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Conceit

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Forget your high-school textbook anthologies!
Mary Novik's Conceit is nothing like that!
Hers is a brilliant and complex work featuring a sparkling cast of characters who step off the page as breathing - yea, sometimes panting.
A flawed, and sometimes tormented panoply of human beings.

Donne, whose literary fame rests on both his theological meditations and poetry and his earlier sensuous Cavalier lyrics both to Ann More and to his reputed mistresses (pre-Ann) forms the cog of the wheel of this narrative.
This poet's extremes, as any student of 17th century English literary study knows, is the core of the Donne dichotomy.

For to say you like John Donne is to be met with the question: Which Donne? The Cavalier - who loved all he touched, or the enigmatic, untouchable Priest, whose writing reflected a man grappling with Puritan concepts of the evils of the flesh and a preoccupation with the subject of death?

Who was this man, so passionate in his love for Ann More that he risked everything to make her his wife only to later occupy high moral ground of the Anglican pulpit where - in sanctimonious tones - he decried his own sinful passion and her "voluptuous spirit"?
Was this pious priest the same lover who, thrown into jail for his union with her, wrote despairingly (and characteristically wittily) to her from prison the now famous phrase "John Donne. Ann Donne. Undone."

The question not only of Love's secret but also the poet's identity is at the center of this page turner of a novel; and if that were Novik's only focus, it would be question enough, indeed, to explore.
But - in something of a conceit itself, alongside Donne's life story, deepening and complicating the answer to the riddle, is Novik's largely fanciful story of Donne's youngest daughter, Pegge and her own quest for love. A quest that would seem to drive her toward madness of the kind found in the pages of gothic fiction.

Novik leans Pegge's longing and incisive memory narrative against the narrative voices of Donne (who wanders through the past and looks to the future as he waits to die and rise to a purified state), and Ann, whose haunting voice escapes from the grave to harry both John and Pegge to tell her story - the real story of the "undone" lovers. It is a request that Pegge seems to hear and to take on as her challenge.

Though there is ample bawdy here as Novik takes us in rich description to the beds of the book's lovers, Conceit is no mere Harlequin romance telling in titillating tones the story of the famous and erotically charged lovelife of Ann More and John Donne. A rich display of creative nonfiction, the book rambles leisurely into Novik's impressions (meticulously researched) of an historical London and its tapestries of plague, medicine (maggots, poultices of dead pigeons, etc.), fashion, politics, and personalities.

Novik, who said that she got the idea for the novel while wondering what Donne's children would think of the steamy letters and poems that he had written to his wife, notes that Donne "wrote love poems like a priest and holy poems like a lover." Not exactly the kind of stuff you'd leave as legacy to your offspring.

But legacy it becomes for Pegge, whose intelligent, independent voice relays much of the story, mingling her unflagging desire to find a love commensurate with her parents' all consuming passion with her own apparent failure to find a mate suitable to her desires. Pegge's early obsession with Izaak Walton, her father's biographer, forms an intriguing subnarrative enhancing the book's primary motifs.

Wanting to be remembered as a holy [and wholly] passionless man, after Ann dies in childbirth (their 12th), Donne denies the reality of the love they had shared...a love that had once compelled him to write of being buried with his love, entwined in an eternal embrace, as well as such heart-searing and ardent verse as "Valediction: Forbidding Mourning."

Donne has not completely succumbed to the sacrosanct, however: we overhear the dying Donne privately recollect his youth and admit in straightforward interior monologues to Ann that he would "rather be owner of you one hour than all else ever." It is a desire that the pious Donne would like to destroy, but one that bespeaks the kind of absolute passion that daughter Pegge wants to find for her own life.

As Pegge follows her quest to discover "What is love?" - a question put to her ill and dying father in a most remarkable scene - Pegge, craving the kind of passion for which she knows (by reading Donne's poems to her mother) that her father and mother shared, ultimately becomes something of her mother's defender, a role that she sees as necessary largely because of Izaak Walton, whose Life of Donne seems to be an attempt to "sanctify" her father, erasing all his fleshly yearnings.

It is her insistence on seeing to it that both her father's lust and his longing for spiritual purity are represented in Walton's book that takes the book to its ending - and neatly (but not too neatly) wraps up Pegge's search.

Novik, though she draws her major characters completely, does not weaken on the minor roles either: emerging in full-fledged array are Izaak Walton - whose Compleat Angler forms a backdrop for passages on fish and fishing unlike any I have ever read- and the irrepressible Samuel Pepys, from whose Diary Novik draws to portray yet another (moving) look at how a marriage contends with the effects of unbridled passion - this time for someone other than one's spouse - a theme that, when closely examined, intensifies the book's central theme of passion vs. a less flesh-dependent love.
Opening the book with a vivid portrait of the Great Fire of London, a scene that is probably drawn from Pepys' account, Novik frames the narrative here: opening and closing with Pegge's rescue of her father's effigy from the inner sanctum of St. Paul's Cathedral. (Having more than a little fun with her historical perspective, Novik has even seen to have Christopher Wren make a timely cameo appearance.)

As close to being creative memoir with historical grounding as a novel can be, Novik's narrative in itself forms a kind of conceit as it offers both implied and overt comparisons between Donne's love in his youth and age and those of his daughter Pegge.
The conceit - an elaborate and ingenious analogy - was the literary device for which Donne is known. Donne's brilliant use of this literary device runs smoothly through the book as Novik pulls in a radiant array of lines from his work. Novik's novel is scattered with lines from Donne's work, sometimes surreptitiously placed, sometimes quoted in full. They only add more richness to a book already rich in descriptive, sensuous prose describing domestic activities, city life in London in the seventeenth century and natural settings.

