, about which they will be called upon to testify. James is extremely upset by this event, and his reaction leads to unforeseen complications.

Grace has promised to read the manuscript (the interior novel) written by an acquaintance’s father with a view to telling the acquaintance whether it is publishable. She has been avoiding reading it while she works on her thesis but finally begins. We are led to understand that, while presented as a novel, it is actually a true story of the writer’s relative.

In the interior novel, Maud Goodwin becomes pregnant at fifteen and is immediately rebuffed by her family, with the exception of her brother John. John has recently taken a new job in a different county, and his solution to his sister’s problem is to set up housekeeping with her, the two of them posing as husband and wife to avoid her shame. John is homosexual, which of course was illegal in those days, and has vowed to remain celibate, so he knows he will never marry.

The interior novel takes up the bulk of the book, which I found unfortunate. I thought John was in some ways foolish, and Maud becomes a bitter, ungrateful woman. My immediate thought, even as John was deciding what to do, was that Maud’s situation could just as effectively and more sensibly have been taken care of by her posing as a widow and sharing a house with her brother.

Sadly, John lacks judgment in where he bestows his affections, and when he chooses a partner he basically seals his fate. I had some sympathy for John, but he exits the novel fairly early on, and I grew to dislike Maud more and more.

It isn’t until the narrative returns to the present time that I feel the novel regains its focus and finally provides some payoff, and the long-anticipated suspense. In addition, sadly, the themes of the novel seem labored and obvious, to the point where the author has characters voicing them instead of letting the reader figure them out. If you want to try Barbara Vine, the name Ruth Rendell uses for her psychological suspense novels, I suggest instead A Dark-Adapted Eye, which is one of my favorites.

Day 403: The Town

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Cover for The TownThe Town is the second of Faulkner’s “Snopes” novels about the rise to power of Flem Snopes in Jefferson, Mississippi. Written in a style that is remindful of a bunch of old Southern men sitting on the porch swapping stories, it is narrated by three different alternating voices. As a pioneer in novels with multiple narrators, Faulkner is a master.

One of the narrators is a character we met already in The Hamlet, V. K. Ratliff, the itinerant sewing machine salesman who is most knowledgeable about Snopes’ true character, having been deeply scorched by him. Ratliff enlists the Jefferson city attorney, Gavin Stevens, in his observations of Snopes. The third narrator is Charles Mallison, Stevens’ nephew, who tells us himself that he wasn’t even alive during the times of his first tales but was told the stories by his cousin Gowan.

The novel covers the events of nearly 20 years, from the arrival of the Snopes family in Jefferson to the events shortly following the death of Flem’s wife Eula. Although some of the events are tragic, the tone of The Town is more comic than that of The Hamlet, perhaps because the lives of the folks in Jefferson are not as grim as those of the poor sharecroppers in the first novel.

The novel focuses first on the young Gavin’s infatuation with Eula Snopes. Rumor has it that Snopes’ appointment as power-plant supervisor–highlighted by his attempted theft of all the plant’s brass fixtures accompanied by an effort to frame the plant’s two black firemen for the theft–is in return for him closing his eyes to his wife Eula’s affair with Manfred de Spain, the town’s mayor. Young Gavin, newly returned from university at the time, is incensed by this rumor and determined to protect Mrs. Snopes’ reputation. Later, as Eula’s daughter Linda grows up, Gavin tries to save her from “Snopesism” by helping educate her and trying to get her a place in an eastern university.

These two novels are fascinating because of Faulkner’s ability to make central a character who barely has a line of dialogue in either book. He effectively makes Snopes the major presence in the novels by having the other characters observe the results of his actions while endlessly speculating about what he actually does and why he does it. As always with Faulkner, the prose is beautiful.

Day 402: Dust and Shadow

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Cover for Dust and ShadowIn Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson, Lyndsay Faye combines a great deal of research into the Jack the Ripper killings in 1888 with a vast knowledge of Sherlock Holmes literature to offer an entertaining solution to the crimes. The novel begins nearly 50 years after the events, when Dr. Watson places his narrative of the murders into a safety deposit box on the eve of war.

