The narrator of The Sweetheart Season, Karen Joy Fowler's second novel, identifies herself right off the bat — forgive the baseball pun — as unreliable. It is the story of the narrator's mother, as told by the daughter:
"You would do well then to keep always in mind that this is a story told by two liars. It is possible, therefore, our fictional impulses being so opposite, that we may arrive together at something clear-eyed and straightforward, the way two negative numbers multiplied together produce a positive value. If this happens it will be by accident. It is not my intention. I will go so far as to say I would consider it a disappointment."
What reader could resist such . . . honesty? And the aforementioned apologies are in order because this is a book about the Sweetwheat Sweethearts, a female baseball team. At least, on the surface, this is what the book is about. It is also about ghosts, mirrored realities, lost realities, and the realities unseen by those involved in the living of them. It is about how our myths — or even lies — about ourselves and others obscure reality, distort our expectations, and may lead to living a dishonest life or, to put it more mildly, an unhappy life. It is a stab at trying to understand how to get at those realities, which are often so inaccessible that our only hope is to wheel, once again, into fiction in order to get to any truth.
You can read this book for the sheer pleasure of the language, the effortless and continuously delightful narrative flow, the deeply ironic tone reminiscent of great American humorists such as Thurber and Parker, and the charming, lovingly (but not sentimentally) told tale of the town of Magrit, Minnesota, in 1947, when the boys were supposed to come home from the war and marry the girls they'd left behind.
Except that they didn't come home to Magrit. Or if they did it was only to touch down restlessly in this place which embodied the spirit of the past, where already, beneath the surface, changes were taking place.
The story: Margaret Mills was started at the turn of the century by Henry Collins, an ambitious businessman who was attracted to Magrit and the idea of manufacturing breakfast cereal by an omen. "Breakfast cereal was the wilderness, first tamed, and then eaten. It was family, it was America, it was a wholesome and American alternative to grain's other uses, a point that Henry made clear in his 1906 pamphlet, Barley, the Janus-Faced Seed."
Henry also created Maggie Collins, America's expert on cooking, household hints, and etiquette, often combining the three as she answered letters in her column. And, in the 1940's, he created Sweetwheats, "America's first puffed and sugar-coated cereal."
Margaret Mills would not exist had not Henry dynamited Upper Magrit, the part of the town above the falls, where the few wealthier residents had built. The town voted, and Lower Magrit, having more residents, and being able to retain their dwellings, won. The resulting millpond covered the homes of Upper Magrit, creating jobs, longstanding resentments, and ghosts.
When the book opens, Irini Doyle, the narrator's mother, is nineteen. She had graduated from high school and is working in the Margaret Mills Scientific Kitchen. Irini has grown up with the girls she works with, and their personalities and relationships with one another ring quite true. She has a terrific right arm from kneading bread. Her father, who began drinking the day after Irini was born — also the day her mother died — is portrayed as wise, affectionate, direct, iconoclastic, and usually drunk. He might be called the Voice that Magrit, and America, does not want to hear: "The whole world's been sugar-coated. It's this labored American blandness. This forced optimism. It happened during the war, somehow. Darndest thing. We've seen the concentration camps. The mass suicides of the Japanese. We've seen innocent hostages shot and hanged, whole cities obliterated in a blink. And we still think we live in a Disney cartoon."
Henry Collins and his second wife Ada are not at all removed from the town. Ada has a somewhat eccentric and artistic bent, and midway through the book goes to India and returns to attempt to reunite the residents of Magrit through Satyagraha.
Meanwhile, the Sweetwheat Sweethearts have been created in an attempt at publicity and also to get the women in the Scientific Kitchen out and about and perhaps married. They are to tour the area and play against men's teams. This also has the effect of bringing Henry's grandson Walter back to Magrit to coach the team and perhaps gain an interest in running the mill; since the war, he has preferred California. Irini has always been indifferent to Walter's infatuation for her; she is somewhat nonplused to find that he now seems indifferent to her.
But things are changing, not only in Magrit, but in America and in the world. The mysterious Thomas Holcrum, devastatingly handsome and urbane, comes to down. No one seems to know why. Fish sticks, the convenience food of the future, are invented, but not by the Scientific Kitchen. Magrit, and Maggie Collin's philosophical accord with the woman of America and the world, are both apparently on the wane. To make matters worse, someone with an ax to grind has usurped Maggie's podium and no one can figure out who this is, since Maggie's column has always been written by a compendium; just about everyone falls under suspicious at one time or another.
Throughout the book the narrator raises doubts about her mother's memories, her practice of always thinking the best of everyone and putting the best spin on every event, of seeing reality through a haze of kindness. The narrator contrasts this quality with the changes that have occurred in the American public since then: "These people had just fought and won a war . . . it was a war that seemed to provide and entire generation with evidence of their essential goodness, their innocence, their generosity. It seems to have been a war waged in an almost total absence of doubt. To us today, of course, this might as well be fairyland. The people who raised us are no more like us than the fairies are."
Magrit does not come through these changes unscathed. Throughout The Sweetheart Season, the narrator chronicles how this fairyland disintegrated into the present, though this aim is never in the forefront until, with true postmodern panache, the narrator comes right out with her own point of view, which ripples back through the book to its very first chapter. And then, you have to realize you had been warned.
Any fiction by Karen Joy Fowler rewards close reading. Her work is so seamless that it must be swallowed whole, as it were, to allow the insights and subtexts within to be digested. After this process, The Sweetheart Season seems to glow with a slow, deep fire, throwing a light which will not wane no matter how long you think about it, or how many times you reread the funniest, loveliest, or more thought-provoking passages.
Oh, yes. I have left the ape out of all this. Henry Collins is on a quest for an ape, a quest which follows hard on the heels of his bird-tagging enthusiasm of early spring. Eventually, he finds one. The ape is, I think, one of the leitmotifs of the book. Apes figure strongly in Maggie Collins' last, incendiary letters, the ones in which she admonishes women to leave their glowering husbands and screaming children, dance on the tables, order lobster, and take many lovers. I have also left out communism and just about everything concerning ghosts.
But there are some delights in The Sweetheart Season you will just have to ferret out for yourself.
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