March by Geraldine Brooks

And now, a year has passed since I undertook to go to war, and I wake every day, sweating, in the solitude of the seed store at Oak Landing, to a condition of uncertainty. More than months, more than miles, now stand between me and that passionate orator perched on his tree-stump pulpit. One day, I hope to go back. To my wife, to my girls, but also to the man of moral certainty that I was that day; that innocent man, who knew with such clear confidence exactly what it was that he was meant to do.

In Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, the titular sisters must get by much of the time without their father, who has joined the Union cause as a Civil War chaplain. His letters are sparse, and his narrative role mostly about his absence, though when he take sick, the girl's mother Marmee is called away to D.C. to tend to him. In this way Little Women thrusts the girls into independence and self-sufficiency, but what is it that Rev. March is doing down there, and what is he trying to accomplish? Why does an older man with four young daughters uproot his life and leave his home to risk his life? Geraldine Brooks' March is a story meant to answer those questions, following March through his experiences in the Civil War: first, as a chaplain attached to a field hospital, then to a "contraband" farm leased to another Northerner--that is, taken from Southern hands, worked with the labor of former slaves, now paid, and always at risk of being retaken by Confederate guerillas.

I've read three of Brooks' books now: this, her book The Secret Chord about the Israelite King David, and Caleb's Crossing, about a Wampanoag man caught between his indigenous family and his white lover in the 17th century. I think I get her "deal," which is meticulously researched, middlebrow historical fiction books. What they lack in innovation or experimental qualities, they make up in a kind of well-wrought verisimilitude, and the recasting of vaguely familiar stories with historical detail. In this case, Brooks bases the life of her Rev. March on the life of Amos Bronson Alcott, Louisa May's father and another Northern abolitionist caught up in the crusade of ending slavery in the South. They are convincing, which is about 90% of what they need to be.

It's been a while since I've read Little Women, so I don't have a clear sense of how it compares, or how Brooks uses the raw material of the original novel. But the elements of March that detail March's Little Women life, including the sections in which he meets and woos the hot-headed Marmee, were by far the least interesting parts for me. Much stronger, I thought, was the entirely original story of March's experiences in the South, beginning with his return to a now-collapsed plantation, where once he had been a guest as a traveling salesman and fallen in love with an enslaved woman named Grace. When he returns with his Union regiment, Grace is still there, caring for the ancient plantation owner, who turns out to have been her father. March and Grace have a romantic dalliance that gives the book some of its moral and emotional complexity, and certainly complicates the straightforward Bob-Odenkirk style "My little women!" March of the novel.

I was also gripped by March's experience on the leased farm, where the former slaves still work under horrible conditions, not because of the racism of chattel slavery, but because of the exigencies of war. Has life really changed for these enslaved people, when their wages are delayed and their work is back-breaking? Can March's noble ideals survive the real-world crucible of the war? This question is, I think, what is most engaging about March, which is, in the end, a book about a noble man facing down the limits of his good intentions. For this reason I was put off by the novel's snide depiction of John Brown as a man with good values who let himself be carried away into unacceptable violence--a reaction that seemed confirmed to me by Grace's insistence at the novel's end that March return to his family, where she says she can do the most good. A preference for quietism, I think, dogs the book's moral complexity, though only in slight and subtle ways.