March by Geraldine Brooks

As a fan of Geraldine Brooks, I think I bought March without even reading what it was about. (Hey, my birthday is in March, I’ll buy that!) So, when I went to my overstuffed shelf to pick my next book, I eagerly chose it. It was good, but it was not what I expected. Ok, let me clarify this, if I had read the dust jacket first it might have helped with my expectations. Since I thought I was getting used to her style of combining real people in a historical fiction context, it was a little odd for me to wrap my head around the concept of this book. Brooks has taken a beloved story, Little Women, and basically written the other half — the story from Mr. March’s point of view. March is mentioned mainly as background in Little Women, he has gone off to war when the story begins, and the story ends with his homecoming. Brooks fills in all of the details in between.

The story is poignant and beautifully told, and includes all of the contradictions of the civil war — people of high ideals fighting for the end of slavery, alongside career soldiers trying only to thwart secession. March is naive to the extreme, joining the army as a chaplain at forty, and imagining everyone shares his idealistic views. We meet his good friends Henry Thoreau and Waldo Emerson, and we feel smart, knowing that little fishing pond is going to be very important to Henry a little further down the road.

But, whatever the reason, the device seemed to take away from the story Brooks has to tell. I know this has been done before, with Wicked, and the other books that followed, but I think they were different because they were fantasy. As a reluctant reader of non-fiction, I will make the bold statement here that I would have preferred the straightforward story, without the Little Women context. I think what’s weird is that we have this sense of knowing how it’s going to end, and, at times, you just want to get there already. I could have used a few less mentions of his “little women” at home, there was something creepy about it for some reason. The other concept that’s shocking is that here we have this chaplain, married to perfect Marmee, and he’s not so perfect. He is at times weak and cowardly; prissy and morally compromised. How can he go back to Marmee? What would all those “little women” think of him?

In the acknowledgements, the author gave more information about the background of the actual story, including the fact that Louisa May Alcott wrote the story about her family. Likewise, Brooks did extensive research on the war and on Alcott’s father, and based a large part of the character for March on him. The material available for research was daunting — Alcott recorded his life in sixty-one journals and his letters fill thirty-seven manuscript volumes. In the end, my favorite line of the book is on the last page of the acknowledgements, when Brooks tells how her mother gave her Little Women to read when she was ten. “Though she recommended the book, she also counseled that I take it with a grain of salt. Nobody in real life is such a goody-goody as that Marmee.” In the end, I am not sorry I read it, and I was, I must say, happy to see all of those goody-goodies brought down just a tiny bit closer to the rest of us.