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Reviewed by P.E. Logan
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Women love to read about other women. This is the simplest explanation for the popularity of gal fiction–from the travails of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind to the Ole Miss alumnae in The Help.
These are best-selling books that lure female readers in droves, partly because of an irresistible story arc, but also because of the feats of daring-do by the purposeful, strong women characters. The newest contestant on the stage of this ilk is Sarah Blake‘s The Postmistress. It’s a tidy saga from the same imprint and publisher as The Help, but a weaker sister.
The Postmistress is a book about fate. It’s set in 1940, across two continents: in peaceable, but wary of war, Franklin, Massachusetts, a seaside town on the tip of Cape Cod; in London during the blitz when the Germans rained bombs on the British night after night; and on trains traversing Europe as the Jewish citizenry boards impossibly jammed cars to escape the slithering Nazis.
Connecting these locales are the interwoven stories of three women. The author’s tri-heroine approach reminds me of an Edvard Munch oil depicting a trio of female figures, each signifying the stages of womanhood as they tilt against nature and life.
In Ms. Blake’s novel, we meet Emma Fitch, a newlywed, married to the small town’s lone doctor. Her job is to wait for fate to tell her what to do. There is Iris James, the middle-aged postmaster of Franklin who manipulates fate by controlling the delivery of the mail.
And, there’s Frankie Bard, the Seven Sisters-graduate turned war correspondent who works in London for Edward R. Murrow. Frankie captures the stories of the everyday people in London and on those packed trains. She sends the news back to the States via radio broadcasts. She is the type of woman that era would have called a dame: wise, leggy and ready to rip the hem of her A-line shirt, anything to stop the bleeding of World War II. She wants to tame fate.
The plot is built on their crossed paths. Emma’s young husband flees from Franklin to war-torn London after hearing Frankie’s reports. He writes home every day and the letters are passed through the filtering hands of Iris. He and Frankie meet in a London bomb shelter and she becomes the last leg in the message relay, which takes her back to Franklin and to Iris and Emma. Iris has a late-in-life first love interest, the town auto mechanic, Harry Vale. He spends his days in a tower atop Franklin’s City Hall watching for U-Boats to breach the Cape Cod waters. Like Harry, we can see what’s going to happen in this book miles away.
But it’s Frankie who women readers will admire, befriend, even wish to be. She’s the reason, not the postmaster (postmistress in England), that women are making this a book club must-read. She is super cool. In 1940 you could smoke Lucky Strikes nonstop, pausing to think as smoke tendrils curled the air, without that killjoy, the Surgeon General, nagging you. Frankie puffs away. She swills bourbon, hooks-up (and we thought the 60s invented that…) and learns to shoulder the unbearable heaviness of her luxury as an American reporter. She is on those fleeing trains only to record voices, her U.S. papers are charms and pass inspection every time. Not so, for the many doomed passengers she encounters and interviews. She knows her fate. She’s figured out theirs. Can she stop any of it?
As for the postmistress, Iris’s story is not as compelling. Neither is Emma’s, although her emotional life is more wrenching by mid-book. Ms. Blake paints an apt picture of small town America–which in 1940 represented the entire U.S. We were safe here, then. Europe was a bloodbath. We had plenty of time to worry about what other people thought and what color to paint the house.
The Postmistress is the second sure-fire shot from Amy Einhorn, a Putnam editor with an eponymous imprint. She is the reigning purveyor of three-gal fiction (there are three story arcs in The Help, a mega-seller edited by Ms. Einhorn). I think the door is just opening now on Amy’s Little Shop of Stories. The Help was the most irresistible book I have read in months. This one, not so much. But damn, that Frankie. What a dame! And just in time for Women’s History Month.
P.E. Logan is communications professional and a writer in New York. She has worked at various adult trade publishing houses including Random House, Putnam, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster for almost three decades. She now works at The New York Times. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post and other periodicals.