The Divine Husband
By Francisco Goldman
Atlantic Monthly Press, 465 pages, $24
Lovers of American novels have grown up on the grand gesture, the grand attempt to wrap all the world into a single book–“Moby Dick,” “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “An American Tragedy,” “USA,” “The Great Gatsby,” “Oh, Pioneers!”–and this great legacy serves both a prod and a curse to a current generation of fiction writers.
A few stand aside and take the measure of the task. Francisco Goldman has decided to stand with them. After writing two novels about which I have to confess I find myself feeling rather equivocal, he has taken nearly a decade to come up with his third and certainly his best. “The Divine Husband” embraces great themes, without which, as Melville once wrote, you cannot have a great novel — in this case, the relation of the individual to history, love and death, language and reality, among other motifs — and if by the time this new book spins out its full story some of these slip from the writer’s arms, we still have to admire what he has attempted to hold together.
The story tells of the long quest by an unnamed writer from a factory town in Massachusetts who has been commissioned to write the biography of the mother of a local woman. The story, however, is anything but local. It begins in the late 19th Century in a convent in an unnamed Central American capital known as the Rome of the region for its somberness and piety, just as the country’s new anti-clerical ruler, a dictatorial rationalist some of the novices have dubbed “El Anticristo,” has let it be known he is going to shut down the convents.
One of these girls, Maria de las Nieves (Maria of the Snows) Moran, speaks English with a New York accent because her late father emigrated from New York to the Central American jungle to make his fortune and died trying. Once she is cast out of her spiritual safe house she goes on to make her own way in the world of the Americas, South and North. Her best pal, Paquita Aparicio, will eventually marry “El Anticristo,” and her fate will shadow Maria’s throughout their lifetimes.
Though I devoutly wish it were otherwise, it feels almost like a lifetime before the story really starts to move out of the convent. The paragraphs are long and dense, thick with exposition, and Goldman’s touch here feels more like a palm and heel of hand pressing down on the page than 10 fingers dancing along the keyboard. Unfortunately, for most of the rest of this long novel the large paragraphs continue to fill page after page without anything like a Faulknerian cadence or Melvillean pithiness to keep a reader happy. For me, the story — mainly of Maria’s progress in the secular world–kept getting buried by the writing.
Until, in a brilliant touch, Goldman introduces the historical figure of Cuban poet and nationalist Jose Marti. If God is the divine husband long sought after by the young acolytes, Marti, known as the “Husband of Cuba” and the “Cuban Apostle,” is a romantic, secular version of the Lord–at least to most Latin American nationalists. Marti was a much-beloved poet, a fiery journalist and essayist, and his years of proselytizing while in exile on behalf of a Cuba independent of imperialist Spain made him a hero in his own time (he died on a Cuban beach during a raid against the Spanish occupiers).
Even though Goldman does not offer a full-scale portrait of Marti, everything he does do with this historical character feels exactly right. Especially Marti’s flirtation (and possibly more) with Maria. Other characters pursue her over her lifetime, and other characters are also serious contenders for the paternity of her first child. But none carries the weight and heft of Marti–not Mack Chinchilla, the “Yankee-Indio” entrepreneur who courts her for the longest time; not the “mysterious muchacho,” the profligate ruler-designate of Britain’s fleeting holdings on Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast.
The paternity question adds an element of mystery to the otherwise flatly stated story. So does the timeframe, which gives us large chunks of Maria’s life, and the lives of some of the ancillary characters such as Chinchilla, in temporal fragments rather than in linear time. Presumably this is meant to echo the narrator’s wandering timeline, as he learns more and more about Maria’s life not necessarily in the order in which she lived it.
Whatever the rationale, this manner of story-telling, combined with the huge chunks of paragraphs and the narrator’s tendency to digress in order to pile in everything he has learned about the subject, weighs the book down.
There is a kind of critique in which a reviewer makes plain that he or she wants a book other than the one the novelist wanted to write and marks down the writer because of this supposed failure. I don’t want to offer that sort of review. Nonetheless, after finishing Goldman’s bold but flawed attempt at a big novel with big ideas, I wish he had noticed how much livelier than all the other parts of the book were the scenes and appearances of Jose Marti. And how much better it is to substitute dramatic scenes for exposition, no matter how interesting the material you expound about might be. And, if you are a writer with the kind of talent Goldman possesses, to let yourself look around and describe what you see.
In one of the book’s few passages of outright lyrical beauty, Goldman describes a moment during Maria’s ocean passage to North America when starlight “foamed across the sky like butter in a cast iron skillet” while “the almost eerily tranquil ocean was filled with phosphorescent sparkles and flames, bursts and flickers of colored light like silently exploding fireworks as far as the eye could see.”
At wonderful moments like this, Goldman’s book demonstrates that the dream of the Great American Novel is still alive.