Inspector Lestrade comes to consult Holmes after the second murder, when police begin to realize the two deaths may be linked. Holmes immediately begins pursuing his usual means of detection–inspecting the body and the scenes of the crimes, trying to find out where the victims were last sighted, questioning the victims’ friends–and he very quickly figures out that another murder is related. He even hires an alert young prostitute, Mary Ann Monk, to make her own enquiries and observations after she identifies the body of her friend, Mrs. Nichols. However, he is soon frustrated by his lack of progress. The only lead Holmes has come across is the story of an elusive sailor, being sought by a friend who thinks he may have been involved in the first murder, that of Mrs. Nichols.

Soon Holmes and Watson have something else to worry about, for a member of the press is printing details of the crimes unknown to but a few. He has been alleging that Holmes himself may be the murderer.

Faye’s novel is atmospheric and absorbing. Its greatest accomplishment, though, is in successfully capturing the narrative style of Doctor Watson, making us believe that this could be a Holmes story. Although I was about 100 pages ahead of Holmes in solving the murder (which would never happen in a real Holmes story), I still found the solution ingenious as well as the reason why the crimes are recorded in history as unsolved (when, of course, Holmes solved them). This novel is a very good first effort. I have Faye’s next book awaiting me in my pile.

Day 401: Literary Wives: Ahab’s Wife Or, The Star-Gazer

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Cover for Ahab's WifeToday I am doing something a little different–participating in a virtual book-discussion group with Literary Wives. Literary Wives is a group of bloggers who are wives and are reading books about how wives are depicted in fiction. Toward the end of my normal review of this month’s choice, I will answer some specific questions that appear in every Literary Wives review. Be sure to check out the other reviews by Audra of Unabridged Chick, Ariel of One Little Library, Emily of The Bookshelf of Emily J., Carolyn of Rosemary and Reading Glasses, Cecilia of Only You, and Lynn of Smoke and Mirrors.

I have quite got to like what appears to be a newish fashion of rewriting works of fiction from a different viewpoint. Although it has produced some mediocre results, it has also produced some gems, a few of which are Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, The Solitary House by Lynn Shepherd, and now, Ahab’s Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund.

I was somewhat put off by Naslund’s writing style in her most recent novel, The Fountain of St. James Court; however, it is imminently suited to her most well-known novel, this one, which is a reworking of Moby Dick. This novel is truly an adventure. It begins with a brief look forward to Una Spenser’s delivery alone in a cabin in the wilds of Kentucky of Ahab’s child, which does not live long, and the subsequent discovery that her mother has died in the snow while going for help. If this isn’t enough going on, while she is in labor, Una also has an encounter with bounty hunters looking for an escaped slave. Later, she helps the slave girl escape.

After this glimpse ahead in time, the novel returns to take a relatively straightforward path, beginning with twelve-year-old Una’s banishment from this same cabin in Kentucky. Una has faced some abuse at the hands of her father because of a difference in religious beliefs, so her mother sends her to her Aunt Agatha and Uncle Jonathan, where they live on a lighthouse island off Massachusetts. So begins Una’s fascination with the sea.

Although not every 19th century woman would think life with a loving, thoughtful, intellectually curious family confining, Una eventually finds it so, when she is sixteen. Her feelings are complicated by the arrival of two young men who come to prepare for the installation of a new light for the lighthouse. They are best friends Giles Bonebright and Kit Sparrow. Una knows she likes them both but is not at first sure which one she likes best. This fateful meeting is to affect the rest of Una’s life.

But I am writing nothing here that reflects how unusual this novel is. First, it documents the extraordinary life of an extremely uncommon character. If some of the other characters are not so fully drawn, you really feel as if you know Una. Next, in its occasional long asides and fits of oratory, it is a fitting companion to Moby Dick, with its dissertations on bits of whaling gear and its exhortations by Ahab. If any woman is a match for Ahab, Una is. Finally, its language and ideas are lyrical and soaring, as Una grows intellectually, meets her own life full on, and becomes acquainted with historical figures from her time and place.

