Book Review: A Free, Unsullied Land
A Free, Unsullied Land. Maggie Kast. Fomite Press: Burlington, Vermont, November 1, 2015, Trade Paperback and Kindle, 354 pages.
Reviewed by Marssie Mencotti.
Author Maggie Kast has chosen an interesting time period (1927–1934) and a fifteen-year-old lead character in A Free, Unsullied Land. As Janet Maslin said in her review of The Book Thief in The New York Times, this novel, “ . . . is perched on the cusp between grown-up and young-adult fiction.” Similarly, this coming of age novel covers Henriette Greenberg’s final passage to adulthood and her attempt at developing into an independent woman.
Historical fiction is a broad category, from books narrowly focused on a single event to those that cover a broader swath of time.
In this novel, Ms. Kast has selected a seven-year period of American history and unfolds it through the viewpoint of a sheltered, privileged, intelligent, suburban Illinois girl (age 15 to 22). This period of American upheaval includes the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, the Great Depression, the racial tension generated by Scottsboro trials, the rise of the Communist Party, the Labor Union struggles, Hitler’s rise to power, emergent feminism, and other concurrent national social and political issues.
One of the most consistent topics of this novel is the extant double standard between women and men at that time. Her parents’ attitudes vacillate as Henriette is expected to dress and behave a certain way but is generally ignored and allowed to travel anywhere she chooses. In one instance of the lack of attention to female offspring, Henriette’s mother’s friend knows all about Henriette’s twin brothers but had not even heard of her. Henriette is not expected to attend college (her brothers are already attending) and is encouraged to behave in ways that her parents find acceptable for a young lady. She forges ahead, deciding to attend the University of Chicago where her brother is studying medicine.
In the U of C’s simmering stew of politics, psychology, sociology, and anthropology, she finds theories that sometimes shock and sometimes soothe her. She enters psychotherapy as a means of trying to answer her inner questions. The stolid personality of a teaching assistant and friend, Dillard (Dilly) Brannigan, serves to balance out Henriette's naiveté. They move through the days of bathtub gin, jazz, and cultural anthropology looking for answers and love. Again, here we see the double standard. Dilly is portrayed as clear about his life and future while Henriette is uncommitted and behaves more like a dithering child.
Henriette breaks rules, social taboos, and the mores of her time clumsily and without thinking through to the consequences. She is lead astray by selfish desires to push beyond what her parents or brothers would attempt. She sneaks off to Scottsboro, without a plan, on the pretext of finding her friend and suffers the consequences. This is one instance where it is hard for the reader to care about Henriette. She is motivated by a weak desire to do good but cares more about her own selfish curiosity. The internal trajectory of her friend and journalist Nadine’s story seems more interesting than Henriette’s. Later, Henriette’s observation of a Native American ritual enforces her belief in the supernatural. Just when the reader begins to believe that Henriette has reached some sort of maturity, she willfully breaks the cultural boundary, deeply affecting a friend and showing once again that she is still a victim of narrow self-centered thinking.
Henriette reveals herself as an absent friend, a jealous lover, a thoughtless meddler, and an ungrateful daughter. We see her confusion about her sexuality, her opinions, and her future.
She sees herself at the center of everything and only integrates with the emerging times on a superficial level. The device of the “flawed” hero is a dangerous path. Although there is much to admire about Henriette’s bravado, at book’s end the reader is abruptly left to decide whether she has learned anything from her awkward and sometimes dangerous choices.
This book is effective in keeping the reader involved as we worry about Henriette as she innocently sides with the Communist Party, gets arrested and beaten, and has sex with inappropriate and predatory partners. Issues of lesbianism, homosexuality, a childhood episode of parental abuse, the tension of a Jewish heritage, and the pressure of being a college-educated woman in a time when a woman’s proscribed future held only the prospect of a good marriage remain underdeveloped. However, we still root for Henriette to move her generation forward with more intelligence than what we are shown of her petulant rebellion and flawed intuition.
A Free, Unsullied Land is Maggie Kast’s first novel, although an excerpted story from this novel won a prize in the Hackney Literary Contest and is forthcoming in the Birmingham Arts Journal. She has published fiction in The Sun, Nimrod, Carve, Paper Street, and others. She is also a short story writer, a memoirist and an essayist. She earned her MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Overall, I applaud Ms. Kast’s novel in bringing to life a time of American upheaval and taking the underdeveloped psyche of a young woman through it all. If there is one thing that this novel brought to me as a reader was the astonishing concurrence of so many important historical and cultural events in the decade preceding 1927 that were still unfolding in the years up to 1934 and their impact on the maturing years of a fragile, bright young woman.