The Mineral Palace

Rating:
Summary: What Were Those Critics Thinking?
Review: Everything worthy of a wonderful story was available for the author. Unfortunately, it just was not pieced skillfully together.

Bena Jonssen is an accomplished young mother married to a doctor. Unfortunately, she is presented with some worthy obstacles that are formidable for the time. Her husband, a boozing, skirt-chasing doctor is no support when they move their obviously physically and mentally handicapped infant son to her husband's new job in Pueblo, Colorado in 1934. Aside from Bena's constant preoccupation with her son's health and her husband's apathy, Bena brings with her some unusual habits; one being a mathmatically applied tic, repressed memories of her brother, and an enthusiasm to restore the Mineral Palace.

Unfortunately, the novel's receipe just does not work, even though the ingredients are all there. Historical junkies may be driven to plod through the novel, but the outcome is just a stone's throw in a novel that easily could have been a significant reflection for the time.

Rating:
Summary: What Were Those Critics Thinking?
Review: First, to give Julavits some credit, I must say her book is very compelling. I couldn't put it down, possibly because it was so relentlessly grim that I kept turning pages to find out when the plot would take a more light-hearted turn (it doesn't).
It is hard for me to figure out why this novel was published and further, why it earned the admiration of some critics. Possibly, they admire the author for avoiding "female" sentimentality. In fact, she seems to go out of her way to avoid any hint of human emotion. Every time anything remotely "cute" or vulnerable (eg. kitten) ventures into the setting of her novel, she promptly has it killed and then devoured by rats. Virtually all of her characters are maimed or disfigured in some way, and they all harbor unimaginably dark secrets.
So, how does the author get away with this almost-laughable melodrama? I can only conclude that Julavits is following a different tradition from most modern novels. I suspect she's trying to emulate the 19th century Gothic, in which over-the-top macabre imagery is considered the norm. Her characters are not meant to be realistic, I suppose, they are meant to be symbolic and grotesque.
Knowing these things doesn't make me like the novel any better, though. The classic Gothic novel usually has some redemptive message; this has none. Also, the writing is not to my taste. Julavits' prose style seems awkward and verbose, and I groaned at her far-fetched metaphors (she actually compares a bologna slice to a soul, at one point!)
In short, I'm not sure why some critics liked this book. It held my attention, but left me feeling hollow and let-down at the end.

Rating:
Summary: A Misfire
Review: From the opening pages of Heidi Julavits's "The Mineral Palace", doom hangs over the Jonssen family. It makes its first appearance when a crow hits the windshield of their car as they journey from St. Paul, Minnesota to a new life in Pueblo, Colorado. It lingers like an oppressive force throughout the body of the novel and by the final chapter only the most obtuse reader could fail to see what it portends.

Bena Jonssen is a young mother who slowly comes to the realization that her newborn son is not "right". Dissatisfied with her life (a faithless husband, a college education wasted on marriage, an unwanted move to the dustbowl of 1934 Colorado) Bena spends a lot time blaming blind cosmic forces for her own misfortunes and the grim ugliness of the world she sees around her. In fact, Bena seems capable of seeing only the ugliness and the meaninglessness of her world.

Julavits writes quite well in a mechanical sense but her characters lack soul and the overall effect she creates is contrived. As a reader, it's very hard to feel much of anything for Bena, whose emotions are as distant and cold as the rocks housed in Pueblo's decrepit "Mineral Palace". Julavits has no particular feel for the time period or the place where she sets her story. Indeed, one wonders why she chose them. Without the clutter of stereotypical Western images with which Julavits decorates the novel (like the mysterious cowboy "Red" who eats his sausage by cutting slices off with his pocket knife), the reader would lose all but the most generic sense of time or place. Julavits has a penchant for the bizarre (like the rich widow whose prosthetic leg is made of elephant tusk) which makes her version of the 1930s read like the script for a David Lynch film. The unrelenting bleakness of Bena's vision seems forced and inauthentic. Julavits is making a point here -- but in the soulless vacuum of her Pueblo it comes across as pointless as the lives of the characters she's created.

"The Mineral Palace" is not without its redeeming qualities. The sleight of hand Julavits plays in the first chapter, where the legendary Bonnie and Clyde's final fated road trip briefly intersects Bena and Ted Jonssen's journey to Pueblo, is pulled off with style and ease. Julavits's writing sometimes has a cinematic quality, such that one can imagine it more successfully achieved on the big screen than on the printed page. Overall, however, I would not recommend this book.

Rating:
Summary: Evocative, sensual, enigmatic, eponymous novel
Review: I don't know where to start! This novel is a pager turner of an incredible story with an abyss of emotional depth that will leave the reader spent, shaken out of his or her wooden workaday existence. The descriptions of the dust-bowl and the Depression (the period following the stock market crash of 1929) made me weep more than once. The cast of characters calls to mind Dickens, and the presence of artificial limbs is outright Melvillian.

I just bought three of these to give out as birthday presents this year. This is definitely a heartbreaking work of incredible genius.

Rating:
Summary: UGH!
Review: I'd been wanting to read this book since I read Ms. Julavits' article in Poets & Writers about the criticism she received for this work and the importance of getting historical fiction right.

So...I started reading and would agree that it began nicely--though, at some point I couldn't figure out where the story was going and then I realized: Jeez. Is there even a story? In searching, I could find no great conflict, drama, or even mild tension. Nothing propelled this drivel. And so, after 243 pages, I called it quits (and believe me, I HATE giving up on a novel).

Julavits is a so-so author. Some of her sentences read very nicely. Still, I just have to wonder, what on Earth inspired her to write this? What was the inspiration? Was she writing genre fiction, keeping a frame around her story of "women's historical fiction" or did she actually think that this idea was unique?

I'll read Julavits again, only if the story itself seems clever.

Shame on her for publishing such a mindless bore.

Rating:
Summary: A debut to remember
Review: It is a mark of distinction in a novelist when she can pull such deep emotions from a reader. This novel is the first from an author reminiscient of Joyce Carol Oates in her darkest days. We have a semi-fictional era portrayed from generations ago full of dispair from monumental disasters, financial and otherwise, with hope a scarce commodity. Julavits shapes the edges of her story with gut wrenching visuals of animal cruelty. Not only do we see how such a deprived society is so afflicted to punish the most innocent among them, we also get descriptions of the animals inflicting suffering on themselves perhaps to escape the despair which is so evident. Julavits portrays men, at best to be suspicious of, and at worst, people not in control of their basest animal instincts. The reader is left to guess why such a seemingly established half of a couple with child is so enthralled by a seedier, but possibly without pretense existence. One in which the town whore is exhalted and the society ladies shunned. I'll leave the specifics for you to discover. An unbelievable novel that should be celebrated by all.


Rating:
Summary: Bleak, But Beautifully Written First Novel
Review: Nothing can thrive in Pueblo, Colorado, the town in which Bena and her family move when her physician husband's past deprives him of employment in more hospitable towns. New-born kittens are, upon closer inspection, writhing with maggots, mangy dogs have their backs broken by defiant vagrants who refuse to share their meals, and buffalos inexplicably opt for mass suicide. The human inhabitants of Pueblo do not escape misery -- women are barren, except for a prostitute addicted to laudanum, Bena's infant fails to thrive despite her husband's insistence that the child is healthy, and Bena's marriage flounders.

The author skillfully evokes the despair and decay of a town that is blanketed with dust and populated with characters who are sad and pathetic. This is a difficult book to read but, like a traffic accident, it is impossible to look away and the images remain with the reader long after the story concludes.