Customer Reviews

The Mineral Palace

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

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.

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).

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.

Stripped to its basics, this novel amounts to little more than a series of concocted images of the macabre--all, I assume, to build a menacing atmosphere in an otherwise common-place story of an unhappy marriage. The effect, sadly, is the opposite. Rather than shudder at each pointed reference to blood, pus, feces, scabs, roadkill,and prosthetic limbs, the sheer redundancy of these images became an irritating distraction and prompted me to abandon the book halfway. Where, I wondered, were the editor's red pens, good sense, and bottles of white-out?...

This Depression-era novel does little to evoke the Great Depression, but may well instill readers with their own private depression after they slog through this miserable tale. Doom and gloom hover over the Janssen family from the very outset of this overwrought and overwritten book. Forced to move from St. Paul, Minnesota to the small town of Pueblo, Colorado so that the man of the family can work as a doctor, they set off on a cross-country road trip. Ominous portents abound for Bena and Tom, with their newborn acting strangely, a crow hitting the windshield, and an encounter with Bonnie and Clyde all en route.

But this is just the warm-up for their arrival and installment in the strangely gothic town of Pueblo. Bored and unhappy with her life in general, and her marriage in particular, Bena gets a job at the local newspaper. This leads her to ignore what is considered proper and correct in order to poke around other people's lives and the town's past. Bena can't seem to turn around without meeting someone who is physically or emotionally scarred (sometimes both). But the dark underside of Pueblo isn't enough, Bena's got her own dark past -- namely the death of her brother. The material is the stuff of lurid pulp fiction, the kind of ingredients Jim Thompson handled so well. But here it becomes mostly melodrama and overstuffed imagery and metaphor. Lust, betrayal, addiction, suicide, incest, and infanticide are all present, and the sheer volume of life's dark side numbs the reader to any impact.

This might have been forgivable had their been a strong sense of time or place, or even an unpredictable payoff at the end. But the Depression seems to have little effect on the people of Pueblo, or at least no one seems particularly put out by it. And rather strangely, the author set the story in a real town with a real past, but seems to have more or less ignored the local geography, climate, and history. There is some good imagery at times, but the people are all far too outsize and knowing to be real. Finally, the denouement is entirely too predictable--having been foreshadowed into the ground. On the whole, the book has little to offer.

First, to give Julavits some credit, I must say her book is very compelling. I couldn't put it down, possibly because it was so relentlessly grim that I kept turning pages to find out when the plot would take a more light-hearted turn (it doesn't).
It is hard for me to figure out why this novel was published and further, why it earned the admiration of some critics. Possibly, they admire the author for avoiding "female" sentimentality. In fact, she seems to go out of her way to avoid any hint of human emotion. Every time anything remotely "cute" or vulnerable (eg. kitten) ventures into the setting of her novel, she promptly has it killed and then devoured by rats. Virtually all of her characters are maimed or disfigured in some way, and they all harbor unimaginably dark secrets.
So, how does the author get away with this almost-laughable melodrama? I can only conclude that Julavits is following a different tradition from most modern novels. I suspect she's trying to emulate the 19th century Gothic, in which over-the-top macabre imagery is considered the norm. Her characters are not meant to be realistic, I suppose, they are meant to be symbolic and grotesque.
Knowing these things doesn't make me like the novel any better, though. The classic Gothic novel usually has some redemptive message; this has none. Also, the writing is not to my taste. Julavits' prose style seems awkward and verbose, and I groaned at her far-fetched metaphors (she actually compares a bologna slice to a soul, at one point!)
In short, I'm not sure why some critics liked this book. It held my attention, but left me feeling hollow and let-down at the end.

Bleak, hammering and unforgiving in the administration of human folly and weakness. Maybe I shouldn't say 'unforgiving'; the author takes an even if unsparing hand with her characters. It's the reader who isn't forgiven, especially of all those inculcated desires for pollyanna satisfaction.

I think one of the most remarkable things about this novel is the degree to which it maintains the ethical rigor of the cautionary tale without ever lapsing into a hectoring or instructional tone. The characters here perform awful, selfish, ill-conceived and mercenary acts, but never florid or inexplicable ones. If caution is implied then I guess it's caution as to how easily a life can generate paths more horrific than any of us would prefer to imagine. In fact, that very concept -- the preference of imagination over truth, regardless of the consequences -- is one of the ideas most eloquently explored here.

I should also point out that all this narrative and moral freight is carried by a series of really lovely sentences, one after the other. It's beautiful writing, clear, replete with evocative images yet never cluttered. Impressive and pleasing.

'The Mineral Palace' is difficult to read, but only because of the difficulty of those things the author considers therein. She certainly considers them with honesty and intelligence and a ceaselessly inventive and accomplished prose; the work deserves to succeed.

I'd been wanting to read this book since I read Ms. Julavits' article in Poets & Writers about the criticism she received for this work and the importance of getting historical fiction right.

So...I started reading and would agree that it began nicely--though, at some point I couldn't figure out where the story was going and then I realized: Jeez. Is there even a story? In searching, I could find no great conflict, drama, or even mild tension. Nothing propelled this drivel. And so, after 243 pages, I called it quits (and believe me, I HATE giving up on a novel).

Julavits is a so-so author. Some of her sentences read very nicely. Still, I just have to wonder, what on Earth inspired her to write this? What was the inspiration? Was she writing genre fiction, keeping a frame around her story of "women's historical fiction" or did she actually think that this idea was unique?

I'll read Julavits again, only if the story itself seems clever.

Shame on her for publishing such a mindless bore.

Heidi Julavits seems to think that the only reason women have for existing is to reproduce. I can think of at least 3 examples of women being "barren" in this book, and of course they are angry or dysfunctional. I found this book to be sexist and offensive. The story was so bleak that it almost became laughable...all the characters' lives were completely devoid of joy or humor. They all should have just killed themselves (along with the buffalo mass suicide) and gotten the misery over with. The ending was highly predictable...more misery. The characters were stereotypical and one-dimensional. The women were either loving mothers (even when they did bad things to their children..it was out of love for them) or "barren women" whose lives were totally empty without children. The men were callous, cold, or downright evil...cardboard characters. That being said, however, some of her prose was really great...it was such a shame that she didn't use her talent to write a decent book. Don't waste your hard-earned money on this. Read something of value.

... but I just couldn't. Bena, the main character, is one of the most dull, obtuse, unlikeable characters I have run across in a long time. From the first couple of chapters, I was forcing myself to read on because I really didn't care what happened to her. I actually found myself cheering for her husband when he had the good sense to seek companionship with other women.

It is clear that the author did exactly zero research on Pueblo. If she wanted to set the novel in a real city, should she not have at least depicted it with some grounding in reality? Pueblo is far from the most glamorous city in Colorado, but lethal dust storms? Give me a break! Why does this New Yorker have such an axe to grind? Creative license is one thing, but if she wanted to bash a city on the High Plains, she would have done better to invent one than to pass off gross inaccuracies as historical fiction.

And for the record, I'm in my mid-thirties -- not a "vicious grandma" by any means; just telling it like it is. The author is clearly obsessed with her characters' fertility. Bena seems to consider herself superior to her "barren" acquaintences, despite the fact that she displays no affection for her son. It doesn't take a lot of life experience to figure out where the story is going long before the plot's "terrifying secret" is revealed.

I wouldn't recommend spending good money on this book ... borrow it from the library if you must subject yourself to it. Ban it? No way! Hey, if you're into overwrought stereotypes and vapid melodrama in an unrealistic setting, it just might float your boat.