As with any complex work of literature, it is impossible to fit Conceit into any kind of neat slot. It is fiction, it is biography, it is history.
But mostly it is a story of the conflicts found within us all - the longing for ....the higher and yet the yoked to physical and earthly pleasures.
No pretty little romantic story, Conceit can be a disquieting read on many levels, not the least being that - not to give too much away - Novik hints in several instances of what most would view as an unnatural, unhealthy love.
But it is the language and the questions it asks that ultimately may leave the reader with his [or her] own obsession - to read more of the poetry of Donne.

Mary Novik has written a seventeenth-century historical fiction, at the heart of which is Pegge Donne, one of the poet John Donne's daughters. Significant characters are her poet-priest father, her mother Ann More Donne, her siblings and children, some contemporary luminaries and other persons, and her husband Sir William Bowles. The gist is two generations of the Donnes' domestic lives-- courtship, marriage, childbirth, and dying--amid the backdrop of contemporary English events. Novik's style is sensuous with description yet also raises longing, love, and letters to a spiritual plane. The transition between above and below ground, between this life and the next, is celebrated rather than shunned: Ann Donne opines from under the paved stones of St. Clements; bones and effigies are returned to the life cycle, memories and remnants haunt present generations. Passages, sometimes resemble a prose poem. Highly recommended for literary and history buffs, this book differs in style and theme from Edward Docx's modern fiction THE CALLIGRAPHER, an adaptation of Donne's thirty SONGS AND SONNETS.

This is a superbly discreet novel about Pegge Donne, a daughter of John Donne. It is a wonderful portrait in which the figure of John Donne also looms large in a setting believably evoked through well researched, unobtrusive detail. The main ideas are, as one would expect, concerned with physical presences in a world where spiritual truths are imaginative possibilities rather than realities. For me, the spiritual climax of the work has been brought off with great skill considering its brave entangling of sex with death in a scene of revelatory beauty well fitting the metaphysical aura of the entire novel (see Chapter 18 "A Nocturnal"). Perhaps it is that i love novels in which the dead speak. The language of the novel is exemplary; several times a paragraph struck me as among the best i'd ever read. Obviously John Donne has inspired the author to a representation that is convincing. Since i've a great interest in film i've spent some time since reading "Conceit" speculating on who i'd want to play the various roles; Pegge & John Donne would be plum roles & much could done with the scenes at St.Pauls burning during the Great Fire wherefrom Pegge retrieves the great effigy of her father. There is high drama at times but mostly it details Pegge's spiritual character & her relationships with her Father, Mother, Brothers, Sisters, Husband, & "friend" Isaac Walton. It is well worth reading.
John Camfield, Vancouver B.C.

This is a beautifully-written historical novel, told mainly from the point-of-view of John Donne's daughter. This is the type of historical fiction I delight in, with flawlessly crafted prose, delightful details, wit, and interesting family dynamics. I highly recommend it.

This is a captivating read. The author's historical research coupled with her amazing imagination made this reading experience a most special one. She has vividly brought seventeenth-century England to life while weaving a rich tale about one of literature's greatest poets. After reading Conceit, you will never again think of John Donne as he was presented in literature classes!

Mary Novik's novel Conceit is the story of John Donne's daughter Pegge and her quest to discover what love is. She is entranced by her parents' relationship--in an unusual move for their time, they married for love, but by the end of his life, Novik's Donne seems to regret this decision in some ways as he searches for husbands for his own daughters and tries to suppress his past and his feelings for Ann, who died years before the novel's events. He is concerned about the legacy he leaves behind and works hard to construct an expurgated life story for himself, focused on his work as Dean of St. Paul's. The novel begins as Pegge braves the Great Fire of London in 1666 to save the effigy of her father in St. Paul's and travels back through Pegge's memories of her father's death, the memories of her own parents, and forward again to Pegge's life as a wife, mother, and grandmother.

Novik brings seventeenth century England to life in this novel. In many cases, I think writers of historical fiction create characters who act too much like modern people. This novel reminded me of Anthony Burgess's Nothing Like the Sun (Norton Paperback Fiction) in its attention to period detail. Novik has managed to capture a place that seems much more real than most historical fiction novels do. Even though Pegge is somewhat eccentric for her time, I found her completely plausible as a character because of Novik's skill as a writer. What else would the daughter of John Donne be? I found myself shaking my head at her and sympathizing with her husband William a great deal, but she was oddly endearing. I really enjoyed reading about all of her experiments (from fish recipes to horticulture). A favorite quote by Novik's Donne from the novel:

"That is my last poem, Pegge. See that it gets to Marriot for printing with the others. I am glad it was you who came into the room just now. Of all my children, you have the most poetry in you, thought God knows how you will use it."(214)

Conceit is a rare historical novel that allows the reader to feel immersed in a time period, learn some history, and enjoy the story all at once.

Mary Novik has created an intensely intimate and extraordinarily sensual experience of 17th century England, seen through the always wide open eyes of Pegge Donne,daughter of the famous poet John Donne. The unconventional Pegge's passion for the natural world, restless intelligence, and overwhelming desire to uncover the nature of human love are irresistible forces, and an intimate reading experience.