{"id":5798,"date":"2016-06-22T07:26:01","date_gmt":"2016-06-22T11:26:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5798"},"modified":"2016-06-22T07:26:01","modified_gmt":"2016-06-22T11:26:01","slug":"charleston","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5798","title":{"rendered":"***Charleston"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Longwood,

photo: Vicki Weisfeld<\/p><\/div>\n

By Margaret Bradham Thornton \u2013 There\u2019s something about a man who\u2019s \u201ctoo perfect.\u201d The feeling that something will go wrong hangs over your head as you turn the pages, waiting . . .<\/p>\n

In this debut novel, Eliza Poinsett is the daughter of an old Charleston family. (Supposedly, she\u2019s a descendant of \u00a0diplomat Joel Roberts Poinsett, a Charlestonian who introduced the flower that became the ubiquitous Christmas plant.) Educated at Princeton and Columbia, Eliza decamped to England after the love of her life, Henry Heyward, told her he was marrying someone else. His wife-to-be Issie was pregnant, and the marriage lasted not much longer than it took for her to produce young Lawton. Henry sued for custody and got it, and Issie departed for less socially correct climes.<\/p>\n

At the start of the book, Eliza has established herself in England with a job, a pending fellowship, and Jamie, her proper English boyfriend. Then she runs into Henry at a wedding. He\u2019s available, Jamie doesn\u2019t really move her, and she\u2019s on the verge of her first return trip to Charleston in years, to attend her step-sister\u2019s coming out party.<\/p>\n

She waffles about going, but of course she does, straight into the snares Henry quite cheerfully admits he\u2019s setting for her. At one point, she tells now nine-year-old Lawton that she prefers tennis to sailing, because \u201cI could never figure out which way the wind was blowing.\u201d Ah, but the reader can.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, Eliza dithers half-heartedly, weighing the pain of missed opportunities in England against the hope of second chances. Since the book is written from Eliza\u2019s point of view, it would have been helpful to explore more deeply what underlies her ambivalence.<\/p>\n

The author does a wonderful job of evoking Charleston\u2014its geography, weather, history, architecture, and most of all, culture. That part of the book I enjoyed a lot. In other areas, the text signals \u201cresearch!\u201d or some obvious error plants a seed of doubt about the whole enterprise. For example, she refers to a pastel portrait as a \u201cpainting\u201d or to a watercolor \u201ccanvas.\u201d Those are slip-ups a good editor should have helped her avoid and they would have mattered less if Eliza weren\u2019t an art historian, supposedly up on such basics.<\/p>\n

For my taste, the book is too much of a soap opera romance, moving at a soap opera pace, with only its admirable atmospherics to sustain it. The ending, which I won\u2019t reveal, shouldn\u2019t burst out of the blue as it does; it needed some careful foreshadowing. Again, an editor should have helped with that.<\/p>\n

I was puzzled about the naming of the principal characters Henry H. and Eliza, since the parallel with the more famous duo stops with the names. The explanation is in an author interview with Adam Parker<\/a> in The (Charleston) Post and Courier<\/em>. Thornton said,<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we restored our house, we found on the original paint layer of a door jamb the names and heights of the Heyward children who had lived in the house in the 1830s. I liked the idea of taking the name of one of the children for one of the main characters. In Shaw’s \u2018Pygmalion,\u2019 Henry Higgins brings Eliza Doolittle into the mannered world of aristocratic London. In \u2018Charleston,\u2019 Henry goes in the opposite direction and brings Eliza into the untamed world of Lowcountry swamps.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

OK, but without that explanation, and perhaps with it, it\u2019s a confusing choice.<\/p>\n

I wish there were perfect men like Henry in the world waiting to sweep us gals off our feet, but, meanwhile, we have the fascinating city of Charleston. As New York Times<\/em> reviewer Meghan Daum<\/a> says, in this book, \u201cthe real femme fatale is the city itself, a place where the breeze in the laurel oak sounds \u2018like a slow kind of applause.\u2019\u201d The story takes place around 1991, and I wonder how much Charleston\u2014whose ways and mores here seem set in amber\u2014has changed in the interim.
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