Anne Bartlett

NonfictionBiography

A writer’s regret

Review by Anne Bartlett

As the popularity of the movie Midnight in Paris demonstrated, tales of the 1920s Lost Generation—Scott, Zelda and the gang—have an enduring appeal. That “lost generation” nickname was first used by Ernest Hemingway, and his early novels and posthumously published memoir, A Moveable Feast, are among its best depictions.

A.E. Hotchner’s Hemingway in Love is a poignant postscript to A Moveable Feast, particularly to Hemingway’s bittersweet last chapter. Hotchner, now 95, was Hemingway’s younger friend and Boswell, notebook at the ready, accompanying Papa to all the iconic haunts: Venice, Paris, Pamplona, Key West. He wrote a full biography of his mentor soon after Hemingway’s suicide. In this late memoir, Hotchner wants finally to give Hemingway his say about his one true love: Hadley, his first wife, the Paris wife.

This book is Hotchner’s riposte to critics who believe the first edition of A Moveable Feast was overedited by Hemingway’s fourth wife, Mary, in a way that was unfair to wife no. 2, Pauline. Quite the contrary, Hotchner says. In private conversation, Hemingway said that leaving Hadley for Pauline was the worst decision of his life, and had turned him in the wrong direction, as an artist and a man.

The outlines of the story are familiar, but Hotchner provides new detail, including the wrenching “100 days” that Hadley insisted on as a trial separation. During that miserable time, Hemingway lost many of his Paris friends, who to his apparent surprise hadn’t liked being turned into fictional characters. 

This is a book of elegiac charm, about a great writer’s regrets. It’s framed at beginning and end by Hotchner’s heartbreaking visit to his close friend in a psychiatric hospital, not long before he shot himself. Hotchner likes to think he’s now with Hadley.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A.E. Hotchner’s Hemingway in Love is a poignant postscript to A Moveable Feast, particularly to Hemingway’s bittersweet last chapter. Hotchner, now 95, was Hemingway’s younger friend and Boswell, notebook at the ready, accompanying Papa to all the iconic haunts: Venice, Paris, Pamplona, Key West. He wrote a full biography of his mentor soon after Hemingway’s suicide. In this late memoir, Hotchner wants finally to give Hemingway his say about his one true love: Hadley, his first wife, the Paris wife.
NonfictionHistory

Unearthing the buried secrets of an eccentric aristrocrat

Review by Anne Bartlett

The stupendously wealthy 5th Duke of Portland had a very weird obsession: building underground. At his order, tunnels, a ballroom, a church and a vast network of chambers were constructed underneath his estate at Welbeck Abbey in England. It might also be said he lived an underground life, avoiding human contact whenever possible. He communicated with his servants by written message and traveled mostly at night, with a lantern attached to his belt.

So when a middle-aged widow named Anna Maria Druce claimed in court in 1898 that her late father-in-law T.C. Druce, a successful London retail merchant, had, in fact, been the late 5th Duke in disguise, it seemed improbable, but perhaps not impossible. So began one of the stranger legal cases in British history. It was a public sensation for the next decade.

Author Piu Marie Eatwell brings this bizarre story to a modern audience in The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife, and the Missing Corpse, and it’s as entertaining now as ever. In vivid, cinematic scenes, she lays out the battles between Anna Maria and her allies against the 6th Duke and her own Druce relatives, who thought she was nuts. The case got even more outlandish as secrets emerged about T.C. Druce that brought a whole new cast of colorful Australian relatives into the picture. To top it off, the legendary Inspector Dew of Scotland Yard played a pivotal role in the inquiry.

Wonderful as that all is, the best part of the book is the last third, where Eatwell describes her own investigation. The outcome of the Druce case in 1907 is a matter of record, but there was much those Edwardian lawyers either didn’t know or didn’t reveal. Eatwell finds letters, documents and pictures that provide a completely different perspective on the odd 5th Duke—and expose anew the extraordinary hypocrisy of which some 19th century patriarchs were capable. 

The stupendously wealthy 5th Duke of Portland had a very weird obsession: building underground. At his order, tunnels, a ballroom, a church and a vast network of chambers were constructed underneath his estate at Welbeck Abbey in England. It might also be said he lived an underground life, avoiding human contact whenever possible. He communicated with his servants by written message and traveled mostly at night, with a lantern attached to his belt.

