Books: The Hard-Edged and Glittering Life of Miriam Leslie

There is nothing quite like a cultural history or a great biography of a once famous, now largely forgotten person. When those books are written with verve and wit worthy of their subjects. But too often, a fascinating life results in a book that begs for its primary source darlings to be slaughtered. Some stories cry out to be a great Vanity Fair article, not a full-length book.

Still, Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age (out now, Harry N. Abrams) has much to recommend it in terms of its subject. Mrs. Frank Leslie was many things over the course of her long life. All evidence points to both a biracial heritage—whispered about even at the time—as well as a stint as a sex worker in her teens. But she traveled and performed with Lola Montes; she lived in an almost open menage a trois with a cuckholded husband and the wealthy Frank Leslie; and she ran a publishing empire with, at her best, an almost eerie insight into what the public would read. And she did it all by flattering male egos and entreating women to aspire to the arts of feminine perfection, while simultaneously exerting more power than most women of her day could have dreamed of.

The story itself is fascinating—as is Miriam Leslie’s short-lived marriage to Oscar Wilde’s brother—but here the book falters is in author Betsy Prioleu’s liberal use of contemporary accounts throughout. Every quotation is another stutter in the narrative, particularly when it’s a word or two in the middle of a sentence. Yes, that gives us the flavor of the era, but I have less faith in the accuracy of the press than most others do and I tend to take everything printed in a newspaper with a grain of salt. Still, Prioleu navigates the story’s wild tangents and abrupt shifts in tone with aplomb, rendering Miriam Leslie at turns a social climber, a survivor, a joke, and an inspiration. Just as she was in life.

Books: ‘Paralyzed by Triviality’

Penelope Mortimer always seems poised to have a moment, and yet never quite breaks through. That’s a shame, because her semi-autobiographical writing—sharp, clean, and dispassionate, but not unkind—has withstood the test of time.

Never mind her family life, famous husband, large household. Mortimer’s mordant wit sets her apart from fellow novelists of the mid-century years. The Pumpkin Eater (made into a film starring Anne Bancroft) may be her best-known novel, but there are treasures aplenty to be discovered. And chief among them is Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting (McNally Editions, May 17), her 1958 novel initially published in the states as Cave of Ice.

Cave of Ice as a title seems like a joke played on the novel, about Ruth, a frustrated wife and mother who throws off a nervous breakdown caused from suburbia as much as anything else to help her daughter secure an abortion. Her daughter doesn’t necessarily want one (though that depends on her ever-fluctuating desire to annoy her mother); Ruth long ago gave up on connecting with her husband; and the commuters who sleep and breathe in their sleepy neighborhood are exactly the types of adulterous, gossipy neighbors you’d expect in a town like this.

Books: Refusing to Look Away

Bette Howland, the MacArthur Genius who published three acclaimed books in her lifetime and then fell into obscurity, has been hailed as a major rediscovery with the reissues of her books. (Never mind the cultural implications of why only women seem to become so forgotten that they are cause for celebration upon rediscovery, let’s just be happy that writers like Howland and Eve Babitz and, the queen of rediscovered genius, Dawn Powell continue to be in print.)

If Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, the collection of her selected short stories, seemed slightly underwhelming, the reissue of her three novellas proves the enthusiasts correct. The women in Things to Come and Go (A Public Space Books, May 10) are sui generis and yet utterly recognizable. Howland is grappling with big themes via minutiae in these stories: The careful physicality of the family at the center of the first story lays bare the X-ray vision of children; is it any wonder the narrator recalls all the people who were forever “imitating me staring at them.”

Books: The Walking Wounded

Nobody Gets Out Alive (Scribner, April 12) is the title, but nobody gets out intact, either, in Leigh Newman’s stellar new story collection punctuated by two stellar long tales. In “Alcan, an Oral History,” we’re introduced to two sets of travelers along the Alcan Highway, on a collision course that takes place in a dreary restaurant. “Chops. Pasta. Cocktails” reads the sign, and a weary waitress is too tired and worn out by the business of living to prevent the explosion when it comes. And in the closer, “An Extravaganza in two Acts,” Newman takes the reader into 19th-century Alaska, where two marriages are put to the test among conflicting desires and machinations.

But it’s the opening story, “Howl Palace,” that sets the tone. As the much-married (and divorced) first-person narrator prepares for an open house—instead of baking cookies, she plans a caribou burger grill station—neighbors and exes drift in and out as frequently as she drifts in and out of reverie about her past. She’s wry, tough, and regretful, and her world is that of a typical American suburb slightly skewed. The backyards all have float plane parking. A room is covered in animal pelts. And the dog just got into the caribou burgers and moose dogs.

Books: How to Save Your Own Life

Megan Mayhew Bergman’s women tend to exist in the liminal space between leaving and gone. They are tough—some for years, some only recently—tender-hearted women who are exploring the boundaries of selfishness for the first time, tentatively trying on the notion of saving their own lives. And all of them are frustrated. With the people in their lives (often the men), with their own shortcomings, with society, with geography.

But in her new collection How Strange a Season, they’re also the walking wounded, shell-shocked by life and clinging to a dryness of tone and outlook that insulates them against more pain. “We’d planned to divorce, but neither of us liked paperwork,” the narrator of “Workhorse” says in the collection’s opener, adroitly introducing the reader to Bergman’s world, where women ruminate, question, regret, plan—and work.

Losing oneself in work—while simultaneously eking out a living—is a running theme in the collection, as is leaving. Some, like the women in “The Heirloom” and “Peaches, 1979,” are on the precipice of making the tiny shift from thinking to doing. “People were engaged in a cycle of coming and going, perpetually deciding to stay or to leave,” Regan thinks in “The Heirloom.” “Sometimes they returned after a mental absence, you never knowing they’d left in the first place, lying next to you in the dark.”