Tara Conklin’s first novel, “The House Girl,” arrives in the middle of Black History Month boasting all the qualities of a Very Earnest Bestseller. Like Kathryn Stockett’s “The Help,” which has sold millions of copies, “The House Girl” depicts privileged white women and oppressed black women in a familiar, unchallenging way that strokes our liberal sensibilities and lets us feel again the sweet pleasure of racial enlightenment.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but Conklin’s novel gives the impression that it has been genetically engineered for women’s book clubs. Miscarriages, missing children, alienated fathers, lost mothers, dating troubles, trying to have it all in a man’s world: The requisite issues snap into place with the kind of predictability that will make readers suspect they’re being manipulated. What’s particularly unfortunate is that there’s a fine story chopped up and sprinkled within the pages of this book.
(William Morrow) - “The House Girl” by Tara Conklin
With a nod to A.S. Byatt’s “Possession,” “The House Girl” comes to us in two alternating strands: a mystery in the past and a search for answers in the present.
Josephine is a restless young slave in 1852. The once-prosperous Virginia farm where she lives is failing under the mismanagement of a master who has neither the funds nor the skill to maintain the plantation. His wife, the dying mistress of Bell Creek, fancies herself a painter, but Josephine is the real artist of the affecting portraits that will someday be regarded as masterpieces of 19th-century American art.
In the novel’s alternating chapters, we follow the detective work of Lina Sparrow in 2004. A new associate with a prestigious New York law firm, she and another young lawyer are charged with preparing the largest legal case in the history of the world: a class-action lawsuit demanding $6.2 trillion from the U.S. government and 22 corporations on behalf of millions of descendants of African American slaves. Because “this is a biggie,” as her boss puts it, that relies on a “new legal theory,” Lina is given two weeks to prepare. Such are the demands on young lawyers hoping to make partner. Next month, she might sue the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
The legal and moral arguments for paying reparations to the descendants of African American slaves would be a rich and fascinating subject, but the cringing absurdities of this plot multiply like a senior partner’s billable hours. It isn’t enough for Lina to sue the U.S. government for an amount equal to a sizable percentage of the GDP; she decides that she must first solve a 150-year-old mystery of art history involving Josephine’s paintings. And given the millions of aggrieved descendants of slaves who might make powerful lead plaintiffs in the reparations case, why not insist on recruiting only an extremely reluctant, mixed-race hunk who might or might not be related to Josephine?
These would seem to be formidable challenges for any new lawyer and amateur sleuth, but fortunately, every time Lina cracks open an old notebook, out falls some revelatory clue that has eluded generations of scholars.
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