Customer Reviews

The Madam

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2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Julianna Baggott's third novel, The Madam, is an incredible story of strength and suffering. Built with poetic language and a riveting narrative, The Madam is a must read for book groups, classes, and individuals. This is a different style for Baggott after her debut, Girl Talk and her fabulous follow-up, The Miss America Family. But if you look carefully at the themes, the poetic prose, the lovable and insane cast of characters, you'll find that The Madam is all Baggott.

In spare, exact prose, Julianna Baggott transports us to 1920's West Virginia and continues to examine all sides of what it means to live within a family. This time, she not only explores the extended family, which she has done masterfully before in Girl Talk and the Miss America Family, but has added other characters to the bloodlines--and because of this begs the question--just what does family mean?

Julianna also looks at ONE moment in a lifetime (not as earthshattering as Sophie's Choice, but because it's NOT as heartbreaking but still involves children, still well-worth the contemplation) and asks, How does this change a life, and more to the point, how does that one moment change all the participants in that decision? In, what I would call sepia tones, Julianna goes exploring. I say sepia tones because I believe we go exploring with Julianna as if we were exploring old photos in a scrapbook. Maybe it is because of the time period--those late 1920's when life could be hard as dirt. Each page is photo-perfect in unfolding the story.

What I appreciate most about Julianna is her braveness in exploring a totally different voice than her first two novels while continuing to explore some of the same themes. Risky, sure, but ultimately rewarding for the reader. You won't pick up this novel and say, I've read this before.

As a sidenote, if you ever get the chance to go to one of Julianna's readings, you will be sold for life. Some authors are just born to read their works and some appear to be wearing shoes two sizes too small. Julianna is wearing comfortable shoes.

I've left the character particulars (Alma, Henry, the children) to other reviewers. Grab a cup of java, pick out your most comfortable chair, and settle down with The Madam. You'll be flung back in time and want to sit a spell.

Everything I've loved in Baggott's other novels, Girl Talk and The Miss America Family--is here, but with a sense of place and time that draws you in from page one. There's the wild, off-kilter characters, desperation brimming just under deliberately tough exteriors, the family flung apart by circumstance and reconstituted into something altogether new, unexpected and yet exactly as it should be. The language is lush and evocative--as another reviewer said, you can tell a poet is at work here (Baggott's This Country of Mothers is an award-winning book of poetry and a must-read), but it's completely to serve the story, which culminates in a tense and powerful scene of a family saving itself. Baggott has taken on new territory here and made it her own.

Stolid, pragmatic Alma leaves work at the lint-filled hosiery mill and plods home through her 1920s West Virginia world awash in coal dust to a house packed full of show-people boarders, a railroad man husband with pie in the sky dreams, and three children who deserve a better childhood. When she gets there, her work will begin again, endlessly, as though the denizens of the household comprise a rather large and unseemly nest of squalling baby birds with infinite needs and peculiarities.

En route, Alma pauses at a carnival, steals time away from those infinite needs and peculiarities at a side show of oddities on display where she spends her dime to see the Mule-Faced Woman. The Mule-Faced Woman is grotesque but, on balance, her life appears better than Alma's. Yet, Alma senses impending change, she's not sure exactly what, but she needs it if she's ever going to give her kids better than she ever got.

Julianna Baggott's spartan, poetic prose weaves an off-kilter and dramatic story suggested by her own family's legends. In the acknowledgments, Baggott thanks her grandmother "who was raised with show people, nuns, hustlers and whores" for sharing the the facts of a very unusual life.

After her husband Henry leaves her when his sure-fire money making scheme doesn't pay off, after the boarders disappear when the show closes, after almost all of Alma has drained away, transforming the large house into a bordello is the only sensible solution. The whores, the clients and the police bring a new normalcy into Alma's life even though her children will one day want something better than the nest. There's money now and food on the table.

