One of the miracles that literature can perform-its ability to persuade us that there is such a thing as human nature, that certain aspects of feeling and belief are constants, fundamentally unchanged by geography and history-is unlikely to occur when we are perpetually being distracted by expository passages that seem to us to emit the dusty aura of the research library as we encounter an accumulation of costumes and customs.Įmma Donoghue’s Frog Music is an unusual case, in that it begins as a rather standard historical novel, eager-even anxious-to barrage us with surface details: the sights, sounds, and smells of the seamier side of San Francisco during a heat wave and a smallpox epidemic in the summer of 1876.

Doctorow’s Ragtime, Péter Nádas’s Parallel Stories, and Russell Banks’s Cloudsplitter-can give us the sense that we are reading about ourselves or versions of our friends and neighbors, people who, oddly enough, seem to have been born and died in another time and place.ĭenis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams provides a perfect example of how a gifted writer can make us feel as if he is writing about a past era-beginning in 1917-from inside the characters who inhabit it. Whereas the psychological novel set in the past that focuses on language and characters-as with Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, E.L.

By the final pages, we may notice that we know more about what they wore and how their houses looked than about who they were. The historical novel that offers a surfeit of period detail-books such as Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha-can make us feel very distant from the men and women (however much we may sympathize with them) who dress and sound and live so differently than we do.

Frog music book review