Customer Reviews

Queen of the Underworld: A Novel

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

This book starts out with everything going for it: intriguing characters, an intimate look at the underbelly of Miami in the
1950's. But somewhere in there, Godwin seems to have completely bypassed the plot. She gets the nitty gritty of a newsroom right, and then does very little with it.

There was, I felt, an element of "Mary Sue-ishness" in it. Except for the evil stepfather (a minor character without the rich extensive history given most of the others), everyone seems to be standing in line to tell Emma (protagonist) how clever, pretty, stylish, bold, talented writer/reporter, she is. This got annoying. Except for a streak of perfectionism, she was perfect! That makes for a boring heroine no matter how "grirry" her job.

Also, the title is misleading. Emma, through sheer coincidence, manages to make contact with a young woman who gained notoriety by running a charm school for call girls. I expected much more of her story, which was dropped for pages before being brought up again at the end. This was frustrating because the "Queen of the Underworld" was a truly fascinating character, even more so than the heroine.

In addition for someone who has been extensively physically and sexually abused as a girl, Emma's adult relationships were amazingly stress free and wholesome. How can she possibly trust men as partners wholeheartedly after being beaten and raped by her stepfather? This rang false.

Like many of the others who have reviewed this book, I am a longtime fan of Gail Godwin and found most of her other books rich, complex and rewarding. I was pleased to see she had a new book out.

After completing around 100 pages, I was still waiting for anything to happen, other than the introduction of characters, the writing of a few newspaper stories by Emma, and several meals. I determined that I would finish the book regardless, and it was a disappointment that by the end, I still felt that essentially very little of interest had happened.

Many plot threads were introduced and never resolved. These dead ends were distracting, because I had noted them and imbued them with future significance, which never happened. For example, Emma's aunt Tess is involved in a plot with her employer, a Cuban expatriate dentist, to smuggle weapons into Cuba. We never learn how either of them became involved in this, what eventually happened with the weapons, or the significance of their involvement. The plot, if you can call it that, was thin and aimless. With such rich potential - the Miami of the late 50s, during the early days of Castro's regime - the plot could have been incredibly meaningful and complex - but unfortunately it's almost as if we see it through the eyes of an uninformed person who doesn't understand what she is seeing.

Most of the characters are rather flat and undeveloped. I hate to say it, but they seem like caricatures. An example is Lydia, the Cuban mother of Alex, the manager of Emma's hotel. From statements that Alex makes, we realize that he feels manipulated and used by his mother, but this is never explored or explained. She's just a self-centered fashion plate who likes to throw parties. The only really well-developed character is Emma, and I found myself disliking her more and more as she was fleshed out. I too realized that this book must be autobiographical, and wondered to myself about a character who accepts the gifts and kindnesses of her lover Paul's wife, while carrying on an affair with her husband behind her back. With apparently no guilty conscience! The book also implies that she accepts gifts and money from Paul too. It happens, but it's not endearing, and doesn't seem to cause Emma any remorse.

Every author has a right to a clunker or two, and the usually reliable Gail Godwin must have had a bad year with this one. I gave it two stars because her writing is still enjoyable and there are moments when it shines, usually when she is describing something. She can evoke a time and place, although I don't think she did justice to her setting, other than the Julia Tuttle Hotel, which was nicely described.

Once again, a book gets published only because it's written by someone who's been published in the past, with no regard as to whether the book is good or not.

This book is a definite NOT!

In 1959, no woman directly out of college would have been hired as a reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper. I was a journalism major in the mid-60s and the best I could hope for was a job on the society pages on a small paper or copy editor (if I were lucky) on a large one. All the job offers I received were for secretarial positions with the possibility of free lancing and maybe "working my way up." (And, yes, I had experience, had been published in Sunday magazine supplements, worked on several college publications, and done co-op work on a local weekly paper.) I went to grad school instead in an unrelated field.