NonfictionHistory

An anguished search for truth

Review by Anne Bartlett

Like so many Americans, writer Rita Gabis has mixed ancestry. Her late father was Jewish and her mother is a Lithuanian Catholic, whose family emigrated to the U.S. after World War II. Gabis knew her maternal grandfather—“Senelis” in Lithuanian—as a fond elderly man who bought her treats and took her fishing. But she had one disturbing memory: the time he told her, “No be like your father . . . Jews no good.”

It wasn’t until Senelis was long dead that her mother mentioned that he had worked for the Germans during the war—that is, the Nazis occupying Lithuania. He was a police chief. In other words, there was a good chance her dear grandpa had persecuted Jews.

A Guest at the Shooters’ Banquet is Gabis’ gripping, psychologically acute account of her search for the truth about him, a wrenching personal journey. Was Pranas Puronis a Lithuanian patriot who helped the Nazis’ victims? Or was he one of the killers? Trapped or complicit? Gabis talks with relatives and Holocaust survivors, digs through records, travels to Lithuania and environs. Most moving are her interviews with elderly Jews who escaped the bloodlands where their families and friends died—remarkable people of brains, courage and wisdom.

Their country had been a stew of competing ethnicities. Many Lithuanians hated the Soviet Russians who were the first occupiers and welcomed the Germans as liberators. While some Lithuanians helped Jews, it is clear that others massacred thousands of Jews and Poles, under the direction of Germans. It was less clear to Gabis for a long time what role her grandfather played in that horror. Everyone seemed to have a different story.

Ultimately, an obscure Polish court file provides answers. But it’s Gabis’ resolute hunt and expressive prose that really illuminate these years of anguish.

Like so many Americans, writer Rita Gabis has mixed ancestry. Her late father was Jewish and her mother is a Lithuanian Catholic, whose family emigrated to the U.S. after World War II. Gabis knew her maternal grandfather—“Senelis” in Lithuanian—as a fond elderly man who bought her treats and took her fishing. But she had one disturbing memory: the time he told her, “No be like your father . . . Jews no good.”
NonfictionHistory

Soviet history worthy of a soap opera

Review by Anne Bartlett

Hard as it might be to imagine, readers of Ben Mezrich’s Once Upon a Time in Russia could find themselves feeling a certain sympathy for Vladimir Putin. Sure, the new Russian president was trying to seize control of the news media in 2000 when he forced television magnate Boris Berezovsky to sell his business. But Berezovsky was, to put it mildly, a handful. 

In the gunslinger-capitalism years after the Soviet Union’s collapse, he had risen from mathematician to software guy to billionaire TV tycoon by running down everyone in his path. He and his oligarch buddies essentially bought the 1996 presidential election for Boris Yeltsin, and he was instrumental in the choice of Putin as Yeltsin’s successor. But he badly underestimated Putin and ended up in bitter exile.

Mezrich, best-selling author of The Accidental Billionaires, which depicted the rise of Facebook, is now writing about a world far more dangerous than Silicon Valley. He explores the evolution of post-Soviet Russia through the improbable stories of Berezovsky and his cohorts, primarily protégé-turned-rival Roman Abramovich (engineering school dropout to aluminium titan) and Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB man who died in a bizarre polonium poisoning in 2006.

Using what he calls “re-created dialogue” based on interviews and court documents, Mezrich unfolds the drama in cinematic vignettes. Among them: Berezovsky survives a car bombing; Putin lays down the law to the oligarchs in Stalin’s old dacha; Abramovich lands by helicopter at an Alpine resort and agrees to pay $1.3 billion to Berezovsky to dissolve their partnership; Berezovsky chases Abramovich into a Hermès store in London to serve him a subpoena as he sues him for $5.6 billion. Surreal as it seems, it was all quite real.

It’s Wolf Hall on the Moskva: Litvinenko was murdered. Berezovsky died a broken man. Abramovich is worth an estimated $9 billion and owns England’s Chelsea Football Club. And Putin still runs Russia.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Hard as it might be to imagine, readers of Ben Mezrich’s Once Upon a Time in Russia could find themselves feeling a certain sympathy for Vladimir Putin. Sure, the new Russian president was trying to seize control of the news media in 2000 when he forced television magnate Boris Berezovsky to sell his business. But Berezovsky was, to put it mildly, a handful.
NonfictionTrue Crime

The family who spies together

Review by Anne Bartlett

In his early Cold War novels, John le Carré referred to something called “Moscow Rules”: the tradecraft used by spies in a hostile city when they had to be super-cautious to avoid getting caught. If you want to learn the 21st-century equivalent of those rules, The Spy’s Son is a great place to start—although in real life, they don’t always work as smoothly as in fiction.

