'Fever' misses out on the real hero
By Patrick McGrath |
March 24, 2013, Sunday
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MARY Beth Keane's first novel, "The Walking People," could stand as a historical sequel to her new novel, "Fever." The earlier book is the story of two Irish sisters who immigrate to New York in the early 1960s, accompanied by a young man who belongs to the "walking people," also known as the "traveling people" or tinkers. That novel is less about the anomalous position these itinerant peddlers occupy in Irish society than it is about the consequences of concealing from a child the circumstances of her birth. At the same time it's a long, fond portrait of a family.
In "Fever," the Irish immigrant in New York is again the focus of the story, and as before the twin themes of social exclusion and exile are explored. But this time the immigrant's ordeal is harsher, and her fate more complicated than that of the characters in the slow, graceful pages of "The Walking People." Here the action has shifted from the recent past to the early 1900s, and the immigrant in question is Mary Mallon of County Tyrone - better known to us as Typhoid Mary.
The facts are well established. She arrived here in 1883. Between 1899 and 1915 she worked as a cook in the homes of a number of wealthy families, and later in a hospital. Various people for whom she cooked suffered bouts of typhoid fever. Several died. A man named George Soper, a sort of medical detective, tracked the source of the infection to Mary. She was soon identified as the first known asymptomatic, or healthy carrier of the disease. A woman of robust temper, she cursed her accusers, attacked them physically and fled them when she could; to no avail. She was quarantined on North Brother Island in the East River in 1907. There she stayed for three years until a softhearted health commissioner allowed her to return to the city, as long as she never cooked for anyone again and regularly washed her hands.
Mary was helped to find a job as a laundress. She hated it. "Her knuckles would itch and crack and bleed and cramp." And it paid a third or less than cooking did. Soon she was back in her old line of work. But as always, when Mary's in the kitchen, people get sick.
It's a fascinating episode in modern medical history, in which the true hero is surely the indefatigable Soper. Why then tell Mary's story, and not his? It's hard to make a case for any great injustice here. Mary's quarantine was justified and not uncomfortable. She was given every chance to live in society, if she didn't cook. She was an unlucky woman, and she raged against her bad luck, at first because she didn't understand it. Later, when it seems she did understand the problem, she remained willfully blind and criminally irresponsible.
An intelligent woman, she clung to this state of fatal denial until finally, inevitably, almost gratefully she gave in. "If she'd brought typhoid to the hospital, to those new mothers, to those babies, then it was as they said, she'd brought it to the other places, too." Then there's this: "She wondered whether it was possible to know a truth, and then quickly unknow it, bricking up that portal of knowledge until every pinpoint of light was covered over."
It's in the tender, detailed portrayal of willed ignorance collapsing in the face of truth that Mary Beth Keane has made of Mary Mallon's life a fine novel of moral blindness, and also remorse, of a sort.
In "Fever," the Irish immigrant in New York is again the focus of the story, and as before the twin themes of social exclusion and exile are explored. But this time the immigrant's ordeal is harsher, and her fate more complicated than that of the characters in the slow, graceful pages of "The Walking People." Here the action has shifted from the recent past to the early 1900s, and the immigrant in question is Mary Mallon of County Tyrone - better known to us as Typhoid Mary.
The facts are well established. She arrived here in 1883. Between 1899 and 1915 she worked as a cook in the homes of a number of wealthy families, and later in a hospital. Various people for whom she cooked suffered bouts of typhoid fever. Several died. A man named George Soper, a sort of medical detective, tracked the source of the infection to Mary. She was soon identified as the first known asymptomatic, or healthy carrier of the disease. A woman of robust temper, she cursed her accusers, attacked them physically and fled them when she could; to no avail. She was quarantined on North Brother Island in the East River in 1907. There she stayed for three years until a softhearted health commissioner allowed her to return to the city, as long as she never cooked for anyone again and regularly washed her hands.
Mary was helped to find a job as a laundress. She hated it. "Her knuckles would itch and crack and bleed and cramp." And it paid a third or less than cooking did. Soon she was back in her old line of work. But as always, when Mary's in the kitchen, people get sick.
It's a fascinating episode in modern medical history, in which the true hero is surely the indefatigable Soper. Why then tell Mary's story, and not his? It's hard to make a case for any great injustice here. Mary's quarantine was justified and not uncomfortable. She was given every chance to live in society, if she didn't cook. She was an unlucky woman, and she raged against her bad luck, at first because she didn't understand it. Later, when it seems she did understand the problem, she remained willfully blind and criminally irresponsible.
An intelligent woman, she clung to this state of fatal denial until finally, inevitably, almost gratefully she gave in. "If she'd brought typhoid to the hospital, to those new mothers, to those babies, then it was as they said, she'd brought it to the other places, too." Then there's this: "She wondered whether it was possible to know a truth, and then quickly unknow it, bricking up that portal of knowledge until every pinpoint of light was covered over."
It's in the tender, detailed portrayal of willed ignorance collapsing in the face of truth that Mary Beth Keane has made of Mary Mallon's life a fine novel of moral blindness, and also remorse, of a sort.
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