But I decided to suspend my disbelief and plod on. I'm sorry I did. Nothing else about the plot was in any way realistic.

And then everything just stopped. There were no resolutions to any of the plot lines. Why was the book called "Queen of the Underworld" when she's a minor character barely mentioned? Why was the main character crazy about her married lover, but then not upset when he was no longer coming to Miami? Did the Cubans she helped leave the US get arrested in Cuba? The book ended and I kept checking to make sure the last 50-100 pages (it would have taken that many to have resolved all the subplots) hadn't been torn out.

I'm not sure if I'm more frustrated, disappointed, or angry. I'm glad that I borrowed the book from the library and didn't waste money on it.

Blech.

Gail Godwin's latest novel is all about Emma Gant, recently graduated from a university in North Carolina, and embarking on her first real job as a beginning reporter (she writes obits) for the MIAMI STAR. Apparently we are to think of both Jane Austin's EMMA and Thomas Wolfe's LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL when we meet this character. She has all the enthusiasm and naivete we expect from a young woman who celebrates her twenty-second birthday during the week or so that this novel spans in 1959. A bourbon and beer girl, she hardly knows the difference between a yarmulke and a guayabera, is subject to the many pitfalls that a novice makes on any beginning career and of course encounters the sexism at the newspaper we would expect from males of that era. She sometimes asks the wrong questions and is provincial when it comes to world events. She works hard, however, at being sophisticated and hopes that not many people in the Julia Tuttle, the hotel where she is staying, will witness her first visit to the hotel pool since neither her swimsuit nor her Bass Weejuns are what a fashionable young woman would be wearing. Naive she may be, but not too naive to be having an affair with Paul Nightingale, a Jewish restaurant owner twenty years her senior, and not above taking money from his unsuspecting wife to purchase an expensivse pair of pumps from Saks Fifth Avenue.

Godwin makes both Emma and the many characters she encounters, many of them refugees who have fled Castro's Cuba, as well as the City of Miami itself, come alive in vivid detail: Paul's Aunt Stella, a survivor of the Holocaust and a designer of custom perfumes; Alex de Costa, a Cuban American hotel employee who has a mild crush on Emma; his many-times-married mother Lidia; Emma's mother's friend Tess; the newspaper employees et al. Most importantly, however, is the suicidal character Ginevra Snow, the "queen of the underworld," a retired madam now married to a psychiatrist, with whom Emma becomes obsessed. From key lime pie to Howard Johnson's to the humidity, Godwin gets the city just right as well.

With language that only a first class writer is capable of, Godwin guides the reader through the education of this young woman with humor and flair. Emma quickly learns some lessons she didn't count on-- about her friend Tess and her lover Paul in particular. Godwin, however, leaves the reader wanting more, as we do not know how successful Emma will be on her new outpost away from the downtown Miami location of the paper, what will be the outcome of her complicated relationship with Paul, and will she ever write about the Queen of the Underworld?

If you believe that a good fiction writer should first and foremost tell a good story, than Ms. Godwin meets all the requirements. Secondly she has created a person all of us can identify with as practically everyone under the sun has had to live through the early days of being on his or her own for the very first time.

There aren't too many books that I've read that I've disliked from start to finish. I'm reluctant to give up on a book--sometimes stories that start out slow come to a roaring finish. I was hoping for something similar when I started Gail Godwin's Queen of the Underworld. Was I mistaken! This book was absolute torture, and I hate admitting this as I generally enjoy Gail Godwin. Her Father Melancholy's Daughter is one of my very favorite books.

Emma Gant is fresh out of college when she gets a job as a reporter for the Miami Star. Fidel Castro has just taken over Cuba and Miami is being overrun by prominent Cubans who have lost everything to the Castro regime. This novel bounces around--characters appear and then disappear, loose ends dangle everywhere, the title character (The Queen of the Underworld) is AWOL, there isn't a single likable character and the entire book is just too painful for words.