Author Bryan Denson, an experienced journalist, leads us step by step through an extraordinary espionage case that stretched, in two phases, from the mid-1990s to 2011. In phase one, Jim Nicholson, a rising star in the CIA, sold his agency’s secrets to the Russians to get himself out of a financial jam. He was caught and sent to prison. Then, in a remarkable twist in 2006, Jim, still imprisoned, recruited his son Nathan to sell more secrets to the Russians.

Nathan was a somewhat adrift young man in his 20s who loved his father too much to fathom how he was being manipulated into treachery. With words of paternal care and religious faith, Jim lured his son into his scheme. The Russians were happy to play along; luckily for U.S. national security, the FBI caught on to Nathan as fast as it had to his father.

The book’s strength is its wonderful detail. We follow Nathan as he meets his grizzled Russian spymaster “George” in San Francisco, Lima, Mexico City and Malta; we track the FBI agents on his trail. The feds wouldn’t let Jim talk to Denson, but we end the book with a strong sense of the two-time spy’s plans and motives. Clever and narcissistic, Jim did love his son. But he had no compunction about turning him into his “last asset.”

 

This article was originally published in the May 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In his early Cold War novels, John le Carré referred to something called “Moscow Rules”: the tradecraft used by spies in a hostile city when they had to be super-cautious to avoid getting caught. If you want to learn the 21st-century equivalent of those rules, The Spy’s Son is a great place to start—although in real life, they don’t always work as smoothly as in fiction.
NonfictionTrue Crime

The history of a young psychopath

Review by Anne Bartlett

What with all the CSI television dramas, books by FBI profilers and frightening news stories about serial killers, we’ve become quite familiar with the concept of the criminal psychopath, a person without remorse. But even now, most of us are shocked when a child is a murderer. In 1874, when our current ideas about mental illness were still in their infancy, 14-year-old Jesse Pomeroy seemed to many like a demon from hell.

As what we would now call a tween, Jesse kidnapped and tortured little boys not far from his home in Boston. A stint at a reform school just taught him better criminal techniques: After his release, he killed a girl and a boy in South Boston. He was quickly captured (though not quickly enough to save the second victim). The troubling question for Bostonians: What next for Jesse? Execution, imprisonment, treatment? Attitudes toward him changed as the study of mental illness evolved.

Roseanne Montillo’s absorbing The Wilderness of Ruin explores Jesse’s crimes and the decades-long debate that followed in the context of 19th-century law, medicine and literature. She particularly focuses on the life and social circle of writer Herman Melville, whose emotional troubles influenced Moby-Dick and Billy Budd, among other works. Melville’s friend Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (father of the Supreme Court justice) was among those who argued that Jesse should be studied, not hanged.

Perhaps most compelling is Montillo’s portrait of Jesse, who was intelligent and resourceful, but in modern terms clearly a dangerous psychopath. Bostonians were likely very lucky that he started his criminal career before he was sophisticated enough to cover his tracks.

 

This article was originally published in the April 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

What with all the CSI television dramas, books by FBI profilers and frightening news stories about serial killers, we’ve become quite familiar with the concept of the criminal psychopath, a person without remorse. But even now, most of us are shocked when a child is a murderer. In 1874, when our current ideas about mental illness were still in their infancy, 14-year-old Jesse Pomeroy seemed to many like a demon from hell.
NonfictionHistory

Restless spirit

Review by Anne Bartlett

If you’re an author with a family ghost, it would seem almost obligatory to write about it. Hannah Nordhaus’ “paternal grandfather’s maternal grandmother,” Julia Staab, haunts La Posada hotel in Santa Fe (or so lots of people believe). In American Ghost, Nordhaus offers a fascinating and nuanced account of her ancestral ghost story and her complicated clan.

The Staabs, German Jews by birth, were among the first American merchants in Santa Fe. Julia married the already successful Abraham in 1865; she died in the house at the age of 52. Seven children survived her.

The ghost story goes like this: Julia never recovered from a baby’s death; her husband abused her; she died violently, perhaps by Abraham’s hand; and she now haunts her old bedroom. Nordhaus establishes that this is romantic fiction, though she remains respectful of those who believe they’ve encountered the ghost.

