The Mineral Palace [Hardcover]

Heidi Julavits (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 24, 2000

It is the drought-ridden spring of 1934, and Bena Jonssen, her husband, Ted, and their baby move from Minnesota to Pueblo, a Western plains town plagued by suffocating dust storms and equally suffocating social structures. Little can thrive in this bleak environment, including Bena and Ted's marriage, and the baby, whom Bena-despite her husband's constant assurances-believes is slipping away from her.

To distract herself from worrying, Bena accepts a position at Pueblo's daily newspaper, the Chieftain, reporting on the town's elite club women and their "good works"-women such as Reimer Lee Jackson, with her plans to restore the town's crumbling monument to the mining industry, the Mineral Palace, to its former grandeur. Bena is drawn to the Mineral Palace and to more of the seamy side of Pueblo-the lurid hallways of a brothel, where she encounters a prostitute, Maude, and Red, a brooding cowboy. Through these emotional entanglements, Bena exposes not only the sexual corruption on which an entire town is founded but also the lies enclosing her own marriage and the sanctity of motherhood. She returns again and again to the Mineral Palace; finally, within its eroding walls, she is forced to confront her most terrifying secret, which becomes her only means for salvation.

With gritty and magical prose, Heidi Julavits conveys the darker sides of wealth and status, and the intersection of parental love and merciful destruction. The Mineral Palace is a startling and authentic story of survival in a world of aridity and decadence.

"The Mineral Palace is daring and brutal in its revelation of lives distorted by past injury and present denial. Heidi Julavits has written a dark Faulknerian tale."-Maureen Howard

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

As they drive from Minnesota to her physician husband's new job in Pueblo, Colo., in 1934, Bena Jonssen encounters on-the-run bank thief Bonnie Parker (of Bonnie and Clyde fame), who gives her a tarnished silver charm. This surreal event, and others that follow, invest this compelling, though not flawless, debut novel with a dreamlike immediacy. The Depression, the drought-parched dust bowl landscape, her newborn son's strange lethargy and her knowledge that her husband, Ted, is an inveterate drinker and philanderer, cast grim shadows over Bena's attempts to come to terms with her future. Adding to these burdens are repressed memories of her domineering brother's death when they were young. Outwardly assured, Bena is subject to a surreptitious emotional tic: she obsessively adds and combines numbersAa birth date, her son's measurements, etc.Ato divine signs and portents. Bena wins a job on the local newspaper, where she covers the numerous civic clubs that constitute social activism in the economically depressed community. One such project, a plan to restore the Mineral Palace, a crumbling edifice built in 1891 to express the town's boastful pride, when silver mining was its chief industry, proves to have a painful epiphanic significance as Bena finally confronts the fears and traumas that have constricted her life. Meanwhile, she has fallen in love with Red Grissom, a soulful, sensitive rancher with a penchant for rescuing lost causes, and has met a Dickensian cast of townspeople, each of whom is festering with doleful secrets. Julavits can be a magician with language, spinning brilliant metaphors and investing descriptive scenes with almost palpable dimensionality. Her enthusiasm with words sometimes spills over into hyperactive verbiage, however, resulting in such forced images as "bacon thinner than a wedding veil." Several key scenes are shriekingly melodramatic, and prosthetic limbs turn up all too frequently among the eccentric characters (and animals). While Julavits can justly be criticized for overwriting, however, her narrative has the drive to keep readers hooked. Agent, Henry Dunow. Rights sold in Denmark, France, Germany, the U.K., Italy, Spain, Sweden and the Netherlands.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In her debut novel, Julavits, a caring writer with a sensitive voice who uses language very skillfully, has fashioned a stark, dark tale of depression, loss, topsy-turvy maternalism, and the death of dreams. When Bena Jonssen, her doctor husband, and infant son relocate to Pueblo, CO, during the Depression years, they see the move as a new beginning. However, Bena has had little experience with dust storms, desolate surroundings, poverty, and rejection. She needs to find out what's wrong with her marriage and why her baby seems different. She also needs to come to an understanding about her brother's death by drowning. Slowly, Bena begins to realize that ordinary people may make strange decisions during times of unusual circumstances. Some readers may find the physical, emotional, and psychological suffering in this novel too overwhelming. The writing, however, is superb.
-DEllen R. Cohen, Rockville, MD
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 326 pages
• Publisher: Putnam Adult; First Edition edition (August 24, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0399146229
• ISBN-13: 978-0399146220
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,634,402 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Heidi Julavits was born in Portland, Maine, in 1968. She graduated from Dartmouth College and has an MFA from Columbia University. Her short stories have appeared in Harper's, Esquire, the Best American Short Stories, Zoetrope, among other places. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, Elle, and the Best American Travel Essays. She is a founding co-editor of The Believer magazine, the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, Ben Marcus, and their two children.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A first novel, November 5, 2000

