The Original
by Priya Parmar
Katharine Hepburn wouldn’t have relished the portrait Parmar paints in THE ORIGINAL (Ballantine, 372 pp., $30), but anyone interested in Hepburn’s early career will have a hard time resisting this stylish, insightful deconstruction of her carefully crafted public persona. The novel’s action moves from Connecticut in the 1920s to Broadway and Hollywood 20 years later, focusing not on Hepburn the established star but on Hepburn the willful, sometimes ruthless newcomer whose unconventional private life and stubborn independence led her, at one point, to be branded “box office poison.”
There’s no sign of Spencer Tracy here. You will, however, find Cary Grant, Randolph Scott, George Cukor, the Selznicks, Howard Hughes and Leland Hayward. Hepburn had liaisons with those last two, in addition to a turbulent romance with Laura Harding, the New York heiress who made a home for her in California. The saddest member of this offscreen cast is Hepburn’s self-sacrificing husband, who eludes the gossip columnists by changing his name, then makes all the arrangements for Hepburn to travel in secret (with Harding) to Mexico so she can divorce him.
Parmar’s depiction of Hollywood in the 1930s is particularly adroit: “In this town, the air is curdled with sex. Here, anything can happen, and anything happens every night.” Yet as the Depression tightens its grip, the movie colony must, at least on the surface, mend its ways. There’s now a Production Code, with new morality standards, and Hepburn insists on making a movie that tests its boundaries. Parmar ends the novel with Hepburn’s triumphant return in “The Philadelphia Story,” using its heroine, Tracy Lord, as camouflage: “Tracy, this new Kate, is biting and strong and not me, but she is who they think I am. … She is who I will be from now on.”
Questions 27 & 28
by Karen Tei Yamashita
QUESTIONS 27 & 28 (Graywolf, 450 pp., $30) takes its title from two crucial items in the loyalty questionnaire Japanese American internees were asked to answer during World War II — whether they would serve in the U.S. military and whether they would renounce any allegiance to the emperor. The sheer hypocrisy of making such demands of people (many of them native-born citizens) whose fundamental rights had already been ignored is just one of the messages of this ambitious, wide-ranging pastiche of fiction and documentation, a hybrid novel that also serves as an idiosyncratic history of the Japanese experience in America before, during and after the war.
Yamashita includes well-known figures — Isamu Noguchi, Daniel K. Inouye, the Hiroshima maidens — as well as those whose stories are only preserved in archives, oral histories and legal briefs. The shape of the narrative changes along with its sources and inspirations, sometimes dense with alarming facts and at other times almost whimsical. Dedicated, as one character puts it, to the “little histories” that are overshadowed by “big history.”
The Last Movement
by Robert Seethaler
You can read THE LAST MOVEMENT (Europa, 122 pp., $22) in a sitting, but this gently elegiac novella deserves to be slowly savored. Set on the windswept deck of an ocean liner in the spring of 1911, it introduces us to the world-famous composer and conductor Gustav Mahler, just 50 but already preparing to die. As he sits wrapped in a blanket, the helpless victim of “a body that was consuming itself,” he thinks back on his life and on the music that has dominated it.
Deftly translated from the German by Charlotte Collins, Seethaler’s account of this man of genius testifies to the sacrifices that accompany the fulfillment of his gifts. Foremost among these losses is the love of his young wife, Alma, who has fallen for the architect Walter Gropius. Mahler knows that she stays with him only because his days are numbered. “All I ever did,” she tells him, “was wait.” And soon the waiting will be over.
The Lost Book of Elizabeth Barton
by Jennifer N. Brown
In THE LOST BOOK OF ELIZABETH BARTON (St. Martin’s, 308 pp., $29), Brown contrasts the story of a medieval woman fatally manipulated by powerful forces with the experiences of a modern-day female academic whose colleagues, while superficially congenial, are no less prone to devious machinations.
Elizabeth Barton, the Holy Maid of Kent, was hanged for her denunciation of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, and all the books that contained her prophecies were destroyed — except for the one that Alison Sage, an American history professor, finds in the library of a Belgian monastery. This is big news in her field, earning her an invitation to an exclusive gathering near Canterbury at a mansion with strong ties to Barton.
In chapters set in 16th-century England, we see how one simple feverish vision led an illiterate servant girl to become a mouthpiece for the papal side in Henry’s battle with the church. Meanwhile, Barton’s 21st-century interpreter finds herself confronted with rival scholars who have their own unsettling priorities when it comes to her great discovery. And one of them, it seems, is desperate enough to commit murder.
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