The Staabs were wealthy businesspeople, but they were also dysfunctional. Nordhaus unearths depression, addiction, suicide and estrangement. She writes of her ancestors’ travails with perception and compassion. Along the way, she employs family history to explore the lives of German Jews (Julia’s much younger sister died at Theresienstadt), the renaissance of Santa Fe and changing attitudes toward illness. It’s a spirited ride.

Perhaps most entertaining are her present-day encounters with psychics, ghost hunters and spiritualists, all eager to help. Her quest culminates in a weird experience in Julia’s room, make of it what you will. She does eventually discover whatever we can now know of the “truth” of Julia’s life, but inevitably, Nordhaus’ journey really is a search for self, and we are privileged to be able to accompany her.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

If you’re an author with a family ghost, it would seem almost obligatory to write about it. Hannah Nordhaus’ “paternal grandfather’s maternal grandmother,” Julia -Staab, haunts La Posada hotel in Santa Fe (or so lots of people believe). In American Ghost, Nordhaus offers a fascinating and nuanced account of her ancestral ghost story and her complicated clan.
NonfictionHistory

England’s dark dynasty

Review by Anne Bartlett

“I could’ve been a judge, but I never ’ad the Latin. . . . And so I become a miner instead.” So starts the bitterly funny “Miner’s Sketch” from the 1960s revue Beyond the Fringe, which gave Americans a sense of the long, brutal class war in Britain between coal miners and the ruling class. Neither emerged intact.

That antagonism provides the backdrop for Catherine Bailey’s irresistible Black Diamonds, a dual history of the “torrid unraveling” of an aristocratic dynasty, the Earls Fitzwilliam, and the collapse of the Yorkshire coal mining community that provided the family’s wealth.

As she did in The Secret Rooms, her 2013 bestseller about the Dukes of Rutland, Bailey provides proof that a noble title doesn’t always signify noble behavior. In 1902, when Bailey opens her story, the Fitzwilliams were based at the 365-room Wentworth estate. Staggeringly rich from coal, they spent the subsequent decades mistreating their children, betraying their spouses, impregnating village girls and chorus dancers and suing each other. Today, they have lost both Wentworth and their noble title.

Ironically, the one thing the Fitzwilliams did not do was oppress their workers: They were among the best of the mine owners. But they could do nothing about the viciousness of their fellow owners. Bailey writes movingly of the fatal accidents, the miners’ ghastly living conditions and the community solidarity that alleviated the horrors.

Peter, the eighth Earl Fitzwilliam, was a war hero and compulsive adulterer. When he died in a plane crash in 1948 with his lover Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, John F. Kennedy’s sister, the grieving families rushed into full cover-up mode. Bailey gives us the real deal, on that and everything else. Downton Abbey’s earl would be appalled, but the dowager countess would love it.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

“I could’ve been a judge, but I never ’ad the Latin. . . . And so I become a miner instead.” So starts the bitterly funny “Miner’s Sketch” from the 1960s revue Beyond the Fringe, which gave Americans a sense of the long, brutal class war in Britain between coal miners and the ruling class. Neither emerged intact.
NonfictionBiography

The history of France’s greatest heroine

Review by Anne Bartlett

To imagine what life was like growing up in a French village in the early 15th century, don’t think of A Year in Provence. Think of modern-day Syria.

It was the France of the Hundred Years War with England, a land and a people ravaged by unchecked violence. Catholic belief permeated everyday life, and the French were taught that their travails were a punishment from God. Out of this mélange of catastrophe and faith came the village teenager we know as St. Joan of Arc, to this day her country’s icon.

Hundreds of books have been written about her, but the story remains astounding enough for new interpretations. Kathryn Harrison, the well-known author of novels, memoirs and a previous biography of a saint, has now taken up the challenge with the deeply researched and thoughtful Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured.

Harrison expertly cross-cuts Joan’s life (1412-1431) in its historical context with the remarkable parallels between her story and the life of Jesus and with consideration of the books, plays, movies and paintings she has inspired. Each age invents its own Joan.

But even stripped of fable, Joan was a phenomenon: a peasant girl who pronounced herself the messenger of God, donned men’s clothes and armor, inspired the French king and army to victory, fought beside them and stood up boldly to the quisling court that condemned her to burn. In Harrison’s hands, Joan’s confidence and intelligence come alive.