If I have a caveat, it is that I feel the exceptional Una would have had more problems of acceptance in the actual 19th century American setting. In keeping with a theme about the enjoyment of life, not only does Una throw off debillitating experiences with little trouble or regret, but she also finds warm friends and acceptance everywhere she goes. It would give away too many plot points to discuss why I find this unlikely.

For Literary Wives: What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife?Literary Wives logo

This novel does not draw on a conventional idea of a wife, particularly for the time it is set. For Una, being a wife seems to mean giving unstinting loyalty up to a point, but this loyalty can vanish fairly quickly if the relationship becomes disrespectful, and Una’s natural ebulliance takes her over some terrible difficulties with relative (and perhaps unlikely) ease.

I don’t think Una lets the conventional notions of wifehood affect her at all. She just does what she wants and what she thinks is right, but her ideas of right are different from other people’s. For her, a husband seems to be the more modern idea of a partner. Certainly, mutual respect, sexual attraction, and love enter into this equation but not so much the typical 19th century idea of duty.

In what way does this woman define “wife”–or in what way is she defined by “wife”?

I don’t think Una is defined by “wife” at all. I think “person” is more what Naslund is interested in. In a review of this book, it was referred to as a feminist, earth mother, reinterpretation of Moby Dick. I don’t see the earth mother so much, but the feminism is certainly there. “What was a promise? A way to enslave the future to the past,” Una thinks at one point.

Day 398: The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton

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Cover for The Strange Fate of Kitty EastonIf you prefer a book to leap immediately into action, this is probably not the mystery for you. The second in a series, it starts slowly, with Speller taking the time to develop the setting and characters.

Laurence Bartram is a young man damaged by World War I, during which his wife and child died and he was injured. Laurence is an expert on church architecture, and he is happy to be summoned to the estate of Easton Deadall by his friend, William Bolitho. William wants him to look over  a small but unusual church, for which William is designing and installing a window.

Laurence is soon pulled into the affairs of the Eastons, a family that is haunted by the war, but moreso by the disappearance in 1911 of the young daughter of Digby Easton, the oldest of the three Easton brothers. Digby died during the war, but Kitty still obsesses her mother Lydia, an invalid who sometimes speaks of her as if she is alive.

The middle Easton son, Julian, has been doing his best with the estate, which Laurence finds beautiful but slightly crumbling, while Lydia’s sister Frances takes care of her. Laurence finds the subject of Kitty lurking behind every conversation and wonders if they will discover her body in the course of their renovations. Soon, the third Easton brother, Patrick, returns to Easton Deadall after an absence of years, first at Oxford and then on an archaeological dig in Greece. It becomes obvious that there is tension between him and Julian.

The family decides to make up a party to visit the Empire Exhibition. William, who was left wheelchair bound by the war, does not feel he can handle it, and Lydia is too ill, but the rest of the family goes. The expedition includes Eleanor, William’s wife, and Laurence. They also bring along David, the estate’s man of all work, and the teenage maid Maggie to help care for William and Eleanor’s young son Nicholas. At the exhibition, Maggie and Nicholas go missing, and although the others find Nicholas, Maggie is nowhere to be seen.

Distressed by Maggie’s disappearance, which can’t but echo the earlier one of Kitty, the family begins falling apart and secrets emerge, especially about the charismatic Digby and his relationships to his family and to his troops during the war. A few days after the disastrous outing, Laurence and David are clearing an area in the church to prepare for the installation of William’s window when they discover a trap door in the floor under the altar. When they open it, they find the body of a woman. The police are able to quickly ascertain that the body is of a woman too old to be Maggie, but then, who can it be? Could it even be Kitty, grown up and returned from wherever she has been?

Laurence does not exactly detect so much as look into a few things the others haven’t thought of, and he eventually unearths a tangle of secrets. Although the novel takes awhile to get going, I soon found myself unable to put it down. It slowly and skillfully builds to suspense. I found it well worth my patience.

Day 397: Sylvester, or the Wicked Uncle

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Cover for SylvesterOn occasion, I reread a few of Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances, which have been some of my favorite reading for many years. Just recently, I reread Sylvester, which in some editions is titled Sylvester, or the Wicked Uncle.