Life for Alma "becomes too complicated if she entertains the notion that her daughter is turning into a woman in a house like this. Alma can feel her life rising up for new consideration, but she prefers the way she has been for years now: A morning goes by and then an afternoon. Eventually there's evening. She sleeps. She is within it all, desperately so, and she doesn't have to think beyond it."

It's not for us to know how truth and fiction combine in this well-told tale with its careful, yet intricate plot seasoned--some will say--with Southern Gothic flavoring, and overflowing with blunt-edged emotions and a no-nonsense view of life's trials and toil. But the atmosphere from beginning to end is relentless and cruel and deeply wonderful because Baggott loved her protagonist, and the show people, nuns, hustlers and whores enough to show their world of lint and coal dust and sex as almost sacred.

This book presents a view of West Virginia that has not really been seen. It gives a voice to women who are usually not included in the history books. An excellent choice for anyone interested in feminist theory and books written by women writers, or for anyone who likes a good, quick read.

This is one of my favorite novels. I love how it examines the quiet, domestic, emotional interior lives of characters and subject matter that are usually sensationalized. The sentences sparkle, not a word out of place. Stunningly poetic and visual. I loved the characters. It would make an excellent movie.

This must have been a difficult book for the author to write because it is based on her own family. Alma, her great-grandmother, was a madam in the 1930s in West Virginia. Lettie, her grandmother, who is now in her eighties, spent her girlhood in that house. Now, all these years later, the talented Ms. Baggott has chosen to use this background.

The characters are all developed with the kind of quirky detail that characterizes all of the author's work. And the setting certainly comes across as real. I recently saw Ms. Baggott speak at a bookstore to promote her book, and I had to smile as she described how she did research by calling up her grandmother in the middle of one afternoon to ask about the prices charged for certain kinds services rendered to the men in 1932.

The story is not only about Alma, mother of three, who worked in a mill, was abandoned by her husband and then took up the world's oldest profession. It's about the times she lived in, the reasons for her choices and the children she loved. Along the way, we meet the women who work for her as well as a very special nun who has more in common with Alma that meets the eye.

The author has a great imagination and I know this was fiction, but I couldn't help thinking throughout about what was true and what was not. Certainly, all the thoughts and feelings had to be created. And the ending, which actually surprised me, seemed a bit too much of a shocker to have really happened that way. But one of the strengths of the book was that I was constantly guessing.

As was Ms. Baggott's other two books, "The Madam" is a fast and enjoyable read. Definitely recommended.

Fans of best-selling novelist Julianna Baggott will thank her for her newest. Like her earlier novels, this one is beautifully written while the characters and their stories keep the reader turning the pages. You can tell she publishes poetry, but, unlike John Updike, for instance, she doesn't beat you over the head with her rich prose; it's just the air the novel breathes.

Again she manages to live in the minds and souls of people quite different from herself (The Miss America Family was told from the point of view of a teenaged boy); her protagonist is a madam living before the middle of the twentieth century. Yet the reader is always convinced by the lives her characters lead.

And the lives are lived utterly on the edge, as in her other novels. The events of her novels matter to us; everything is always at stake.

Here, the protagonist, Alma, is faced with disaster when her husband abandons her, penniless, far from home, and without her children, whom he essentially forces her to leave in an orphanage. With the help and understanding of women curiously like her, and in similar straits, somehow Alma endures and perseveres--the verbs reminiscent of The Sound and The Fury, maybe, but the events in this novel do seem to work in the world of myth. Again, though, Baggott doesn't beat the reader over the head with it. Instead, we are caught up in the tension of these women's world as they struggle to wage life.

A beautifully written story of struggle, loss and joy, heartbreaking at turns, mesmerizing throughout.

This is not the literary page-turner that the inside jacket suggests. This was juat an ok book. I'm still not sure if it was worth reading. The book starts off very slow and didn't pick up until the second half. Then there's just too much going on with everything being crammed into part two. There isn't enough dialogue between the characters. Just a bunch of insight into their thoughts. The ending wasn't too great either. A really great book that has a simalar plot is The Crimson Petal and The White by Michael Faber. I suggest that you read that before The Madam if at all.