Different Times

In The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell, sixteen-year-old Lucrezia is looking at the wedding portrait of herself that her husband, twenty seven year old Alfonso, the Duke of Ferrara, ordered to be painted.  In a slip of the tongue, he exclaims over the beauty of his “first” duchess.

Set in Renaissance Italy, this novel creates a slice of court life from the 1500s.  Lucrezia, too independent and artistic, is not a favorite child, but she has value.  Her marriage will cement an alliance between two noble families. Once married, she must fulfill her role.  She must quickly produce an heir to forestall claims to her husband’s position.  Ruthless and powerful, he expects a son. Nightly, he does his part, but when a pregnancy is not forthcoming within a year, he begins to plan for a solution.  Meanwhile Lucrezia has met the artist and his assistants who have been hired to paint her portrait.

O’Farrell excels at creating a richly detailed past and fully drawn characters from a few bits of historical information. Were things really that way?  Probably not. Could they have been? The massive fortress, the dark dripping forest, the talented young girl forced into marriage? I was certainly a believer while I was reading.

This is how I got to enjoy Ozick’s wit – exaggeration, sarcasm – as she pokes fun at New York lawyers, municipal government, lovers, greed, laziness, elitism, charitable works, innocence, idealism, herself.

She describes the Municipal Building as: “…a kind off swollen doom through which the bickering of small-voiced officials whinnied.”  She describes the “right” kind of young men hired by the law firm: “…one or two of them were groomed – curried, fed sugar, led out by the muzzle – for partnership…they developed the creamy cheeks and bland habits of the always comfortable.”  She describes the kind of man she wants: “He’s got this mind.”

In each of the “papers” there is a story about part of Ruth Puttermesser’s life.  First, she is a lawyer; next a civil servant; she has a lover; she takes in a niece who is a Russian Jew; she dies and goes to paradise.  What seems to hold the sections together is the theme of getting what she wants and finding it not what she hoped for. 

She is unhappy as a civil servant and conjures up a golem (I had to look it up) which solves her problems and makes her mayor.  But, alas, the golem continues to grow; it becomes sexual; its appetites grow; everything falls apart.  In another section, Puttermesser is infatuated with the novelist George Eliot and her partner George Lewes.  Puttermesser longs for an intellectual lover like Eliot’s and she gets one with results similar to the golem situation. At the end, she dies and goes to paradise.  Again, she gets what she wants, but even in paradise, it doesn’t last, or lasts forever, which is the same thing.

I suppose there is some erudite philosophical concept that talks about the seeds of destruction being carried within, but even in paradise??  This unusual intellectual book is for the reader who wants to sit by the fire this winter and think about big questions.

Martha’s gentle ways are successful, and soon she has a steady business.  The reader interested in horses will appreciate the detailed information about her job and the animals she loves. 

The perspective widens as Martha settles in.  It is 1917 and the war in Europe that seemed far away is starting to affect their small community.  She meets the neighbors who, she is not surprised to learn, have familiar problems: alcoholism, illness, lack of farm sense, prejudice against the families with German names.  The young people, including someone in particular, enjoy simple entertainments, ice skating on a frozen lake, hunting for petroglyphs, sleigh rides to the movies.

I was stunned to think that the main character felt safe riding up to isolated strange farms asking for a job and shelter and this was presented as normal. I was surprised that some of the remote ranches were owned and run by women – equal opportunity was already a fact.  And an unusual small bit of information, as Martha’s eventual fiancé tells us: it was illegal to send condoms across state lines then.  Not all change is bad.

“She cut brush all day, grubbing out thickets by the roots with a blunt mattock…It was black and cold inside the shack…she took the dead rats out of the traps…She felt along the quilts cautiously looking for vermin…her hair was not entirely dry, she hoped it would not freeze overnight.” 

Molly Gloss grew up listening to stories about her four pioneer great grandmothers, all “westering women,” in addition to reading diaries, letters, and journals of women who settled the West.

“It’s impossible to read the sad saga of Mr. Bankman-Fried without thinking he, and many of those around him, would have been better off if they had spent less time at math camp and more time in English class. Sometimes in books, the characters find their moral compass; in the best books, the reader does, too.” New York Times