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A review by karabc19
The Mineral Palace by Heidi Julavits
3.0
Set against the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, Heidi Julavits’s debut novel The Mineral Palace is as heavy and despondent as the story’s backdrop. While the novel may not be a light summer pick-me-up, there is much to appreciate in Julavits’s well-crafted narrative and fine writing. Her prose is as polished as her pedigree indicates: an MFA from Columbia and an acknowledgments page crowded with shout-outs to literary heavyweights like Maureen Howard and Dave Eggers. Her protagonist is a reporter, trained to observe and witness from a cold, non-participatory distance, and so the reader is treated to stunning details of the dry, lifeless landscape in Colorado and the dry, lifeless people-scape in the stunted town of Pueblo.
Bena Duse Jonssen lives her daily existence much like a reporter—she is detached, questioning, amoralistic but quick to judge. She is a new mother in her mid-twenties, toting around a half-dead baby that seems to symbolize the hopelessness of America’s future, straining uselessly for life under oppressive economic and environmental conditions. It’s a bleak setting and a bleak story, bloated with deaths—dead animals, dead babies, dead souls. Julavits ponders the burden of living surrounded by so much death and a dead, dried up earth. “What is the point?” Bena asks twice in the novel. Most of the characters—and readers—would prefer not to think about the question, but it is inescapable in the hot, dusty surroundings, where the earth offers up no possibility for a renewal. Bena moves through her days curious about the lives and stories of other people, while seeing herself as smarter and wiser than everyone else, but also passive and listless in her unhappiness.
Like many women before her, Bena is dragged westward by her husband’s past mistakes and hopes for new prospects, and so Julavits tackles the ways that women’s happiness is bound up in the fortunes of their husbands. Very little seems to separate the wealthy woman, the maid, or the prostitute, when all are subject to the power, whim, and violence of male desire. And it generally doesn’t seem to end well for anyone in Julavits’s world. The unforgiving landscape that sweeps humans and animals into dust is matched by the depraved, deformed people of Pueblo who wound each other and themselves—missing limbs, bruises, blood, stitches, and twisted behaviors populate this novel in overwhelming abundance. Julavits seems to compress the world’s misery into one 6-month time frame, one single Southwest town. A tough read in that sense, but for the reader who can stomach the story, the writing is masterful.
Bena Duse Jonssen lives her daily existence much like a reporter—she is detached, questioning, amoralistic but quick to judge. She is a new mother in her mid-twenties, toting around a half-dead baby that seems to symbolize the hopelessness of America’s future, straining uselessly for life under oppressive economic and environmental conditions. It’s a bleak setting and a bleak story, bloated with deaths—dead animals, dead babies, dead souls. Julavits ponders the burden of living surrounded by so much death and a dead, dried up earth. “What is the point?” Bena asks twice in the novel. Most of the characters—and readers—would prefer not to think about the question, but it is inescapable in the hot, dusty surroundings, where the earth offers up no possibility for a renewal. Bena moves through her days curious about the lives and stories of other people, while seeing herself as smarter and wiser than everyone else, but also passive and listless in her unhappiness.
Like many women before her, Bena is dragged westward by her husband’s past mistakes and hopes for new prospects, and so Julavits tackles the ways that women’s happiness is bound up in the fortunes of their husbands. Very little seems to separate the wealthy woman, the maid, or the prostitute, when all are subject to the power, whim, and violence of male desire. And it generally doesn’t seem to end well for anyone in Julavits’s world. The unforgiving landscape that sweeps humans and animals into dust is matched by the depraved, deformed people of Pueblo who wound each other and themselves—missing limbs, bruises, blood, stitches, and twisted behaviors populate this novel in overwhelming abundance. Julavits seems to compress the world’s misery into one 6-month time frame, one single Southwest town. A tough read in that sense, but for the reader who can stomach the story, the writing is masterful.