Historical Fiction Bender

Here’s my attempt to revive this blog before I drift into baby land very soon. I’ve been a bit distracted by baby showers, crib construction, and just wondering when the heck this kid will decide to show up. But in the meantime, I have devouring a lot of books. The best of the lot are historical fiction titles from Ken Follett and Jennie Fields.

The Age of Desire follows Edith Wharton through a doomed love affair in Paris. The poor woman was famous for writing about New York society and its scandals. But her own personal life lacked passion and drama. She married a dude named Teddy, who came from the right sort of family, when she was too young to realize it was a bad match. They had zero chemistry. Dear old Ted had some bipolar mental problems. Whoops.  This means that Edith didn’t discover sex until she was 46 and met a handsome cad named Fullerton in Paris. I half expected that it would end like one of her novels, where everyone is too genteel to do anything more than secretly burn with desire for someone forbidden. But she actually goes through with a messy affair that not only causes her a lot of heartache but tosses her husband off the deep end. Whoops. Meanwhile, her loyal secretary Anna is totally in love with Husband Teddy, but nothing really happens between them. It’s all very tragic and stuff. I kept wondering why Edith and Teddy didn’t just get a divorce and stop making each other miserable. But what do I know. Fields captured the tone of Wharton’s novels and created compelling characters. It was a bit of a downer, but well written.

Fall of Giants kick-starts a trilogy by Ken Follett that follows several interconnected families through the drama of the twentieth century. I’m not usually one for war stuff, but this guy knows how to keep you in suspense at all times. I’m always impressed by a male writer than can create strong, multifaceted female characters. My favorite lady in the series is the Welsh maid who gets knocked up by her rich idiot boss, but then goes on to become a suffragette in London and eventually a member of Parliament. Other plotlines follow a Russian family that sees the revolution against the czar unfold and Communism rise in the aftermath. But of course they discover that Communism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Whoops. There is a German family that gets caught up in both world wars, and Americans who work for Wilson during the first world war. All of these characters get tangled up somehow and move the story along as the war progresses. I loved it. My only complaint is that Follett’s sex scenes are a bit excessive and borderline silly. But at least they serve a purpose. Conveniently, anyone who has sex in this book ends up making a baby. Otherwise there wouldn’t be the next generation of kids to fight World War II in the next book, you see.

So Winter of the World is the second book in the series, and it just came out in September. I felt super excited to dive into this sequel, but now I am at least two-thirds of the way through it and it’s not grabbing me the same way Fall of Giants did. The next gen is fighting the Nazis and falling on hard times and wow is it depressing. We all learned in school about the atrocities the Nazis committed against Jews, gays, and the disabled during this war, but reading about it in detail is so sad. Little kids with physical and mental disabilities mysteriously disappeared and died. The local Jewish doctor wasn’t allowed to practice medicine anymore and then… Well, we all know it won’t end well. It was a welcome bit of fun to read the brief section about the Swing Kids in Berlin, as it brought back memories of the 90’s film that was so popular when I was in high school. (1993..wow…I feel old.) Of course now you just have to feel deep admiration to anyone who had the courage to stand up to the Nazis in ways big or small. But unfortunately the youngsters in this book are not as compelling as their parents were in Book One. They just aren’t as well-developed and seem to exist just to introduce scenes about Pearl Harbor or whatever historical event Follett is writing about. The book is still worth reading, but I’m hoping the last installment in the trilogy spark with as much energy as the first.

And on an unrelated note, I plowed through Carole Radziwill’s What Remains in about two days. Now this is a book that first caught my eye when I was a fledgling library associate working in the literature department in Chicago’s main downtown library. A weepy memoir that involved the Kennedys, it was a best seller when it was published in 2005. I always meant to read it, but I kept putting it off in favor of more cheerful choices. But this fall Carole showed up as a new cast member on my favorite guilty pleasure, The Real Housewives of New York City. Now, it still seems odd that Carole, an award-winning journalist that has covered wars and major murder trials, would choose to go on a reality show. My ob/gyn declared that he found it “tacky” that the widow of Polish Prince Anthony Radziwill and BFF of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette would subject herself to Housewifedom. Shouldn’t she be hanging out with the equivalent of today’s Edith Wharton crowd in Manhattan? But whatever…she wrote a moving, sobfest of a memoir about her husband’s struggle with cancer and her famous friends’ death in a plane crash. It’s a heartbreaker, but I highly recommend it. Carole went through emotional hell in the late 90s, so if she wants to date a member of Aerosmith’s touring band and fight with Ramona and Sonja on RHONY in 2012, it’s fine by me. She’s an intelligent, hip lady and a hell of a writer. I want to grow up to be just like her.