Whatever we make of Joan’s “Voices”—angels, hallucinations or mental illness—she was utterly convinced of their reality and purity. The French churchmen allied with England who killed her believed the voices were demons, but Harrison shows that Joan’s worst crime in their eyes was her revolutionary audacity in dressing and behaving like a man. Of course, the ultimate victory was hers.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

To imagine what life was like growing up in a French village in the early 15th century, don’t think of A Year in Provence. Think of modern-day Syria.
NonfictionMemoir

A poet’s journey toward identity

Review by Anne Bartlett

Most non-poetry-reading Americans first encountered Richard Blanco in 2013, when he was the presidential inauguration poet. On that occasion, his moving poem “One Today” made passing reference to his Spanish-speaking mother who rang up groceries for 20 years and his father who cut sugarcane so Richard could move ahead in the family’s new country.

Blanco, a gay Latino from Miami’s Cuban community, has now beautifully repaid that debt with The Prince of los Cocuyos, a loving memoir of his boyhood among exiles.

We follow young “Riqui” from his childhood into the larger world of school and El Cocuyito (The Little Firefly), the grocery store where he worked. His tone is fond but clear-eyed: As a boy who loved fairy princesses, he was a puzzle to his relatives. His grandmother was particularly harsh, always badgering him to be more masculine. She was frightened of what might happen to him otherwise.

Indeed, the fear that comes with an unfamiliar language and culture is a running theme: his aggressive abuela flummoxed in a Winn-Dixie; his proud parents treated with contempt during a traffic stop. And Riqui himself was initially frightened by his sexuality. He only slowly integrated his personality—gay, Cuban, American—with the help of fellow Cubans, straight and gay, and an elderly Jewish woman who taught him that living among different worlds could be great fun.

Blanco used the same material in his first poetry collection, City of a Hundred Fires, and he approaches the memoir as a creative artist who shapes his narrative, making clear that it is “not necessarily or entirely factual,” with memories “embroidered.” It doesn’t matter: Blanco’s touching reminiscence has a deep emotional truth.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Most non-poetry-reading Americans first encountered Richard Blanco in 2013, when he was the presidential inauguration poet. On that occasion, his moving poem “One Today” made passing reference to his Spanish-speaking mother who rang up groceries for 20 years and his father who cut sugarcane so Richard could move ahead in the family’s new country.
NonfictionWomen's HistoryHistory

Working undercover in plain sight

Review by Anne Bartlett

You can get away with quite a lot if no one takes you very seriously. Like carrying military intelligence about the Union army through enemy lines to deliver it to the Confederates. Or hiding Union POW escapees in your attic while Confederate officers are boarding downstairs at your home. 

You get the picture: Women were largely dismissed as flighty, inferior creatures in Victorian times. That attitude helped several become some of the most effective spies of the Civil War. Again and again, the women who are the focus of Karen Abbott’s exciting Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War came close to discovery or death, only to be saved by their enemies’ sexism.

Not that Belle Boyd, Rose Greenhow, Emma Edmonds and Elizabeth Van Lew were ordinary women. They were all strong-minded, daring and difficult. Edmonds was perhaps the most astonishing: Escaping an abusive father in Canada, she masqueraded as a young man and joined the Union army. She kept up the game so well that she became an army scout, “cross-dressed” as a woman.

Confederates Greenhow and Boyd were flamboyant women who used sexual attraction in the service of their cause and were too indiscreet to retain their effectiveness. Pro-Union Van Lew, however, was a wealthy, circumspect middle-aged spinster. She carefully built a large, lasting spy and prisoner-escape network in Richmond, even infiltrating an African-American secret agent into Jefferson Davis’ house as a servant.

This is compelling material, and Abbott, best-selling author of Sin in the Second City, cross-cuts among the stories to produce dramatic cliff-hangers. Her depiction of Greenhow’s tragic end will move any reader, whatever one may think of the Confederate cause.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

You can get away with quite a lot if no one takes you very seriously. Like carrying military intelligence about the Union army through enemy lines to deliver it to the Confederates. Or hiding Union POW escapees in your attic while Confederate officers are boarding downstairs at your home.
NonfictionHistoryArts & CultureArt

Behind the art world’s most famous face

Review by Anne Bartlett

Leonardo da Vinci was an outlier in so many ways: a peripatetic polymath, handsome, unmarried, an innovator, unquestionably an artistic genius. He doesn’t typify his era any more than geniuses ever do. Leonardo was a party of one.

