Waiting for Mary Novik's Next Book, Here's a Review of Her Last One...

Almost exactly six  years ago, I was lucky enough to have Quill and Quire ask me to review Mary Novik's debut novel Conceit.  I was blown away by it, as the following review which I've just rescued from my old files, attests.  Now I hear that her novel about Francesco Petrach will be out in August, and I'm really looking forward to reading it.

In the meantime, here's my review of Conceit:

I How to write a review in 350 words that does justice to Mary Novik’s extraordinary novel Conceit? 

Nearly impossible, which is probably why the publicist’s bumph veers toward  purple prose, making it sound like an overheated historical bodice-ripper.  Yes, Novik plunges us into the London of the Great Fire of 1666 as the book opens.  Yes, she makes us smell the smoke and feel the heat, just as she shows us, a little later on, the longing that Pegge Donne feels for her first love, Isaak Walton.

The book, in its baldest outline, is pretty simple, too: a family drama with passionate overtones.  Dashing young courtier-poet John Donne falls madly in love with Anne Moore, has 12 children with her, and vows to  be buried next to her. 

But when he becomes dean of St. Paul’s, he decides to be buried there.  Pegge resents this decision, yet nevertheless  when London burns, Pegge—by now the mother of 12 children herself—rescues Donne’s statue from the cathedral (photo at right.) The book ends with a kind of reconciliation between Pegge and her long-dead father, and between her and her very-much-alive husband.  .

But this is far too sketchy  Not only does Novik present us with Pegge’s thinking, she also gives us John Donne rationalizing why he won’t spend eternity with Anne, and Anne, who died at 29 after 12 pregnancies,  wailing  “I know I did not die a natural death.  I was slain by love, at far too young an age.”  This shifting of point of view can be at times confusing, but the richness of the book makes up for it. 

Novik’s descriptions are often startling but very apt: for example, she says that during their father’s long sermons, the  Donne children “lounged about in their minds.” In preparing to tell her story Novik obviously has read major texts from the period, from Samuel Pepys’ diary to Donne’s own poems and sermons.  But the book is about “my seventeenth century,” she says, adding that she has “invented joyfully and freely.” 

The result is as delightful as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and as erudite and readable as A.S. Byatt’s Possession.