March (original 2005; edition 2006)

Like almost every other girl growing up in the 20th century I read Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. I also recall reading Little Men, An Old Fashioned Girl and Jo's Boys and I even had a copy of Eight Cousins by the same author. But that was long ago and I must confess I hadn't thought of those books for a very long time. So when someone in my work book club suggested reading this book, which is the story from the view of the father of Little Women, I jumped at the suggestion.

Mr. March volunteered to join the northern army as a chaplain when war was declared. Most of the book is told from his point of view as he views one disastrous engagement after another. This isn't his first time in the south as he was a travelling salesman there when he was young. At one point he had been invited by a plantation owner to spend time exploring his library and conversing about philosophy which he eagerly accepted. At first he thought the plantation owner was quite enlightened and gentlemanly but eventually he saw the truth. In the intervening years he and his wife and children have helped many former slaves escape to Canada. During the war he ends up at the same plantation where the owner is now senile and sick. Only one slave remains, a woman March was and is attracted to. He tried to persuade her to leave but she is determined to stay to look after the owner who is her father.

March ends up at a plantation that is being run by a Northerner growing cotton for the Union cause using freed slaves. He is appalled by the conditions but stays to do his best to help. That enterprise too ends in disaster and March is almost killed. He is saved by a young woman to whom he had shown some kindness and he is taken to a hospital in Washington D.C.

The book then switches to Marmee's voice (Marmee is Mrs. March). She comes to Washington to help nurse her husband and realizes that he has secrets that rock the foundation of their marriage. If you have read Little Women then you know how this book ends. If you haven't then you might want to do so after reading this book.

There's been lots written about the American Civil War but I thought this was quite different. Neither side is shown as heroic and March is certainly not a conventional protagonist. I'm not sure I really even liked him and I'm sure he would have been a very difficult man to live with. But I really liked the storytelling and I'm glad I read it. ( )

I’m a Louisa May Alcott fan, but you don’t have to be one to enjoy this tender, engrossing historical novel. The author has borrowed Mr. March, the father of Alcott’s “Little Women”, and imagined what could have befallen him during the year when he left his family to be a chaplain in the Civil War. Mr. March himself was based on Bronson Alcott, Louisa’s father, an interesting character who lived according to his beloved, progressive, marginally crackpot ideas. How would the experience of war change such an idealist, such a true believer? It’s worth the telling. ( )

An adjunct story of Captain March, the husband and father in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Set in America in the years immediately before the American Civil War, the story describes how March meets his wife, his journeys as a tinker through the South where he becomes infatuated with a Negro slave and his fight for emancipation as a Preacher and later, a teacher.
March is an idealist and pacifist who battles with enormous guilt when his lack of courage leads to the torture and death of others.

Slow to start, but then really interesting. Gives an insight into America in the mid 1800’s and the battle between the Northern Unionists and the Southern Confederacy. Violence and torture is often graphically described. ( )

The problem with March is that it's tied in to a beloved children's story. While this might have been a terrific marketing ploy, (fan fiction often is, since it offers immediate context and recognition,) it created two very different stories. The first: a reworking of one absent and one present (and much loved) character in a famous work of fiction. The second: a story of a pacifist who went to war in one of the bloodiest and most tragic conflicts in our nation's history.

The first seems a recipe to designed to anger loyal fans of the original. The second is the more compelling story, and probably more accessible to those who are unfamiliar with L.M. Alcott's novels.

It's probably a good thing I'll never get around to reading Little Women again, because March seems like it was written to slaughter a few babies, and a reread would possibly be spoiled by my constant justifications of my irritations with this Pulitzer Prize winning novel*. In the afterword, the author admits that, though she having loved LW as a child, her mother once told her: “Nobody in real life is such a goody-goody as that Marmee.” It seems Brooks took that statement to heart, and set about to write a story that painted Marmee as a petty, jealous, shrewish, risk-taking idealogue – a woman without restraint of either temperament or libido.

Mr. March expects his wife to be the picture of decorum in every situation, and mentions her piques of temper with disparaging attitude, in contrast with the loving, gentle picture painted of him as devoted father and husband, in Little Women.

Regarding Marmee as a young woman:

“Standing one on either side, they half patted, half held her, as one would both soothe and restrain a lunging, growling dog.”

“The intemperance of her attack left me breathless. Angry women generally cannot be said to show to advantage, and to see that lovely face so distorted by such a scowl as it now wore was immensely shocking to me. Who could have imagined this gently bred young woman to be so entirely bereft of the powers of self-government? I had never seen such an outburst, not even from a market wife.”

“At such times I thought I would rather live in the midst of a crashing thunderhead than with this Fury of a wife.”

“'It is you,' I said, trying to keep my voice even, though my pulse beat in my head. 'It is you who degrade yourself, when you forgo self-mastery.'”

