Customer Reviews

The Transformation: A Novel

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Hauntingly beautiful engrossing summer read. This book sticks with you like sweat hungry flies in the oppressive Florida humidity. Captured the mood of the era just right and gave me all the seediness about it that I wanted. Enjoy this great off-the-radar book with a mint julip in an old creaky beachfront house with hosiery draped over Tiffany lamps for optimum pleasure.

The Transformation is all about hair, and widows and Cubans, but it is mostly about hair. Set in 1898 with the century almost gone, and the automobile coming, the story centers on the wig maker Lucien Goulet III - Manufacturer of Ladies' Imperceptible Hair-Pieces and Gentlemen's Invisible Coverings. Escaping a shady background in France, the mysterious perrupuier has found a new home in Tampa, Florida, a world of perpetual sunshine, oranges, mosquitoes, swamps, and the occasional hurricane.

Author, Catherine Chidgey paints a picture of Tampa as a happening place. The railroad magnate Henry B. Plant has just build the Tampa Bay Hotel, with its tangle of Moorish minarets and aches, "its Byzantine domes and its thirteen crescent moons, the Hotel resembles "fairy-tale" castle anchored at the water's edge. Taking a room in one of the minarets, Goulet takes advantage of the Hotel's wealthy clientele, while inwardly sniping at their self-indulgent, decadent ways. In tones of sycophantic menace, he declares that he can work miracles with "a hank of hair, glue and a net."

As Goulet relates his adventures in hair, his narrative interweaves with those of Marion Unger, a local widow and orange grove owner whose silver-blonde tresses so entrance Goulet, and Rafael Méndez, a young cigar-roller who has come to Florida to escape the war in Cuba. He too is drawn to Marion, and drawn into the dark side of Goulet's dream-weaving business: scavenging refuse tips for combings, and eventually scalping the dead. Goulet, whose obsession with Marion's hair, manipulates both and the transformation he determines to make for it, is the driving force of the plot.

The Transformation is obviously meticulously researched and it shows, especially in the pages devoted to Goulet's obsessive rambling about his past in France and his wordy discussions on the art of the perrupuier. Florida of 1898 in recreated in convincing, immediate detail. There is lots of attention paid to Rafael's background and his family back in Cuba, and Chidgey deftly evokes the political climate leading up to the Spanish American War, when the American soldiers were amassing in Tampa hoping to liberate Cuba.

Chidgey portrays Goulet as some kind of hair sucking monster, a man devoted to fakery and deception. In one instance he mocks a customer by employing two actresses to mimic her for his own entertainment. But as the book progresses, Goulet's gleeful inhumanity becomes almost pantomimic and unreal, a caricature of a self-made, foppish and dandified man. In the search for hair, he gloats, "Once I found a stillborn child, but the little hair I could recover was too downy for my purposes."

The Transformation is full of Chidgey's confidant commanding prose, and vivid atmospherics, but the meandering narrative often hampers the overall effectiveness of the book. This reader never really cared that much about the characters or what happened to them - they all seem to sink into the background, weighed down by the author's rather substantial prose. There should be at least a modicum of emotional payoff involved in this story, but Goulet and his obsessions swamp the narrative, sucking the life from all around him, and in the end neither his flighty customers nor most readers will really be that concerned or worried over his fate. Mike Leonard May 05.