The extremely eligible bachelor Sylvester, Duke of Salford, has decided to take a wife. His only difficulty is in deciding which of five eligible girls to marry. When his beloved mama mentions that she and her best friend made a plan for their children to marry many years before, he decides to go inspect the girl, his godmother’s granddaughter, to see if he might like her. Although he is warm and thoughtful to those he cares for, since his twin brother’s death, he has been aloof to others and comes off as haughty.

Sylvester’s visit is disguised as a hunting party, but Phoebe Marlow is informed by her detestable stepmother that the duke is coming to make her an offer. Unfortunately, Phoebe has already met Sylvester and took such a dislike to him that she used him as the villain in a novel she wrote. That novel is going to be published, despite all expectation. Normally, she would not expect him to recognize himself in a silly gothic romance that pokes fun at various society figures, but for the mention of Sylvester’s very distinctive eyebrows.

Fearful of her stepmother’s pressure and not understanding that Sylvester has no intention of proposing, Phoebe talks her childhood friend Tom into escorting her to her grandmother’s house. However, an accident and a snowstorm strand her and Tom with Sylvester in a small country inn.

After Phoebe gets to know and like Sylvester, she is horrified to find out that he has a nephew, since in her silly romance his character is a wicked uncle who wants to steal his nephew’s fortune. Another horror lurks, because Phoebe’s book proves to be a smashing success, much read by society members, who are all trying to identify their friends. Since Phoebe has never brought herself to admit to Sylvester that she wrote a book, she soon fears that people will find out she is the author.

Heyer creates delightful, engaging characters and puts them into silly and unbelievable situations, which is part of the pleasure of reading her novels. They are very well written, with entertaining and sparkling dialogue and a complete understanding of the customs, dress, and speech of the period. If you decide to read Sylvester, get ready for some fun. Many of Heyer’s novels have been re-released in the past few years, so they should not be hard to find.

Day 394: The Fountain of St. James Court or, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman

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Cover for The Fountain of St. James CourtI received this book in a First Reads giveaway from Goodreads. I haven’t read Naslund before, so I am not sure whether she adapted her writing style for this novel, but it took me awhile to accustom myself to it. She follows the activities of two artists, one Kathryn Callaghan, a fictional older writer in the current time, and the other a once-living person, Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun, a painter known especially for her portraits of Marie Antoinette.

The modern-day story begins at midnight next to a fountain of Venus in a neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky. Kathryn, or Ryn, is taking her newly finished manuscript to her friend Leslie’s door because she can’t wait to deliver it.

The novel’s structure is a book within a book. Chapters following one day in Ryn’s life are interleaved with chapters covering the whole of Vigée-Le Brun’s life, which are from Ryn’s book. Both stories are about the theme of what it means to be an artist and what you must give up of your personal life to pursue your profession. The novel is said to be a deliberate variation on Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, but it has been so long since I’ve read it that I cannot comment on that.

This novel is contemplative, especially in the modern-day narrative, but the interleaving of stories in such short chapters slows down the pace too much. It literally takes until page 34 for Ryn to walk across the street and deliver the manuscript. Even with some chapters from the 18th century interleaved, the pace is frustrating. I found myself thinking, when is this woman going to make it across the street?

I found the story of Vigée-Le Brun’s life more compelling than the modern-day story, during which we follow Ryn’s every thought. She is an excitable, emotional woman who contemplates everything she looks at and repeatedly broods over the same things. We read about the russet and yellow fall colors or the appearance of the fountain many times. Nothing much happens all day until a late-night confrontation that seems artificially created to provide some tension.

I did not feel, however, that the two women, Ryn and Vigée-Le Brun, were two different people–they seemed to be the same person in different time periods. Vigée-Le Brun is slightly less emotionally excitable than Ryn, but their observations of the world around them, their attention to color and the details of design and structure, are very similar. Vigée-Le Brun’s narrative style, in first person where Ryn’s is in third person, is a little more formal as befitting an earlier age, but conversations in this story often sound stilted, and her first conversation with Marie Antoinette is positively sycophantic.