In fact he seems quite disdainful of her throughout much of the story, and yet he is incapable of keeping little mr. march in his pants. (Brooks also seems to think she is quite clever with her allusions to masturbation.)

Later, when the point of view switches to Marmee's, we see more character assassination, and a few scenes that don't even correlate with how Brooks has changed her. Are we to believe that this tireless, passionate and outspoken abolitionist woman, a stop on the Underground Railroad, is going to instantly devolve into racist slurs, when she (uncharacteristically for LW) jumps to the conclusion that her husband is an adulterer? I don't buy either scenario. If the character of Marmee is as Alcott portrays, I don't believe for a moment, that she would assume her husband is an adulterer on such a triviality. And if the character is as Brooks portrays (aside from her temper and her sexual freedom,) I don't find it believable that Marmee would express her thoughts in a racist fashion.

This character assassination doesn't seem to contribute anything useful to the story in any case, and instead comes across as a personal agenda to take Marmee down a peg or ten. The comment in the afterword supports this observation. Because of the above objections, this part of the story fails on every level for me.

The character of Mr. March is built, naturally, on the story of Bronson Alcott, Louisa May's father. Since Little Women was loosely autobiographical, it seems appropriate to do such with March. There was a great deal of experimental thinking and ideology during these years, in New England, and literature bears out the ideals of the time, with thinkers such as Thoreau, Emerson, Dickinson, Alcott, William Elery Channing, and others, developing the ideas and philosophies of transcendentalism, and setting the stage for the emergence of uniquely American faiths such as the Unity Church and Religious Science. The same region and intellectual climate also produced the burgeoning religiosity in the nearby area that came to be known as the “burned-over district,” and the emergence of its insular and restrictive religious ideals. (This book does not address this last theme, but it's historically relevant.)

Alcott and his contemporaries were ideologically progressive, pioneering new ideas regarding education, communal living, and veganism, as well as exploring other cultural ideals. Alcott himself seemed to be somewhat incapable of providing well for his family, so Brooks uses L.M. Alcott's backstory that Mr. March once made a fortune, then lost it.

Unlike Alcott, Mr. March – a strict pacifist, in both stories, goes to war as a chaplain. This is where the story improves, the irony being that it would be possible to utterly separate the narrative from the LW storyline.

Mr. March is an idealist, quite naïve and more than a little self-righteous. He joins the war effort without really understanding the political or moral climate – which is perhaps more realistic in its portrayal than not. As I read these parts of the book, I thought that here was potentially the real meat of the story – the picture of close range war, the destruction of lives, families, home, property. Personal tragedy, horror and degradation. It certainly is rich with commentary on slavery and its obvious and less obvious evils (although Brooks makes quite a lot of use of slavery/civil war cliches to make her point: the beautiful mixed-blood house slave/interracial romance, the powerful old genteel southern woman, Reb rapists, sawing off limbs in a field hospital, the stench of blood and bowel, etc,) but I find that as I sit down to write this review, I realize the novel falls victim to political correctness; for every evil Southern Rebel, you must show an equally despicable Northern Unionist. For every ignorant/uneducated slave, you must write an intelligent/educated one. In one sentence she writes with flagrant disregard for cultural behavior in the interaction between Black and White, and in the next, she stops to point out how few Northerners were actually motivated by abolitionist ideals. It detracts from the argument against slavery, but unfortunately falls short of contributing any meaningful discourse of the disunion present on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Maybe it's unfair to make something of that, because modern fiction set in 19th century America frequently raises this exact dichotomy. America really was two very different countries, and in many ways it still is. Maybe it's picking nits to point out the way Brooks handles this conceit, after all her prose is beautiful, drawing one along in the story, in spite of itself. Except that it feels like she had a checklist of “fair” that she drew up before she could write this novel.

Brilliantly done, however, are the final two chapters, when we are returned to Mr. March's point of view. Brooks hands over an eloquent portrayal of Soldier's Heart and survivor guilt. It's a bit of a shame that these chapters were not expanded just a little.

I would not have read this book, had it not been for it being included on an assigned summer reading list for matriculating Stanford University students (my nephew is leaving for Stanford in the fall! *little brag*) and its inclusion grabbed my eye as being odd. After a little discussion with him, my curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to read it. After reading, I admit I'm still a little baffled as to its selection.

*I dug around quite a bit on the 'net, trying to find the criteria for a Pulitzer Prize. There really doesn't seem to be much; the book needs to be by an American, or about an American, or about America, or... “other.” I guess if the little panel at Columbia likes it, for any reason, it qualifies.

Maybe I should make a prize called the Stacey Prize. You can qualify thus: Any book, written by a human, about a human, or about something that resembles a human, or any book that a human can read. ( )

From Publishers Weekly:

Brooks's 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'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.

This was a wonderful book that will stay with me for some time. ( )