By 

S. Harris (Spotsylvania, VA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Mineral Palace (Hardcover)

Heidi Julavits is clearly a talented writer who will, I feel, in the future write a great novel. But "The Mineral Palace" isn't it. "The Mineral Palace" is a good novel, but it is overlong and crowded with too many figures and forebodings that drown out a potentially effective ending. The novel starts out promisingly enough with a scene straight from a Kurosawa film: a dog trotting along with a prosthetic arm in its mouth. Bena, the main figure in the novel, looks warily at the dog, while constantly doing computations regarding fate -- an effective device that is later dropped at about the halfway point of the novel. Bena is a fascinating and complex character, with her guilts and desires, playing themselves out on the devasted moonscape of Pueblo Colorado, circa 1934. Julavets spends a great deal of time developing her. And she largely succeeeds. Where the author fails, is in the sheer accumulation of grotesque figures populating the novel. There is a rich one-legged woman thumping around on an elephant tusk; a fated prostitute who does litte more than shriek throughout the novel; two feed store clerks straight out of "Deliverance"; an unbelievable heart-of-gold Sam Elliot like cowboy, who never grows beyond the Marlboro Man, etc. None of these figures are bad in themselves, but only half were probably needed (along with about a 100 less pages). On the other hand there is a wonderful evil figure in Horace Gast, who is central, and one I wish Julavits had of spent even more time exploring his various dark corners along with his relationship the town. Up to about the halfway point of the novel I was ready to give this 4 or more stars. But the novel seemed to lose much of its energy after this. Revelations such as infaticide, suicide, and incest, lacked the kind of wallop they should of had on the reader. It seems to me that Julavits, with her remorseless universe, was going for Aeschylus via Thomas Hardy (or perhaps better: William Faulkner). Still, this is a novel worth reading. Like Faulkner, Julavits delivers chapters that can stand alone as stories. Two, "The Stolen Pillbox" (where Bena meets an on-the-run Bonnie Parker), and "Buffalo Mass Suicide" are fine examples of a short story writer showing her strength. "The Mineral Palace" is, at 300 pages, an ambitious novel. I hope Julavits' next novel is more pared back. But I also look forward to it.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Yaddo, Yaddo, Yaddo, April 26, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Mineral Palace (Nova Audio Books) (Audio Cassette)

I almost used the title: How many gratuitous dead babies does it take to make a bestseller? Offensive? Yes. But not entirely inaccurate. This is not your "feel good summer beach read."

This is the kind of book that comes out of writers' workshops. Overwrought and over-long with symbolism overwhelming story at every turn of page.

Mineral Palace is bleak and tedious. Too many plot points end up being pointless. And how do such cardboard characters withstand such raging duststorms?

As a work of fiction, I don't care whether this is an accurate depiction of Pueblo in the 30s. I do care that I was lured into this town with the promise of a good story and left with just a few stunning images (The Buffalo Mass Suicide).

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A contrived tale signifying nothing, August 25, 2002

By 

Anne (Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Mineral Palace (Paperback)

From the opening pages of Heidi Julavits's "The Mineral Palace", doom hangs over the Jonssen family. It makes its first appearance when a crow hits the windshield of their car as they journey from St. Paul, Minnesota to a new life in Pueblo, Colorado. It lingers like an oppressive force throughout the body of the novel and by the final chapter only the most obtuse reader could fail to see what it portends.

Bena Jonssen is a young mother who slowly comes to the realization that her newborn son is not "right". Dissatisfied with her life (a faithless husband, a college education wasted on marriage, an unwanted move to the dustbowl of 1934 Colorado) Bena spends a lot time blaming blind cosmic forces for her own misfortunes and the grim ugliness of the world she sees around her. In fact, Bena seems capable of seeing only the ugliness and the meaninglessness of her world.

Julavits writes quite well in a mechanical sense but her characters lack soul and the overall effect she creates is contrived. As a reader, it's very hard to feel much of anything for Bena, whose emotions are as distant and cold as the rocks housed in Pueblo's decrepit "Mineral Palace". Julavits has no particular feel for the time period or the place where she sets her story. Indeed, one wonders why she chose them. Without the clutter of stereotypical Western images with which Julavits decorates the novel (like the mysterious cowboy "Red" who eats his sausage by cutting slices off with his pocket knife), the reader would lose all but the most generic sense of time or place. Julavits has a penchant for the bizarre (like the rich widow whose prosthetic leg is made of elephant tusk) which makes her version of the 1930s read like the script for a David Lynch film. The unrelenting bleakness of Bena's vision seems forced and inauthentic. Julavits is making a point here -- but in the soulless vacuum of her Pueblo it comes across as pointless as the lives of the characters she's created.

"The Mineral Palace" is not without its redeeming qualities. The sleight of hand Julavits plays in the first chapter, where the legendary Bonnie and Clyde's final fated road trip briefly intersects Bena and Ted Jonssen's journey to Pueblo, is pulled off with style and ease. Julavits's writing sometimes has a cinematic quality, such that one can imagine it more successfully achieved on the big screen than on the printed page. Overall, however, I would not recommend this book.