Naslund’s writing style, although sometimes vibrant and lyrical, often seems affected, particularly in the modern-day story. The copy I read was an advanced reader’s edition and it had quite a few typos, which I assume will be corrected. I was not quite as sure of some self-consciously unusual phrases, whether they were stylistic choices rather than errors. Naslund’s writing style tends to the unusual, to be sure, but I stumbled over some of these phrases. The only one I wrote down was an instance where some characters “made quick chat.”

I wanted to like this novel more than I did. I think the theme of women and art is worth exploring, although I’m not sure how much this novel actually explored this issue, despite its obvious intentions. I am actually curious about the alleged feminist leanings of Naslund and their effect on this book. Vigée-Le Brun has to put up with her father and then husband appropriating all her money and, in her husband’s case, only giving her a bit of it back as an allowance. When they divorce, he gets almost everything. Yet, she is determined not to let it bother her. I am not sure whether that is a feminist viewpoint or not.

However, the characters in this novel certainly reflect the “gift for pleasure” noted in reviews of Ahab’s Wife (which I am currently reading). The women go on pursuing their lives and dreams without much heed to their menfolk, they have cordial relations with those around them, they delight in color and the fineness of life. Their regrets and sorrows mostly focus on their children.

One thing that surprised me about the historical story was that Vigée-Le Brun hardly seemed to notice the causes of the French revolution or the revolution itself. There is one scene where a woman confronts her on the street and another where she grieves for the fate of so many. That’s about it.

Conversely, it is hard to believe that she would be shocked to the core by seeing a model of internal organs, as artists had been studying the body for hundreds of years. I do not know how much of this novel actually reflects Vigée-Le Brun’s true thinking and feeling. The danger when portraying a historical person is that you are imagining who the person really is–you don’t know–and you have no idea if you are doing them justice or injustice.

Day 383: The Hamlet

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Cover for The HamletWhen I got into The Hamlet a bit, I realized that a bastardized version of it had been released as a movie years ago called The Long, Hot Summer. But Paul Newman’s charming rascal is not at all the same animal as his original, Flem Snopes, a despicable man who rises in life using chicanery, cheating, and blackmail to wrest what he can from the poorest of the poor.

The Hamlet is part of a trilogy of novels about the history of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, beginning shortly after Reconstruction. In particular, it is about the rise of Snopes, the son of an impoverished sharecropper. It begins when Jody Varner, the son of Frenchman’s Bend’s most powerful citizen, Will Varner, leases a property to Snopes’s father Ab, suspected of being a barn-burner. Jody thinks he’ll be able to cheat Snopes out of his yearly crop by alluding to his alleged crimes at the appropriate time. But soon he is more inclined to fear that Snopes will burn him out, so he offers Snopes’s son Flem a job as clerk in the Varner store as insurance.

Soon Jody has lost his own position as manager of the store to Flem Snopes and Snopes has apparently taken over Jody’s standing with his own father. Somehow Snopes begins accruing valuable property and gives away many of the jobs in the village, over which Will Varner has control, to Snopes cousins, whether they are capable of doing them or not. Eventually, he makes a deal to marry Will Varner’s young daughter, the voluptuous Eula.

Life among the Frenchman’s Creek sharecroppers is grim, and the story of the rise of this gray, tight-lipped, cold man is told through a limited third-person narration that moves from person to person. This narrative style creates a sort of plural viewpoint of all the village folk and is combined with the intelligent observations of itinerant sewing-machine salesman V.K. Ratliff, who alertly follows Snopes’s maneuvers and understands all his cheats–or so he thinks.

This novel is created from a series of tales, and it is really about how the tales of an area form its history. It is elegantly written, reflecting a formidable intelligence and education, and is sometimes grimly comic. It comments on the decay of the South in the aftermath of the American Civil War and the Reconstruction, as Frenchman’s Bend is a run-down little village built on the ruins of a once-stately plantation. The legend of gold supposedly buried on the grounds of the plantation plays a pivotal part in the story.