She wanted to imagine the things the ocean hid, fish with bulbous eyes, forests of coral, clams the size of bathtubs. She wanted a moment in which to feel her life for what it was, an inconsequential bit of noise at the edge of something deep and vast. [p. 225]
Set in San Francisco in the 1890s, a city of great wealth and tremendous squalor, of Black and Chinese and European and American, of seances and scandal and charity. Lizzie Hayes, forty-something and unmarried due to a clause in her father's will that promises disinheritance, volunteers at the Ladies' Relief Home for orphans and destitute adults. To Lizzie, one day, comes the notorious Mrs Pleasant, a woman who has passed for white and then publicly announced her Black heritage. She is bringing little Jenny Ijub, whose mother apparently died and was buried at sea. Lizzie is reluctant to accept another charge, especially one of such mysterious origin, but something about Jenny persuades her to say yes.
Thus she becomes entwined in the thicket of rumour surrounding and generated by Mrs Pleasant and by Mrs Bell, a close associate of the former. People say that Mrs Pleasant is a baby farmer, or a voodoo witch (she certainly provides an effective medicine for Lizzie's headaches), a former slave, a secret millionaire. People say that she used to arrange parties where wealthy men (like Lizzie's deceased father) met young women for extra-marital liaisons. Lizzie is not sure what, or who, to believe: but Jenny Igbo's arrival changes her life.
This is a slow and understated novel, or perhaps an overly subtle one: I'm not sure I ever quite got the key of it. Beautifully written (as is to be expected from this author) and focussing on the lives of women -- not only Lizzie and Mrs Pleasant, but Mrs Bell, her daughter Viola, the orphaned Jenny, the staid Mrs Putnam and the confused Mrs Wright -- in a society where they have to find their own various ways to power. I found it interesting, not least for the historical aspects, but it didn't truly engage me in the way that other novels by Karen Joy Fowler have done, and I'm still not sure that I unravelled, let alone understood, the truth about Mrs Pleasant. (A real historical character, as Fowler mentions in her Afterword, but one about whom a plethora of myth has accreted.)
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