How Dracula Got His Groove Back
Between Bel Canto and imaginary pitching tryouts for the Yankees I’ve been wrestling with The Historian. Until Steinbrenner calls, cries uncle, and begs, I’m a lit blogger. This is true despite the fact I recorded sixteen strikeouts in eight innings against The Sawx during a traffic jam on Tuesday. Got Ortiz three times. Call me.
Elizabeth Kostova’s sprawling novel has picked up a lot of ink, most of it ambivalent about the novel’s structure. The reviewer in the NYT correctly noted that each chapter ends in a supense pocket, not a bad idea if the narrative drive is linear, but unintentionally humorous when the author doubles back a few decades to pick up another point of view. Thus we have the equivalent of our heroine tied to the railroad tracks not once, but a dozen times. The lurking figure of Vlad takes on a Snidely Whiplash persona of thwarted villainy and cheesy tension socked between dusty pages of exhaustive scholarly research. At times the book is paced like a manual of arms in which each component part is lovingly cleaned, wiped with a baby diaper, and reassembled with a blindfold on.
The genius of The Historian is Kostova’s reinvention of the Nineteenth Century English novel. She layers the book with sub text, both descriptive and evocative, and sticks with her approach despite the anti-modern pacing. That’s pretty gutsy in the subdural hematoma aftermath of MTV. She knows that Vlad can do the heavy lifting without sketching his needs and motivations until the final section of the book. We know what he wants. Her vulnerable and scholarly ensemble of researchers plod forward, at their peril, as letters from a predecessor remind us. Kostova takes her time, sets and resets the scenes, ups the ante with each episode, and overcomes the fashion of the times with her deliberate vision.