Amazon.com Review
When Claude Marchand first arrives in New Orleans in 1838, carrying the photographic equipment he's stolen from his mentor, Louis Daguerre, there is fever in the city:
I read in the French editions of the papers that the epidemic was in full fury, all that could save the city was October's cold. Almost half-a-thousand were dead. The papers claimed only the foolish or the mad would be out-of-doors at night, the time, it was agreed, during which the Fever was most likely to be acquired. The English editions, as I understood them, claimed news of an epidemic was a hoax, a lie, an attempt to slander the mayor.
Slander or no, yellow fever--called Yellow Jack by the local populace--provides young Marchand a good living; when he sets up shop as a portraitist, he finds much of his business deriving from memorial daguerreotypes of the dead. Soon Claude is living with Millicent, a mixed-race prostitute, but in love with 11-year-old Vivian, the daughter of a local businessman.
Yellow Jack follows this rake's progress as he wins and loses each woman in turn yet is never quite free of either.
From the plays of Tennessee Williams to the novels of Anne Rice, there's something about New Orleans that encourages a writer's inner gothic; and Yellow Jack fairly drips with sex, corruption, death, and perversions of every persuasion. A trip to the opera results in a bloody deflowering behind heavy velvet curtains; the guests at a house party all wear blackface; a bereaved widower kills his dead wife's parrot when it can no longer mimic her voice. Yet, for the most part, Josh Russell doesn't let his story get away from him; his characters are so sharply drawn, especially Millicent, and the city so authentically reconstructed, that even the most melodramatic events seem weirdly appropriate. The result is a novel that entertains and disturbs in equal measure. --Alix Wilber
From Publishers Weekly
Buoyantly detailed, briskly paced and masterfully sad, Russell's debut follows a fugitive apprentice photographer through the shops, bedrooms, newspapers and streets of antebellum New Orleans. In Russell's imaginative account, L.J.M. Daguerre, the inventor of the daguerreotype, had a 15-year-old apprentice who assisted in his discoveries. In 1838, this apprentice ransacked his master's Paris studio and fled to the New World, bringing his as yet unheard of "magic portraits," along with one of the cameras used to make them, to New Orleans, a city then threatened by recurrent epidemics of yellow fever. The narrator, taking the name Claude Marchand, has wild success as a portraitist. He has an octoroon lover, Millicent, who offers her sexual services to the gossip columnist of the Daily Tropic to protect Claude's secret after Daguerre exhibits his process in Paris. Vivian Marmu, a sassy, hypnotically attractive 10-year-old and the subject of one of Claude's first commissioned "soliotypes," competes with Millicent for Claude's attention. When Vivian falls ill with yellow fever (the "Yellow Jack" of the title), the Marmus seek exile in Boston for four years, leaving Claude and Millicent to their unsanctioned partnership, during which they finagle the adoption of twins and live a relatively wholesome domestic life. But the Marmus' return sets the plot reeling again Vivian, heretofore presumed dead, resumes her monthly portrait sitting and seduces Claude, launching a courtship that remains under wraps until it grows clear that, at age 16, she carries his child. As New Orleans authorities deny that Yellow Jack has returned, an appeal to Claude's mercenary instincts convinces him to document its presence in a series of memorial portraits. Eventually, the fever kills Vivian's New England-born fianc?, the obstacle to Claude's union with her. Can they marry? What will become of Millicent? Will the city authorities clean up its open sewers to fight the disease? The reader's excitement and interest come from negotiating three versions of the same story: Claude's first-person narration, Millicent's diary entries and a modern art historian's study, in dispassionately academic language, of Claude's neglected daguerreotypes. The three strands telegraph, diverge and ultimately dovetail to a full set of wrenching and satisfying conclusions. (Aug.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
