I believe Geraldine Brooks' new novel, March, is a very great book. I believe it breathes new life into the historical fiction genre, the borrowing-a-character-from-the-deep-past phenomenon, the old I-shall-tell-you-a-story-through-letters tradition. I believe it honors the best of the imagination. I give it a hero's welcome … The book's protagonist, one Mr. March, has, in other words, been borrowed twice--first from a beloved novel (a novel that was extrapolated from Alcott's own life) and second from history. He is, however, no mere pastiche; Brooks has magnificently wielded the novelist's license, shifting some facts and superimposing the demands of story over the sometimes less-compelling signposts of the past … However brilliant it is, the conceit of March is only part of its glory. It's the story, as it always must be the story, that qualifies March for supreme (forgive the adjective) greatness.
When Alcott wrote Little Women, she created a confusion between the real Alcotts and the fictional Marches. Geraldine Brooks continues this fruitful confusion. Among the characters in Brooks's book are the historical (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Brown), the quasi-historical (the Marches), and the fully fictional (Grace Clement, a slave March knew as a young man and meets again during the war) … The final episode takes place in a Union hospital in Washington, D.C. For this part of the story, Brooks switches to Marmee's point of view, a move that brings us suddenly and nicely back to the world of Little Women. The Alcott book and characters have floated like ghosts all through March. That story of scorched gowns, amateur theatricals, pickled limes, balls and picnics and pianos provides a wonderfully effected, unstated but understood contrast to this story of the war. Brooks has taken a chance in evoking it so strongly at the end, but the chance pays off beautifully.
As March's shadow story emerges from behind the veil where Alcott left it, alternately braiding up with hints in the original version and striking out on a path of pure invention, Brooks reimagines Little Women afresh. It's a sterling example of a brazen genre – the novel that burrows inside another novel, borrowing some of its characters and situations but, in this uncommon case, returning to the host book a liveliness that age and fashion had sapped … Brooks keeps a firmer footing when reanimating not historical characters, but fictional ones. Marmee takes over much of the telling when Mr. March lies near death in a Washington hospital, and her demure yet willful voice carries Brooks' story confidently toward its reunion with the narrative we already know.
In March, the ferocious nemeses conjured by Brooks are war and slavery, which...end up prompting the author and her characters toward a prolonged moral exhibitionism … Like Louisa May Alcott's Mr. March, Brooks's version has gone south with Union troops as a chaplain. But he has another, real-life source in Alcott's father, Bronson, whose slew of Transcendentalist pieties go into the new character's pack. Brooks's novel winds up being both counterfactual and counterfictional … March makes a distressing contribution to recent trends in historical fiction, which, after a decade or so of increased literary and intellectual weight, seems to be returning to its old sentimental contrivances and costumes.
[March] promised to write to his beloved Marmee every day, but he admits privately in the opening chapter, ‘I never promised I would write the truth.’ So begins a double helix of entwined narratives – cheery letters to his little women about the noble fight against slavery and searing descriptions for us of the ghastly defeats of war … What becomes increasingly fascinating in this novel is the complicated nature of idealism in the real world and the way that stress twists March's conscience and warps his once pure relationship with the woman he loves. Again and again, March does everything possible to save others but, failing that, can only berate himself for the shame of surviving … In this highly sympathetic portrayal, Brooks nonetheless suggests that there's a narcissistic quality to the drive for perfection that can lead a man to ignore the common but no less pressing needs of those who depend on him.
Building on what Brooks calls the ‘scaffolding’ of Little Women, March considers the costs – physical, personal, moral, economic – of war in general and the Civil War in particular … From the opening, Brooks sets up a contrast between the sanitized picture March paints in letters home and the brutality of the battlefront. This is his first deception. More serious is his attachment to an elegant slave named Grace, whom he encounters at three turning points in his life. Brooks heightens the moral stakes by creating this love triangle among characters for whom even entertaining adulterous longings is ‘a grave transgression.’ … March is a beautifully wrought story about how war dashes ideals, unhinges moral certainties and drives a wedge of bitter experience and unspeakable memories between husband and wife. March must find a way to reconcile his comfort with others' suffering and live with his guilt and shame.
Through the shattered dreamer March, the passion and rage of Marmee and a host of achingly human minor characters, Brooks's 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.
Now in the war-torn South, March finds himself embroiled in another scheme doomed to financial failure when his superiors order him to minister to the ‘contraband’: freed slaves working as employees for a northerner who has leased a liberated cotton plantation. The morally gray complications of this endeavor are the novel’s greatest strength … Readers of Little Women know the ending. The battle scenes are riveting, the human drama flat.
