July 15, 2021
D.H. Lawrence, Jackie Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover, Lionel Trilling, Lady Constance Chatterley, and a host of others meet in an inspired fusion of fact and fiction. To appreciate the delights of MacLeod's masterful novel, which takes its title from the original title of Lady Chatterley's Lover, one must have the patience to let it emerge from some dubious decisions about where to begin and how to unfold. These miscalculations recede as the full measure of the book becomes clear, about halfway through its more than 600 pages; MacLeod's material might have provided another author with several novels, a few stories, and an essay or two. One plotline--"The Exile"--unfolds in Lawrence's time, exploring the "ever-expanding 'club' of the aggrieved" he created by modeling his characters on life. Another--"The Subversive"--tracks Jackie Kennedy in the run-up to the 1960 election. A fictional FBI agent photographs Jackie at the New York obscenity trial over Chatterley; he becomes entangled in Hoover's plot to take down JFK while she meets Lionel Trilling to discuss the book. A third plotline covers the British obscenity trial in 1960; this section includes some lively fourth-wall-breaking and manages to nearly morph into a page-turner. But how closely is it based on the transcripts? Again and again, one feels eager to know where fact meets fiction--did the novelist Barbara Wall really write this wonderful, long letter to the defense attorney?--but the author is not inclined to tell us. "I have included letters and documents that have been faithfully reproduced; other such items have been invented, condensed, added to or modified for clarity," she writes at the end of the book. If you want more, she continues, go back to the original sources. Call us lazy, but we might prefer more detailed notes. Nevertheless, there is much to enjoy here. At a time when sex is so often linked with exploitation and abuse, Lawrence's central equation between physical passion and profound emotional connection is moving and nearly exotic. MacLeod's interpretation of this gospel includes a lovely Lawrentian scene of sex in a library and a thought, attributed to Jackie Kennedy, about the power derived from sex: "the secret act of beholding the public, daily person--the lover, sanctioned or illicit--transformed in one's presence into a private, raw spirit." Seriously brilliant, seriously flawed, ambitious, and delicious.
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Starred review from July 19, 2021
MacLeod (All the Beloved Ghosts) pulls off a magnificent nonlinear spin on Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the censorship of literature during D.H. Lawrence’s life and beyond. Lawrence first glimpses Rosalind Baynes, the inspiration for Constance Chatterley, in 1915 Sussex. After he and his wife, Frieda, leave England—which has seized and destroyed all copies of The Rainbow—a few years later, Lawrence has a rapturous three-week liaison with Rosalind near Florence in 1920. He chooses not to leave Frieda, and infuses the charged sexuality of his bond with Rosalind—along with his frustration with his dead marriage and England’s hypocrisy, imperialism, and class divisions—into Lady Chatterley’s Lover, completed in 1928 and deemed much too explicit for commercial publication. In 1959, Jackie Kennedy, an admirer of the book and, like Constance Chatterley, a lonely wife, surreptitiously attends a hearing convened by the General Post Office of New York City to determine the legality of a new, unexpurgated edition. Soon thereafter, the British Crown decides to prosecute Penguin for its own uncut edition of the novel, and Rosalind watches from the balcony, while Jackie, back in the U.S., contemplates her future as the election unfolds. MacLeod covers an astonishingly broad range of incidents, eras, and themes in vivid prose, and depicts Lawrence’s supporters and opponents with equal insight and sympathy. Her Lawrence, meanwhile, muses that a good book “sent life sparking from stranger to stranger, across spaces, decades and centuries... over rows of typographical marks; those low boundary fences of the imagination, hurdled.” A triumphant demonstration of that power, this places MacLeod among the best of contemporary novelists.
Starred review from September 15, 2021
The title of MacLeod's unwieldy but profoundly moving and, finally, quite brilliant novel is drawn from one of the working titles D. H. Lawrence used for Lady Chatterley's Lover. Stitching together multiple story lines across decades, MacLeod reimagines the creation and near-death of Lawrence's last novel, published but quickly banned in 1928 and not available in England until Penguin won a famous 1960 obscenity trial. Among the real-life characters on parade here are not just Lawrence and his circle, but also Jacqueline Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover, and Lionel Trilling. The narrative moves between Lawrence in Italy and, earlier, in England, where he met Rosalind Baynes, who would become the inspiration for Connie Chatterley. But Lawrence himself is only part of a narrative that jumps ahead in time to Cambridge in the '50s and the love affair between two graduate students, and to America, where Jackie Kennedy, a closet Lawrentian, is photographed holding a copy of Lady Chatterley by a trolling FBI agent. All of these plotlines swerve together around the London obscenity trial, (too many) great chunks of which are included in the text. Amid the novel's surfeit of story, MacLeod evokes Lawrence's world beautifully, and her Kennedy subplot works shockingly well, as does the students' relationship, which evokes the passion that powered all of Lawrence's work. Overstuffed, yes, but brimming with deeply felt life.
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