Review by New York Times Review
In Geraldine Brooks's novel, a missionary's daughter forms a bond with a scholarly Indian. GERALDINE BROOKS'S new novel, "Caleb's Crossing," her fourth in a decade, is a short and seemingly modest historical work - no kings, no famous events - told by an equally modest narrator who does not go on to become acquainted with, say, the infant Benjamin Franklin. Bethia Mayfield's given name means "servant of Jehovah," and Bethia means to abide by the rules of her family and her Puritan religious affiliation. But even as she begins writing her confession on precious scraps of scavenged paper, she is transgressing the boundaries her father and older brother consider appropriate for a woman - and they have God's word on this. It is 1660. Bethia is part of a community that has broken away from John Winthrop's colony in Massachusetts Bay and settled on Martha's Vineyard. Her father is the village "liberal" who doesn't believe in stealing from or slaughtering the local Indians, but he faces tensions from both sides. Some of the Wampanoag are distrustful, and another influential family, the Aldens, would like to get rid of the indigenous population altogether. Bethia's concerns are at first domestic ones: her beloved mother has died in childbirth, leaving Bethia in charge of the baby and the household. Her father is burdened with farm work, with missionary work and with preparing his son, Make-peace, for matriculation on the mainland, at Harvard. Bethia knows she is likely destined for an arranged marriage to a good-natured local fellow, Noah Merry. Given her upbringing, she is not entirely in touch with her feelings, but she does recognize that she is quite fond of an Indian boy she meets and talks to from time to time, Cheeshahteaumauck, the nephew of the most powerful (and suspicious) local pawaaw, or priest-healer. Bethia thinks it may be this friendship, and the Wampanoag rituals she has allowed herself to witness out of curiosity (or what we may call intelligence and a sense of adventure), that has caused God to punish her by killing her mother. In "Caleb's Crossing," Brooks returns to the time period and some of the issues she explored in "Year of Wonders,'' a novel that takes place in a 17th-century English town ravaged by the plague, told in the first person by a young servant girl. The setting of this new novel is, however, not an earthly hell but a version of paradise, fertile and beautiful. For most of the narrative, Bethia's conflicts are internal: how can she teach herself to exist within the narrow confines of the lives women in her world are expected to lead? The important difference between this novel and "Year of Wonders" is that in "Caleb's Crossing" Brooks gives her narrator not only a voice but writing tools. What makes this novel utterly believable is Brooks's mastery of the language Bethia employs in her confessional diary. Bethia's inner conflict, for example, is clearly expressed by her automatic use of phrases like "already the Lord's Day is upon us" or "I went on, dutiful, trying to keep in mind what father preached, that all of this was God's plan, not his, nor his father's nor any man's." But she also calls sheep "tegs" and barrels "butts" and the Indians "salvages." Her archaic usages ("misliked," "alas") bring the reader much more fully into her consciousness and her world than the plainer and less well-researched style more common to popular historical novels, where the characters seem to be much like ourselves, although wearing weirder clothes. A serious historical novel like "Caleb's Crossing" always proposes that consciousness is at least in part a function of language, and that as language changes, so does thought, understanding, identity. The triumph of "Caleb's Crossing" is that Bethia succeeds as a convincing woman of her time, and also in communicating across centuries of change in circumstance, custom and language. She tells a story that is suspenseful and involving. It is also a story that is tragically recognizable and deeply sad. We know that the Wampanoag did not retain control of their lands. When Cheeshahteaumauck elects to change his name to Caleb and study English, Latin, Greek and Hebrew with Bethia's father, it is in some ways a natural choice for him. Like his uncle, he is interested in power, and he understands that the "Coatmen" have powers the Wampanoag do not. But he is a young man, strong and athletic, and he doesn't foresee the costs of those powers. He only knows that he excels: he's a much more apt student than Bethia's brother, and once he gets to Cambridge he takes to his lessons more readily than most of the white students. More important, he allows his different forms of learning to coexist; he observes the monotheistic doctrines of the whites, but thinks he can live outside them, still cognizant of the culture that has shaped him. Brooks depicts Caleb with a light touch; he's an intelligent boy, but still a boy, as much a rube, in his way, as Bethia. It comes as no surprise that Brooks, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for her second novel, "March," is sublimely proficient at both the details of language and the dynamics of storytelling. Based on the life of Bronson Alcott and, like "Caleb's Crossing," a first-person narrative, ''March" is a persuasive and moving depiction of both the Civil War and a complicated marriage. Her third novel, "People of the Book," is a tour de force that dramatizes turning points in the history of an illuminated parchment manuscript as they are manifested in tiny bits of evidence - a trace of salt, a wine stain. Brooks is as adventurous a novelist as she once was a journalist, reporting from the Balkans in the 1990s and writing about the lives of Muslim women in "Nine Parts of Desire." Her investigative reporting has evolved into exhaustive and meticulous literary research, but her journalistic sense of story has remained vibrant. I can only suppose that years of listening to people talk, of hearing them tell their stories, have given her the same flair Bethia has for eavesdropping on what's going on around her and learning much more than her companions realize. Brooks's intense focus on Bethia doesn't require that the reader contemplate the larger implications of her narrator's experience. By the novel's end, Bethia has attained a measure of freedom and wisdom, the Indian genocide is still in the future and the Puritans' sense of themselves as the chosen people is still essentially a local inconvenience. Bethia and her family live at the easternmost edge of a comment as yet unconquered. But Brooks, in her luminous and suggestive way, doesn't seem to mind if the reader infers that all the issues Bethia wonders about have been present in our nation since the very beginning, that they remain today and that an honest depiction of them is a good thing. "Caleb's Crossing" could not be more enlightening and involving. Beautifully written from beginning to end, it reconfirms Geraldine Brooks's reputation as one of our most supple and insightful novelists. Brooks's heroine must learn to exist within the confines set for women in the Puritans' world. Jane Smiley is the author of "Private Life," "A Good Horse" and many other works of fiction and nonfiction.