Connie -- Constance
--- Goodwin is constantly in emotional flux.
Anxious, angry,
annoyed – she flares into feelings and then swoons into sweetness. She’s coy; she
cloys.
At times, some might even call her
witchy or its more modern rhyming equivalent. Witchiness – albeit the good kind
–runs in her family, so with a little romance from a steeplejack/preservationist
Sam Hartley, Connie, the heroine of The
Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, transforms from petulant shrew to enamored
schoolgirl. Under the influence of a parasitic
professor/adviser, she transforms once again to empowered spell-caster. With the emotional maturity of a high school
sophomore, she’s hardly what one might expect from a Harvard PhD candidate.
In Katherine Howe’s first novel, the
writing is as uneven as the maturity of her main character. Part historical
novel, part supernatural tale, Howe weaves two stories and several generations.
At its best, which is just above mediocre, it describes historical events
of the Salem witch trials and their aftermath. At its worst, it features Connie
in 1991 seeking a lost book of family spells,” which could conveniently also be
the “remarkable unusual primary source,” her dissertation adviser wants her to
find.
Connie becomes aware of Deliverance
Dane, and subsequently the book, when she moves into her long abandoned
ancestral home at the request of Grace, Connie’s mother, who says she wants
Connie to ready the house for market. Grace, who Connie refers as “a
victim of the 1960s” – is pure Hippie cliché so naturally she's away reading auras and doing
other New Age work in Santa Fe. Connie’s
move to the house first seems a diversion; she is supposed to be working on her
dissertation. But as she digs deeper . . .
A PhD candidate at its writing,
Howe, like Connie, is a descendant of those accused of witchcraft in the Salem
trials. She can trace her lineage back to both Elizabeth Proctor and Elizabeth Howe,
one accused, the other condemned for witchcraft. This is interesting. So one understands her deep
interest in the witch trials.
One also presumes she has
first-hand knowledge of the trials of history orals as well as the possible perils
of working under an adviser. Why then do we get such a stereotype? Connie’s adviser,
Boston Brahmin Manning Chilton, (do I hear echoes of Hawthorne’s leech Chillingsworth
here?), is a tweedy, condescending villain we suspect from the start. (This is
not the only Hawthorne echo from the Hartley-Goodwin- Chilton triangle).
It isn’t just Chilton’s interaction
with her adviser that bristles. Ice cream servers ignore her. Archivists
glower. Clerks are curt. Research librarians find her irritating. (Only a
private librarian indulges her.) If I were Connie, I would begin to wonder if
maybe there was something wrong with me.
Ah, but there is.
She shudders when
picking up the family Bible. Blue meteors streak across the night sky. Mysterious
circles appear burned onto the cottage door. Withered plants come alive under
her spells. Blue electric light emanates
from her fingers.
Here’s a sample when Connie
discovers her magical powers over a spider plant:
…. The blue orb of light grew more soild, its
electrical veins snapping in jagged lines from her fingertips and palms to the
center of the ceramic planter. In that instant, the dried spider plant leaves
\flushed with water and health, the fresh, waxy green of life crawling down
each black leaf…… “
Connie’s reaction?
“She staggered backward, groping
for the support of the dinning table, her breath coming in shallow gasps. Hot
tears spring into the rims of her eyes, and she realized that with each breath
she was also letting out a high, panicked whimper. Her hand found the back of
one of the shield-back chairs, pulling it toward her just in time to catch her
falling weight. Horrified, Connie wrapped her arms around her middle and bent
over, resting her forehead on her knees, her breath breaking into hiccupping
sobs.”
Shock. Horror. Melodrama.
I have read other blogger’s complaints
of the implausibility of Connie’s story – those moments when one stops dead in
in one’s reading and says Whaat? My own
knee jerked repeatedly, but was twitchiest when Connie first visited the house
– abandoned 20 years but still standing, despite New England winters that would
cave in most roofs. People know that the danger of leaving a house uninhabited is
that it soon becomes home to all kinds of creatures who create holes. Though there's something growing through the floor, no animals seem to have made the cottage their home. Including local teen age party animals. No beer cans. No condoms. This
cottage, lived in through 1971, has no phone or electricity. Why? Marblehead is hardly
abandoned rural America.
Then, there are the ripe tomatoes
growing in the cottage garden on years-thick stems in June.
Tomatoes – in this garden are perennial
– which is in fact true of tomatoes.( I looked it up) But only in the tropic climes.
By book’s end, one realizes these
knee jerk moments may have been clues to the family’s powers over plants, early clues
that things in 1991 are not what they seem. Unfortunately, by the end I was
paying more attention to the twitches than the story.
Ironically, Deliverance Dane’s
interwoven story—the historical one which I have not talked much about here is
the more soberly realistic, more academically researchesd; Connie’s more recent one the more hysterically
supernatural—a reversal of some dominant belief systems of their respective time
periods.
A New York Times best seller, Katherine
Howe’s The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, must appeal to many. Just not me. When I
try to imagine its audience, I think young girls, maybe those who are enthralled by all things vampires and witches, along with syrupy romances. I think maybe I'm just too old. Too crochety.
After all, I’m a
victim of the 1960s and early ‘70s myself. My own literary preferences were
forged during my education in those times, much of it around Boston.
Which brings me to….. The
author’s silly attempts to render local accents into print completes my
complaints. Why do these various New Englanders have to sound so ridiculous?
I don’t like my reading to put me
in such a snarky mood. Maybe Connie’s annoyance is catching. Or maybe, it’s not the book. Maybe
it’s me. Bitchy me. Witchy me.
I pick up The
Physick Book of Deliverance Dane. I mumble a few words. I feel electricity
surging through my hands. I see blue.
Poof! I shut the book with these
words:
The End.
