Prof. Tom Reed to Lead Discussion of Novel
The next book read by Brown Bag Book Club will be
March by Geraldine Brooks. The club will meet on Tuesday, Sept.
19th at Noon in the Library Special Collections Room.
Bring your lunch and join us for a conversation about this
new, highly recommended novel. The
discussion will be led by Prof. Tom Reed. Civil War buffs, lovers of literature and voracious readers welcome!
From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Brooks’ luminous second novel, after 2001’s acclaimed
Year of Wonders, imagines the Civil War experiences of Mr. March, the absent
father in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. An idealistic Concord cleric, March
becomes a Union chaplain and later finds himself assigned to be a teacher on a
cotton plantation that employs freed slaves, or “contraband.” His
narrative begins with cheerful letters home, but March gradually reveals to the
reader what he does not to his family: the cruelty and racism of Northern and
Southern soldiers, the violence and suffering he is powerless to prevent and
his reunion with Grace, a beautiful, educated slave whom he met years earlier
as a Connecticut peddler to the plantations. In between, we learn of March’s
earlier life: his whirlwind courtship of quick-tempered Marmee, his friendship
with Emerson and Thoreau and the surprising cause of his family’s genteel
poverty. When a Confederate attack on the contraband farm lands March in a
Washington hospital, sick with fever and guilt, the first-person narrative
switches to Marmee, who describes a different version of the years past and an
agonized reaction to the truth she uncovers about her husband’s life. Brooks, who
based the character of March on Alcott’s transcendentalist father, Bronson,
relies heavily on primary sources for both the Concord and wartime scenes; her
characters speak with a convincing 19th-century formality, yet the narrative is
always accessible. Through the shattered dreamer March, the passion and rage of
Marmee and a host of achingly human minor characters, Brooks’ affecting,
beautifully written novel drives home the intimate horrors and ironies of the
Civil War and the difficulty of living honestly with the knowledge of human
suffering.
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