Kerry Maher’s 2022 novel is a charming and enlightening fictionalized account of the pre-war incarnation of Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach’s groundbreaking English-language bookstore in Paris’ legendary Left Bank community. Not only do we experience the ‘Lost Generation’ of Hemingway, Fitzgerald et al from a female perspective, we also get to witness a literary drama as Beach and her shop become first in the world to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses after it was banned in the US – a satisfying achievement that is not without serious drawbacks, scars and regrets. Joyce, we learn, was not an easy person to love and work with/for, eventually pushing Sylvia to drop him like a hot rock, though they did eventually regain a measured reproachment which serves as the novel’s climactic endpoint. Only in an Author’s Note do we learn how Beach and her shop managed during WWII and the Nazi occupation: not well, but far less poorly than scores of millions of others. Both survived: the store reopening under new ownership in a new location and Sylvia remaining with her long-time beloved Adrienne Monnier (founder and owner of the French-language bookshop from which Sylvia took her inspiration) but occupying herself after 1945 in other realms than bookselling.
Maher is a pleasant guide through all of this, dealing frankly with her characters’ excesses and loves, fairly with their foibles and respectfully but not hagiographically with their genius and achievements. Perhaps it is all that respect and fairness (arguably appropriate when dramatizing the lives of real persons), but the overall effect is something like a YA biography or a Hallmark Channel documentary; tamed and homogenized, even as it deals with same sex relationships (kudos to both subjects and author for going there).
Certainly a worthwhile read for those of us with an interest in literary history, Paris or early Twentieth Century social history and also a useful episode in the march of women toward full rights, autonomy and credit for their achievements in realms traditionally dominated by the male.
(Confession: after hearing Sylvia and many of her literary associates profess their great admiration for Ulysses – and for Joyce’s genius in general – I made what is at least my third attempt upon the great doorstop. While I can readily gloss over the many references drawn from that generation’s better education in ‘The Classics,’ I was once again stymied by Joyce’s refusal to provide any guideposts – who is speaking now, what is actual and what a character’s inner thoughts, where are we in time, in place, in action and reaction? One might soldier on through all that in a shorter piece that had initially dangled some hint of light at the end of the tunnel vision, but right from word one of an immense opus? There are too many other good books I’ve not yet read and which better balance the reader’s experience against the author’s preoccupations. My loss, perhaps, but one I am willing to accept.)
P. S. – while the ‘obscenity’ controversy which nearly silenced Ulysses is one example of political overreach, the current resurgence of religious nationalism poses a far greater threat to freedom and enlightenment. E Unum Pluribus is a newspeculative fiction exploring how that movement may bring about the end of the USA, and soon. Its thrilling plot is driven by politics and economics as well as gender, class, language and the origins of faith and provides a glimpse of the bright possibilities which sometime arise from even great tragedies. The novel is currently being serialized online and anyone can read it, at no cost, by navigating to the Home Page of this website (robinandrew.net) and selecting E Unum Pluribus from that page’s top menu, or via this link: https://robinandrew.net/2026/01/01/e-unum-pluribus/
RobinAndrew 