Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Friday August 27, 2010
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THE GIRLS OF MURDER CITY: Fame, Lust, and the Beautiful Killers who Inspired 'Chicago'
Douglas Perry
Viking
ISBN 978 0 670 02197 0
304 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who regularly reviews books for The Washington Post
Once upon a time in Chicago, in the summer of 1924, too many women drank too much bad Prohibition booze and killed off so many of the men in their lives that it developed into a celebrity circus. There was Kitty Malm, whom journalists of the day called "the Tiger Girl"; Sabella Nitti, a forlorn Italian immigrant who was scorned at first by the newspaper-reading public but then underwent a makeover of sorts and turned into a femme fatale; and a few others who took bad behavior to an extreme. But in particular there were two murderous ladies: One was Beulah Annan, beautiful but dumb as a plank, who shot her drunken-bum boyfriend while her long-suffering husband was working at a laundry; the other was Belva Gaertner, glamorous but not nearly so beautiful, who shot her young lover in her car and left him there.
Both Annan and Gaertner were tried for murder. The evidence against them was overwhelming, but because juries in Chicago at that time were made up only of men who considered pretty women incapable of murder, both were acquitted.
These crimes perpetrated by women were mostly reported on by women, which was unusual at the time. There was Genevieve Forbes of the Daily Tribune; Ione Quinby of the Evening Post; Sonia Lee of the America; and a relative newcomer, Maurine Watkins, recently hired by the Tribune, who had been educated in American drama and Christian theology. She had been advised by an academic mentor to go out into the real world and find out what made America tick. She took that advice and found herself in the middle of the unfolding stories of the murderesses being held that summer in Chicago's Cook County Jail. Watkins learned to be a hardboiled newspaper reporter, immersed herself in a cornucopia of gory, perversely comic stories of bloodshed, then returned to Yale Drama School and wrote a satiric work that turned out to be "Chicago."
That production inspired glowing reviews by Rupert Hughes and Brooks Atkinson, which inspired a movie in 1927, which gave rise to another Watkins play, which got a mixed review from literary pundit Edmund Wilson, which may or may not have given rise to Chicago juries who had women on them.
Then, in 1975, all this brought forth a "musical adaptation, conceived and directed by ground-breaking choreographer Bob Fosse ... starring stage legends Gwen Verdon as Roxie (Annan) and Chita Rivera as Velma (Gaertner )"; and "twenty years later, the musical returned to the Great White Way, with Fosse' former lover and protegee Ann Reinking as Roxie. Newly relevant again, thanks to the O.J. Simpson and Amy Fisher trials, ('Chicago') took the Tony Award for Best Musical Revival."
But we know that wasn't the end of it because in 2002 another movie opened -- a musical this time, made from the Broadway adaptation, and right now, even though the planet is rife with murders of every kind, author Douglas Perry takes us back to those two depressing murders yet again.
Playwright Watkins used Roxie, Perry writes, as "the moron triumphant, counting on her fellow morons -- on the newspaper staffs, on the jury, everywhere in this twisted new America -- to save her." And it seems more or less true that Beulah Annan was little more than a subliterate moron, used up and spit out by a long list of lowlifes. Perry makes cruel fun of her, and he can't get enough of her semi-naked bosom, her "breasts like crashed dirigibles." Like an obsessively thrifty housewife, he makes hash out of what used to be meatloaf, which used to be hamburger, which might have originally been an authentic piece of roast beef, but he serves up this 86-year-old material as if only yesterday it were a cow in the slaughter house, as if Annan and Gaertner and the other girls of Murderesses' Row were still primping for their photos and preparing for interviews.
What is the higher theme here? That American men are fools for pretty women? What a newsflash that is! That Prohibition was probably not a good idea, if for no other reason than that the quality of available alcohol messed with the public's health and minds? That newspaper people can be -- perhaps especially in their coverage of crime -- immature at best, cretinous at worst? Are we supposed to be shocked by this?
