March: Pulitzer Prize Winning Novel

Like the other book (Horse) I read by this former journalist/war correspondent author, in this narrative a historical event/period is experienced in a new and profound way through the personal experiences of a few of its heroic but hitherto unknown protagonists. Here the dramatic event is the American Civil War, portrayed with unspeakable cruelty and pervasive prejudice on both sides. Since it is written in the first person, both the style and the dialgue reported seem to be in keeping with the historical context and the cultural and social background of the characters. Quite a tour de force for the author, who by her own admission has immersed herself in personal letters and journals of the times. Aesthetically beautiful prose and gripping storytelling make it an instructive and satisfying read.

Geraldine Brook’s novel fills in a side of the story that is absent from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. These are the experiences of Mr. March, the father of Meg, Jo, Amy, and Beth, and Marmee’s husband, who was a peddler before the Civil War and a chaplain for the Union Army during the war.
As a young man, before he met Marmee, March was a traveling salesman who spent time in the South. Because he was a book lover, he caught the attention of a plantation owner who shared the same interests and loved to discuss literature. He was invited to stay for a while in the man’s house. He became acquainted with the household members, including the enslaved people. One such girl was Grace, for whom he held a strong admiration. He met the children of the house workers and wanted to improve their lives by teaching them to read. In his idealism, he never saw how he set himself up against his benefactor. His actions forever altered the course of his life and brought suffering to Grace.
Years later, after March married Marmee and became a chaplain, he was determined to help in a cause he firmly believed in. He and Marmee had provided a resting place on the Underground Railroad, but he wanted to do more. He left Marmee and his family to work in the Union Army, comforting the soldiers and the injured. He found himself stationed in Southern houses taken over by the Union. One day, he was sent to the very same Southern plantation where he had angered the owner years ago. He found Grace altered only in her circumstances, not in her inherent dignity and courage.
I found this novel profoundly moving, with vivid depictions of the precarious lives of enslaved peoples and the injustices they suffered. The story is haunting and will linger with the reader long after finishing the book. The novel is a must-read for history lovers and historical fiction fans.

At first glance, I excpected to see the heroic Chaplain March, away from his precious “Little Women” and the steadfast wife, serving the Union for whatever made some men who would not have been called upon to enlist anyway. What I read here was an incredibly researched, intense story that felt so real it seemed more believable that LMA’s original setting. The story is layered, filtered through the unbelievably distorted ego and deceit of a man who at every turn seems not genuinely spiritual – after all, no church will have him and he alienates everyone he intends to minister to – but rather a cowardly weasel, seeking the path of least resistance, a man who hides in a corncrib while children are murdered, who lets his friend drown, who snivels and minces about his righteousness and his “special” dispensentation from God Almighty to be human, to sin, (read adultery) to feel bad about it, but by golly to lie like a rug to the wife and kiddies so as not to hurt them. He’s a snake dipped in lard, slick and smarmy. Here’s the dilemma for me – Geraldine Brooks’ writing is fantastic. Her story is woven well into real history, real times, real people, so that it feels no less real. The trouble for me was that I wanted to like the guy. I want to feel sympathy, empathy, and attachment for the main character. What I felt was that her writing was so brilliant it uncovered yes, the uncomfortable deficits of character that people may succumb to, even people who feel like they are good people. So, it is realistic. It is sad. Sad to me as a novel reader and writer, was that in the end I was left thinking he was slime at worst, at best, an over-educated, under-thinking fool without a backbone who threw his vast fortune away on a whim. He spent it subsidizing the infamous John Brown’s slave insurrection ploy. It was a cause that garnered financial backing from many places, but the slap-dash throwing out the baby with the bathwater approach of Peter March divesting his entire life’s fortune (with a wife and four children to support) to a man thought to be a lunatic by many, made March and Marmee seem like dolts. Marmee is painted as a harridan frighteningly loosed from a scold’s bridle, whom a young March, after a tryst under a tree, marries, then dedicates his life to helping her learn to curb her violent public outbursts. It was also somewhat odd to me that the children called her “Marmee” which I thought was somehow an accent or a linguistic turn similar to Cornish “Mar” and “Par” pronunciation of Ma and Pa. So if Marmee is a knickname, why do the girls not call her “Mother?” Was Brooks fair to the LMA characters? Yes. Nothing in the early novel makes “March” an impossibility, except that their generosity and poverty seemed to come from courage and strength, rather than grinding oblivion to self-preservation and an almost perverse adherence to a “cause” which is not clear. So, after that you are asking, why give it five stars? Why not just chuck it out and say something lame like “it didn’t work for me”? Because what is done brilliantly here are the writing, the story-telling itself, the slick pacing and thorough research that never feels forced. This is a book to be read and discussed, one that does not leave you after the last page is turned.

Probably no adult who grew up in an English-speaking family is not familiar with Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women”. Brooks has had the ingenious idea of telling the fate of Father March, who is present in Alcott’s book only in his absence. Brooks spins a fascinating story of his experiences during the American Civil War that is hard to put down. I ordered this book after reading and enjoying Brooks’s “Year of Wonders”, and was not disappointed.

I expected more, and probably would have liked it better had it not tried to be connected to Little Women. The moments, phrases directly lifted from that novel felt jarring in this one, taking me a bit out of the story.
I did however find it easy to read and interesting to learn about aspects of the Civil War that were completely unfamiliar to me.