Ah, but then there’s Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo: Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa”—probably. Other candidates do exist, but most experts now believe this Florentine merchant’s wife was the model for the iconic portrait in the Louvre, arguably the world’s most famous painting. And as author Dianne Hales notes in the engaging Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered, Lisa was an ordinary woman, albeit one with a wealthy husband. Her life provides an excellent entry point into early Renaissance Florence.

Hales, an experienced journalist, weaves the stories of Lisa, her older husband Francesco and Leonardo into a rich tapestry of family life, mercantile society, politics and artistic development. Hales acknowledges that we really don’t know anything about Lisa’s inner life, but we do know a good bit about her ancestry and circumstances, and the author is able to make some informed guesses. Thanks to public records, Francesco comes through more clearly as a sharp-elbowed opportunist. He likely met Leonardo when he was dickering with the artist’s notary father over a financial dispute with a monastery represented by Ser Piero da Vinci.

Particularly enthralling are Hales’ near-cinematic descriptions of Florence’s lively social life—its street festivals, baptisms, weddings. She also lets us in on her own effort to uncover Lisa’s life by taking us along on her visits to Lisa’s old neighborhoods and to contemporary scholars. Hales even introduces us to the present-day Italian aristocrats descended from Lisa, the Guicciardini Strozzi family, who are as charming as one would hope. And might that be a special smile on the príncipe’s lips?

 

This article was originally published in the August 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Leonardo da Vinci was an outlier in so many ways: a peripatetic polymath, handsome, unmarried, an innovator, unquestionably an artistic genius. He doesn’t typify his era any more than geniuses ever do. Leonardo was a party of one.
LiteratureAmerican History

A slice of 20th century life in literature

Review by Anne Bartlett

When The Great Gatsby was published in 1925, it got a decidedly tepid reception. Reviews were mixed, sales were deeply disappointing. F. Scott Fitzgerald just couldn’t get it together to write anything serious, some critics said. The book seemed too ephemeral to many readers—ripped from the headlines, like an episode of “Law and Order” today.

Of course, opinion has changed, and we now see Gatsby as a timeless classic. To Americans educated on the symbolism of the green light on the dock, the early response seems mysterious. But, as literary historian Sarah Churchwell explains in her fascinating Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby, it really wasn’t.

Gatsby was actually much more rooted in its contemporary scene than we remember. Fitzgerald got his ideas for the novel in a particular time and place: New York City and environs in late 1922, when he and wife Zelda were very young, very famous and usually drunk out of their minds. The self-destructive tendencies that soon destroyed them were already sadly in evidence.

Churchwell guides us through the formation of Fitzgerald’s Gatsby ideas, as much as it can be recreated, by following the couple’s lives during that time, and blending their story with what was going on around them. Fitzgerald himself noted a number of the influences, in a terse outline he wrote years later. But Churchwell also takes particular interest in the then-notorious Hall-Mills double murder in New Jersey.

What a murder it was: An adulterous couple, a minister and a choir singer, were found slain under a lover’s lane apple tree. The minister’s wife was rich; the choir singer’s husband was a janitor; a weird person known as “the Pig Woman” claimed to have seen the crime. New Jersey authorities so botched the case that it was never solved (though Churchwell pretty clearly has her own suspect.)

Fitzgerald only mentioned it once in an interview, but Churchwell makes a good case that it subtly underlies Gatsby. Think about it: A downmarket Madame Bovary has an affair with an upper class guy and ends up dead. Her husband is a hapless working-class stiff. Sound anything like Myrtle, Tom and George from Gatsby?

As Churchwell emphasizes, Myrtle’s death is not the Hall-Mills case any more than newspaperman Bayard Swope’s parties are Gatsby’s parties or Gatsby is a bootlegger named Gerlach. Fitzgerald was an artist, not a writer of romans a clef. But Churchwell has produced an intriguing glimpse into how his mind worked, as he mined the Jazz Age innovations that still shape our world. 

When The Great Gatsby was published in 1925, it got a decidedly tepid reception. Reviews were mixed, sales were deeply disappointing. F. Scott Fitzgerald just couldn’t get it together to write anything serious, some critics said. The book seemed too ephemeral to many readers—ripped from the headlines, like an episode of “Law and Order” today.

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