What was even more depressing than The Queen of the Underworld is that it took me almost two weeks to read it. I'm very embarrassed for Gail Godwin and I can't understand why her editors would allow this book to be published. No wonder I'm seeing it for sale in our local dollar stores.

Many other reviews summarize the book so I won't repeat everything here. Suffice it to say - it was very disappointing! I kept waiting for something to happen and when the book finally seemed to get really interesting, it ended - just ended - with no resolution, finality, anything!! A waste of time - could have been so much more. Don't buy it - borrow it or pass altogether. If I like a book, I keep it - this one I will sell to a used book store or donate to Goodwill.

What a lot of interesting secondary characters! Unfortunately, the main character is pretty much annoying. An abusive stepfather gains our sympahy for the plucky heroine at first, but she's so clueless and chirpy--wow, look at me, folks, I'm having an affair! --we lose the sympathy fast and just keep waiting to see if she stumbles.

In the audio version, the narrator does a pretty good job with the various accents, but slips out of Southern a few times.

I always have loved Gail Godwin's books, but I think I missed something here. I continued reading and waiting for the story, but it never happened. I gave it one star, because, even though I don't ususally waste time on books that don't draw me in, I did finish it, because I knew Godwin's books and thought there had to be something more to the story. The main character was Marjorie Morningstar without the soul. I second the reviewer who dislikes reviewers who tell the whole story; stop it, please!

Bright-eyed, independent Emma Gant arrives in Miami in the summer of 1959 with the world at her feet. She has a married lover who'll show her the ropes, and a reasonably-priced residence orchestrated by a family friend, and an upwardly-mobile job at the Miami Star, the most important accessory for a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill journalism school.

Emma joins the Star's reporting staff at a tumultuous time, shortly after Fidel Castro enacted his First Agrarian Reform. Living in a hotel run by Cuban émigrés for Cuban émigrés makes the upheavals of Castro's revolución more than just news to Emma. Placing her in this context, the author seems to be drawing a comparison between Emma's situation and that of the Cubans. As Emma is struggling to figure out her place in the world and gauge her future success, so are her newly exiled neighbors.

The more one reads into the life history of the author, the more Queen of the Underworld begins to seem like a semi-autobiographical novel. Godwin herself graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1959 and spent a year on the staff of the Miami Herald before embarking on the world travels that sparked her literary career.

What is most curious about the novel is that it takes place over such a short period of time. The story of Emma's coming into her own, Queen of the Underworld is a window into what seems to be a key moment in Emma's development, one that may affect her entire career. Godwin, however, manages to squeeze an unbelievable amount of action into less than two weeks. Emma's life during the span of the novel is so full, it is almost surreal; as she herself recounts, "in one week and three days, I met a gangster walking a dog, sat behind a notorious boss at a funeral, became friends with [an] ex-madame [...], and helped two Cubans smuggle arms out of Florida" (331), and that's not even the half of it.

By contrast, the novel's ending is unsatisfying and somewhat abrupt. While Emma fantasizes about writing a novel, there is nothing (besides Godwin's own history) that gives any indication that Emma will become a novelist. The narrative ends with both Emma and the reader waiting on her future, filled with unanswered questions.

Godwin's characterization, however, is the novel's saving grace. Emma is amazingly sympathetic despite her naïveté and the fact that she seems to have no compunction about sleeping with another woman's husband (although her sexual relationships do seem to be at odds with her history of sexual abuse). More significantly, Queen of the Underworld is full of finely drawn secondary characters. One such character is Don Waldo Navarro, a prominent academic who fled Cuba with his memoirs sewn into his wife's skirt. A minor character, who could have easily been shunted aside after his grand entrance, Don Waldo is made real in Godwin's attention to detail: he swims breaststroke in the hotel pool "in billowing maroon trunks" (260) with "his leonine head erect" (259) and has the ability of seamlessly incorporating a nine-year-old Spanish-speaking girl into a English-language conversation: "the great educator's consecutive translations into Spanish on Luisa's behalf bore no trace of pedagogy. Don Waldo made it seem merely as though he suddenly chose to complete the rest of his discourse in another tongue" (272).