Somewhere, on about page 129, reading the ghoulish account of the life and death of Wanda Stopa, who killed a man and then herself for "love" in the summer of 1924, I got the strong feeling that I was wasting my time and that the author was wasting his, too. As any policeman from these very pages might say when trying to disperse a hysterical crowd: "Get along, get along. There's nothing new for you to see here."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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I CURSE THE RIVER OF TIME
Per Petterson. Translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund
Graywolf
ISBN 978 1 55597 556 2
233 pages
$23
Reviewed by Bob Thompson, a Washington writer and former Washington Post reporter and editor
Two-thirds of the way through Per Petterson's new novel, its narrator, 37-year-old Arvid Jansen, finds himself up a tree. Perched on a branch of an old pine overhanging his family's summer house, Arvid mulls a scheme for bridging the emotional gap that divides him from his mother.
It's not going to work, this scheme, but never mind. Petterson, a best-selling Norwegian writer whose "Out Stealing Horses" made him an international name in 2007, is a master at putting parents and children up the kind of psychic trees from which -- minds fogged by anger and longing -- they can't climb down. The stubborn mysteries of family conflict are his subject, and he evokes them in a voice whose straightforwardness belies its subtlety.
Six pages into "I Curse the River of Time," Arvid describes a scene he did not witness: his mother boarding a ferry from Norway to Denmark, alone, hours after learning she has stomach cancer. She's heading straight for that summer house in the Danish town she still considers home, despite decades of exile in Oslo.
"Perhaps (the crew) noticed a new gravity in her manner, in her walk, in the way she looked around her, as she often would with a smile on her lips that was not a smile as there was nothing to smile about that anyone could see, but it was how she looked when her mind was somewhere else," her son observes. "As a small boy I often sat watching her when she was not aware I was in the room or perhaps had forgotten I was there, and that could make me feel lonely and abandoned. But it was exciting, too, for she looked like a woman in a film on TV, like Greta Garbo in "Queen Christina" lost in thought at the ship's bow. ... Or she might look like Ingrid Bergman in "Casablanca" (except that) my mother would never have said: (BEG ITAL)You have to think for both of us(END ITAL) to Humphrey Bogart. Not to anyone."
Not to Arvid's father, the unwanted husband with whom she has a long-standing truce, and certainly not to Arvid. "He's thirty-seven years old," she tells a friend, "but I wouldn't call him a grown-up. That would be an exaggeration. He's getting a divorce. I don't know what to do with him."
Hearing that his mother has fled, Arvid impulsively follows. His attempts to force her attention in his direction are at once comic, pathetic and heartbreaking. "Oh, Arvid," she says after one especially self-absorbed assault, "drop it."
The mother-son struggle continues as flashbacks illuminate their history. Here they are in the 1970s, meeting for coffee after her shift at the Freia chocolate factory. He tells her he's leaving college to take up factory work because the Communist Party has urged its members to become industrial workers. Blind to the likely response of the family intellectual, an obsessive reader denied her own chance at higher education, he is stunned when she slaps his face.
Here she is ringing his doorbell, seeking a reconciliation that may have been put off too long. Here he is at her 50th birthday party, too drunk to deliver a speech in her honor. Here they are in a chillingly intimate hospital scene, watching Arvid's brother die, still unable to cross what Arvid calls the "Rio Grande" that separates them.
"I Curse the River of Time" is about much more than a mother and son. Arvid recalls the origins of his marriage and "how impossible it was to grasp that in the end something as fine as this could be ground into dust." With divorce inevitable, he takes reality-evading drives with his daughters, drumming on the steering wheel as they harmonize on Beatles songs. He feels time "run around beneath my skin like tiny electric shocks," always leaving him "a different person than I had been before, and it sometimes made me despair." Time erodes not just his marriage but his naive idealism: The portrait of Chairman Mao comes off his wall, though the book takes its title from a line of Mao's poetry.
To his mother, time seems even less forgiving. "I thought I had no choice. But I did," she says of the decision that drove her from home 40 years before, "and now I am ill."
Petterson's pacing depends more on character than plot, and when it occasionally slows, the cause is not hard to determine. Arvid Jansen -- who is not Per Petterson, yet who comes close enough that his creator has described him as a soul mate -- is simply less compelling when his tough, complicated parent is offstage.
She, too, has a great deal of the autobiographical about her, and she so fascinates Petterson that he wrote an earlier novel from her point of view. The first-person voice in "To Siberia" sounds remarkably different from Arvid's. But to readers still wondering why his mother drove him up that tree, it may come as a revelation.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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