March, who lives on vegetables and guilt, must continually learn that Northern troops can be as racist as Southern landowners.Īs a young man, March left his native Connecticut to become a peddler. "Chaplain, you sure is an innocent man!" exclaims one of the soldiers. Brooks has March send falsely cheerful letters home to his wife, Marmee, and their "little women," shielding them not only from the worst of the wartime horrors he witnesses but from some of the more stinging rebukes his millenarian righteousness keeps earning him. The whole mix-and-match affair proves more ingenious than interesting.
March of "Little Women" suffered reverses, Alcott tells us, "in trying to help an unfortunate friend" Brooks's March loses his shirt by unwittingly subsidizing John Brown's insurrection at Harpers Ferry. Brooks's novel winds up being both counterfactual and counterfictional: Bronson Alcott (1799-1888) depleted his family's coffers with the 1840's communal experiment he conducted at Fruitlands, west of his home in Concord, Mass. But he has another, real-life source in Alcott's father, Bronson, whose slew of Transcendentalist pieties go into the new character's pack. March, Brooks's version has gone south with Union troops as a chaplain. In "March," the ferocious nemeses conjured by Brooks are war and slavery, which, unlike impersonal disease, end up prompting the author and her characters toward a prolonged moral exhibitionism.īrooks appropriates the absent father of "Little Women" for her principal character. That book, which dealt with the assaults of plague on a 17th-century English village, derived some of its power from the way its resourceful heroine came to suspect the biological essence of the calamity she was up against: "Perhaps the Plague was neither of God nor the Devil, but simply a thing in Nature, as the stone on which we stub a toe." Fearlessness - and experimentation with herbs - saw her through and won a reader's respect.
GERALDINE BROOKS'S second novel is in every important way less accomplished than her first, "Year of Wonders" (2001).
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