Godwin has written a number of other novels including The Odd Woman, Violet Clay, and A Mother and Two Daughters, each of which was nominated for the National Book Award. A career author, she published her first novel in 1970. Her papers are archived in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

At the beginning of Gail Godwin's latest novel, QUEEN OF THE UNDERWORLD, we meet Emma Gant, who has just graduated from the UNC journalism school in the spring of 1959. Rather than taking a job at the Charlotte Observer as her overbearing stepfather suggests, Emma instead accepts a postion as a "cub reporter" for the Miami Star. In the equatorial heat of Miami, she figures, she'll be free of her stepfather's late-night visits--and free to romp with her married lover, Paul Nightingale. Once she arrives in Miami, however, Emma realizes nothing is as she thought it would be: Her hotel is overwhelmed with refugees fleeing Cuba and the country's new dictator, Fidel Castro; there's a distance growing between herself and Paul that she can't explain; and her journalistic career consists mainly of writing obituaries for the Star.

Then relief from the monotony comes in the form of Ginevra Brown, aka the Queen of the Underworld, a former madam who ran a prostitution ring out of a prominent girls' prep school when she herself was a student there. Now a washed-up twenty-something, Ginevra is married to her psychologist and can't stop attempting to commit suicide, even though she doesn't really want to die. Emma meets her in the hospital after her most recent attempt, and immediately our savvy young reporter is drawn to the former Queen. But in heat-drenched, rain-soaked Miami, everyone has a secret motive--and Emma is no exception.

QUEEN OF THE UNDERWORLD brings to life a time and place little explored in contemporary fiction: Miami, in 1959, a point in history when Havana breezes became a memory for thousands of Cuban refugees fleeing from Castro. Godwin peoples her novel with extraordinary Cuban characters--from the young hotel manager with a degree in Comparative Literature from Harvard (and who has a harmless, unrequited crush on Emma), to the nine-year-old niña who projects her own hopes and fears onto two raggedy dolls she brought from her family's sugar plantation in Cuba, to the well-known scholar who hides his memoirs in the skirt of his bride's wedding dress in order to smuggle them out of the country. Her characters are rich and well-nuanced, by far the best part of the novel.

Emma, herself, is a richly-realized heroine. I wholly disagree with reviewers here who have said that Emma is too perfect to be believed. It seems to me she's a completely imperfect heroine; she's at once narcissistic and self-conscious, conceited and clingy, naive and a know-it-all. We must remember that Emma is the first-person narrator of this story--and while the narrative may herald all of Emma's accomplishments, those achievements and praises are coming through the filter of Emma herself. And her relationships are far from healthy and trusting; after all, she infers that she's had many sexual partners--and her most recent one is a 43-year-old married Jewish man, with whom she can clearly have no future. Emma is deliciously unlikeable (and I say "deliciously" because I don't think readers are meant to like her; I think we're meant to chuckle at the image of herself she projects to us, and--possibly--to pity her). Rather than referring to Ginevra Brown, I think the novel's title is meant to remind us of Emma; because in her own mind, Emma is the Queen, and Miami is her Underworld.

The problem with this novel, then, is the lack of resolution. The ending isn't well-written enough to be poignant; too many questions are left unanswered, which is frustrating. Despite this flaw, though, I thoroughly enjoyed QUEEN OF THE UNDERWORLD. Godwin's descriptions of Miami are rich and atmospheric; her look into the world of journalistic news is engaging; and her characters are beautifully-realized and incredibly intense. In my opinion, QUEEN OF THE UNDERWORLD is contemporary historical fiction at its finest. Don't let the negative reviews here deter you, or you'll be missing out on a great read.