The Buccaneers by Edith Wharton completed by Marion Mainwaring

Penguin Books, 1993

This is not a new book, having been published in 1993 and serialized for a dazzling PBS Masterpiece Theatre in 1995. However,I came to it only recently after renting the DVD for a second viewing and learning the novel on which it was based, about a group of Nouveau Riches Americans in the 1870s who take England by storm, was by one of my favorite authors Edith Wharton, though it remained incomplete at Wharton's death in 1937 and was finished by Marion Mainwaring–-a Wharton scholar and writer––and published posthumously.

The ethical question of posthumous publication has long been debated among writers and scholars, and is all the more significant when the work is not just in first draft, but incomplete. According to the "Afterword" Wharton's literary executor, Gaillard Lapsley, first published the incomplete (through Chapter XXIX) work in 1938 with only "'certain verbal emendations required by sense or consistency'." Mainwaring added another 27(!) chapters and made "a few other... changes" in the Lapsley version "when it seemed that Wharton would have revised to avoid repetitiousness, and when she referred to a race in terms repellent to modern readers." Wharton had drawn up a synopsis and outlined the novel, though the written chapters apparently "departed from it in significant respects almost as soon as she began work."

Despite the high praise in the blurbs, mostly saying how Mainwaring maintained the Wharton voice or transitioned seamlessly, I would respectfully disagree. Missing in Mainwaring's style are the ornate, almost Baroque, sentences, and, oddly, for a work with a more upbeat ending, it lacks the tongue-in-cheek observations on society that characterize Wharton's more tragic novels. In addition, many of the chapters added by Mainwaring comprise multiple scenes written in small chunks, many no more than a paragraph long. Before reading the "Afterword" I assumed these had been a part Wharton's original draft that Mainwaring chose not to "fill in." But apparently that was not the case. Mainwaring also departs from the great beauty of Wharton's understated love scenes, with the one major love scene reading like something more suited to a Harlequin Romance.

The Buccaneers is one of those rare cases where I found the TV rendition actually better than the novel it was based on. The three-part Masterpiece series focuses on all the American girls who, due to a lack of pedigree, are scorned by New York's Gilded Age society and make up for it by marrying into aristocratic but impoverished English families. The novel as completed by Mainwaring focuses almost exclusively on Annabelle Tintagel (nee St. George)––whom I found, in many ways, the least interesting character––and seems out of sync with the plural title.

As novels go, in general, this wasn't a bad read. As Edith Wharton novels go, I found it lacking and disappointing.

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

Scribner May, 2009

A review copy was provided free by the Amazon Vine program.

I have not read Colm Toibin's other books––Blackwater Lightship or The Master––both of which were apparently shortlisted for the Booker Prize, but going by the reviews on Amazon, those who did read his other books, and enjoyed them, found Brooklyn to be a disappointment. I thought it a pleasant enough story, more akin to something your immigrant mother or grandmother might tell you, with the caveat that it all turned out for the best. Only, like a story Grandma might tell, the story of Eilis Lacey, who leaves her small town in post-WWII Ireland to find work in Brooklyn, lacked the depth and tension to hold my attention through 262 pages.

Having not read his other books, I can only speculate that part of Toibin's problem might have been taking on a female POV, though other male writers have done this quite well. Here Toibin seems to only skim the surface. He tells us what happened, but brings to it no depth of emotion. We meet a wide range of characters, especially in the bording house where Eilis lives, but we don't get to know any of them well, including Eilis herself. Threads are begun, then dropped, as when Eilis screws up the courage to approach her Jewish law professor, who turns out to be a Holocaust survivor. From the conversation I thought he might become a rival of Eilis's Italian boyfriend, but the man and the thread simply disappear. Same with when Eilis's boyfriend Tony reacts sadly to the story. I expected there would be something about Tony's war experiences, but, for all we know, neither Tony nor his older brother were in the war.

Which brings me to my second major criticism––much of this simply did not ring true. It is unlikely that Tony's Italian family, particularly his mother, would be so welcoming to his Irish girlfriend even if she did take the time to learn to twirl her spaghetti (I'm Italian, born in 1953, I know these things). It is even more unlikely that, in the 50s, a young Irish Catholic woman who gave into a night of passion with her boyfriend, would so easily have her guilt assuaged by one confession with an unusually open-minded priest and the fact that she wasn't pregnant.

All the tension comes in the last 30 pages or so, and I will say, at that point I kept reading to find out what Eilis would do. It made an interesting choice.

I certainly wouldn't say I disliked this book, but I can't say I liked it either––at least not enough to highly recommend it. However, if you like a simple, fairly happy tale––beach season is on it's way––this could definitely be read in one sitting.

Hundred in the Hand by Joseph M. Marshall III

Read the review at Roses & Thorns