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 15, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Brooks, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her Civil War novel, March (2006), here imagines the life of Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, the first Native American to graduate from Harvard. The story is told by Bethia Mayfield, the daughter of a preacher who traveled from England to Martha's Vineyard to try and bring Christ to the Indians. In 1660, when Bethia is 12, the family takes Caleb, a Wampanoag Indian, into their home to prepare him for boarding school. Bethia is a bright scholar herself, and though education for women is discouraged, she absorbs the lessons taught to Caleb and her brother Makepeace like a sponge. She struggles through the deaths of her mother, a younger sister, another brother, and her father. When Caleb and Makepeace are sent to Cambridge, Bethia accompanies them as an indentured servant to a professor. She marries a Harvard scholar, journeys with him to Padua, and finally returns to her beloved island. In flashbacks, Brooks relates the woes of the Indian Wars, the smallpox epidemic, and Caleb's untimely death shortly after his graduation with honors. Brooks has an uncanny ability to reconstruct each moment of the history she so thoroughly researched in stunningly lyrical prose, and her characters are to be cherished.--Donovan, Deborah Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Pulitzer Prize-winner Brooks (for March) delivers a splendid historical inspired by Caleb Cheeshahteaumauck, the first Native American to graduate from Harvard. Brooks brings the 1660s to life with evocative period detail, intriguing characters, and a compelling story narrated by Bethia Mayfield, the outspoken daughter of a Calvinist preacher. While exploring the island now known as Martha's Vineyard, Bethia meets Caleb, a Wampanoag native to the island, and they become close, clandestine friends. After Caleb loses most of his family to smallpox, he begins to study under the tutelage of Bethia's father. Since Bethia isn't allowed to pursue education herself, she eavesdrops on Caleb's and her own brother's lessons. Caleb is a gifted scholar who eventually travels, along with Bethia's brother, to Cambridge to continue his education. Bethia tags along and her descriptions of 17th-century Cambridge and Harvard are as entertaining as they are enlightening (Harvard was founded by Puritans to educate the "English and Indian youth of this country," for instance). With Harvard expected to graduate a second Martha's Vineyard Wampanoag Indian this year, almost three and a half centuries after Caleb, the novel's publication is particularly timely. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Pulitzer Prize winner Brooks recounts the relationship between a Native American boy from Martha's Vineyard and the white girl he befriends. The story tackles the prejudices Caleb faces both in terms of race and religion as well as the sexism Bethia suffers. Caleb surmounts his obstacles to become a student at Harvard, where, ironically, Bethia also is sent, but as an indentured servant. (An LJ Best Historical Novel of 2011.) (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The NBA-winning Australian-born, now New England author (People of the Book, 2008,etc.) moves ever deeper into the American past.Her fourth novel's announced subject is the eponymous Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, a member of the Wampanoag Indian tribe that inhabits Massachusetts's Great Harbor (a part of Martha's Vineyard), and the first Native American who will graduate from Harvard College (in 1665). Even as a boy, Caleb is a paragon of sharp intelligence, proud bearing and manly charm, as we learn from the somewhat breathless testimony of Bethia Mayfield, who grows up in Great Harbor where her father, a compassionate and unprejudiced preacher, oversees friendly relations between white settlers and the placid Wampanoag. The story Bethia unfolds is a compelling one, focused primarily on her own experiences as an indentured servant to a schoolmaster who prepares promising students for Harvard; a tense relationship with her priggish, inflexible elder brother Makepeace; and her emotional bond of friendship with the occasionally distant and suspicious Caleb, who, in this novel's most serious misstep, isn't really the subject of his own story. Fascinating period details and a steadily expanding plot, which eventually encompasses King Philip's War, inevitable tensions between Puritan whites and upwardly mobile "salvages," as well as the compromises unavoidably ahead for Bethia, help to modulate a narrative voice that sometimes teeters too uncomfortably close to romantic clich. Both Bethia, whose womanhood precludes her right to seek formal education, and the stoical Caleb are very nearly too good to be true. However, Brooks' knowledgeable command of the energies and conflicts of the period, and particularly her descriptions of the reverence for learning that animates the little world of Harvard and attracts her characters' keenest longings, carries a persuasive and quite moving emotional charge.While no masterpiece, this work nevertheless contributes in good measure to the current and very welcome revitalization of the historical novel.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
