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gardnerhere 's review for:
March
by Geraldine Brooks
In the afterword to her novel, Brooks tells us that part of the reason Fruitlands, the utopian community established by A. Bronson Alcott (padrito de Louisa May and the man on whom her narrator is modeled), failed is because the Fruitlanders (no joke) refused to react with person-on-pest violence when canker worms took up residence in their apple crop. Had I read that first, I imagine I would have skipped this often wonderful but mostly frustrating novel. Our narrator, Mr. March, is a benighted fool hellbent on living out his noblest precepts. He joins the Union army late in life and travels south as a chaplain, which affords him the opportunity to piss off most everyone he encounters (including this reader) with his head-in-the-clouds idealism which (and this was a surprise) often does not serve him well in wartime. I know--whodathunk? There are some startling and wondrous passages in this novel--her account of the battle of Ball's Bluff which opens the novel is exceptionally well done--but in the end I can't get past our narrator, who I like even less at the novel's conclusion. It's an impressive book, but it just made me want to kill an orchard full of canker worms one-by-one just to show folk how it's done.