Author: Karen Odden

I love best the historical novels that have the feel of the real, and often they describe or represent the objects of daily life, mundane to the characters but unfamiliar to us. A few weeks ago my friend Wendy, who is madly talented at hunting up curious things in thrift stores, gave me this piece of crockery. (The pen is for scale.) She wasn’t sure what it was, she said, but with the brush of gold, and the maker’s mark (“F. Winkle & Co. Byron England”) on the inside, it looked like it came straight out of my book, set in Victorian England, so she wanted me to have it. Maybe it was a serving dish, meant for soup or a stew, she ventured. That night my mother-in-law walked in to my kitchen, saw it on the counter, and gasped: “My! What a beautiful chamber pot!”

I have put it in my office, along with a few other items: 19th-century medical books, a hatpin from the 1860s, a cast-iron train engine. Much like the “portkeys” in Harry Potter books—such as the old boot that can transport half a dozen people from a field in England to the World Cup Quidditch match—these objects connect me to my alternate universe. I found myself curious and began to ask my writer friends (on the FB Historical Novel Society page and elsewhere) if they too have an historic object like this that feels like a portkey to their period. I received back a resounding, “Yes!” and some wonderful pictures. Farthings, washboards, a napkin ring from the deck of a WWI naval ship, vanity sets, chess pieces, furniture, parasols; the list went on and on. (A side note: one member told me that chamber pots were also known as “thunder mugs” by pioneers in the Northwest. Isn’t that the best moniker?)

By chance, I just finished Michael Chabon’s Moonglow, which I can already tell will be in my top ten books for the year. Near the end of the book, Michael meets a woman named Sally who knew his grandfather toward the end of his life, after he had been diagnosed with cancer. She attends a book reading in Florida, and Michael and she go out to dinner. He reaches over to light her cigarette with a silver lighter his grandfather was given during WWII by a friend named Aughenbaugh.

“That lighter,” [Sally said.]
“There was a story behind it,” [Michael replied].
“I’m sure. All of his stories were stuck behind something.”

Maybe that is partly why I like the somethings—because they suggest that there is always a story stuck behind them. But it’s also more than that. If I am going to try to imagine a Victorian woman’s life, I like to think I can inch just a bit closer by putting my hands in the same place hers were—as if I could, by touching that handle and hefting the porcelain weight of it, feel what she felt, with both her fingertips and her heart. 

If you have a “portkey” to your period that you’d like to share, please post a picture and/or your story below, in comments. I’d love to see!

This past week, my first novel was promoted by Bookbub and, predictably, when a title is pushed to millions of readers, my sales soared. It was terrifically exciting … even if it is temporary, the author’s version of Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame. There was even a day when my book was RIGHT NEXT TO one of my favorite novels, The 19th Wifeby David Ebershoff, on the Amazon Best Seller list for historical mysteries.

It was enough to make me feel dazed. Weak in the knees.  

But it wasn’t enough to make me forget the fact that five years ago, I didn’t even have an agent. I had lots of rejection letters and four unsold manuscripts. (Ugh.) But this is perhaps a good time to reflect on one of those bad, early manuscripts, about art looting during WWII, because I think I’m heading back to that time period for my next stand-alone.

Whenever I finish a manuscript—and I finished “Down a Dark River,” about a Scotland Yard inspector in 1878 last month—I don’t begin to write a new book right away; I begin to read. I think of it as throwing ingredients into a pot. The flavors blend. And here are three bits floating in my next stew:

First: a book review by Adam Gopnik in the August 29 issue of the New Yorker. He was discussing the book Blood in the Water, by Heather Ann Thompson, an historian at the University of Michigan; the title of the review was “Kill Box: Learning from the Slaughter in Attica,” and it concerned the 1971 uprising and massacre at that prison in upstate New York (less than an hour’s drive from where I grew up).  A paragraph toward the end of the article demanded my attention; I read it over, three times:

“At moments of crisis, the integrity of our institutions turns out to depend, to an alarming degree, on the fragile integrity of individuals. Prisons are our vulnerable point because they reveal, under pressure, that procedures designed to insure justice have to be constantly reanimated by human will. … At 3 p.m., Edland stepped forward and told the world the truth: that all the dead had been killed by the gunfire of the advancing troopers and guards. It is an act of historical imagination [by Thompson] to have recovered their unostentatious courage. It also requires, for us to see such acts as heroic, getting past the language of masculinity and assertion that had entrapped both the prisoners who took hostages and then the guards who would kill them. To call men of smaller official obligations, carried out in the face of intimidation, heroes is, perhaps, to change the meaning of what we mean by heroism. It may be time for that, too.”

I ripped the article out of the magazine and promptly lost it in the quagmire of paper in my office. When I went searching online for the reference some weeks later, I googled “New Yorker fragile integrity” to find it again. Upon reflection, I realized this was an interesting choice of search words. I had completely forgotten the sentence was from the review about Attica—perhaps because the idea of the “fragile integrity of individuals” could have belonged in half a dozen articles I’ve read recently, with topics ranging from racism to public school education.

Second ingredient: a book about gardening. I’m not a gardener at all—everything dies on me, even mint and philodendrons—but I was at a bookstore waiting for my daughter, and there was a book on the discount rack with lovely pictures. On the page about thistles, it explained how the primary plant can send out a “stolon,” a shoot that runs horizontally, along the ground, and then sets down roots at intervals. Pretty pink thistles can destroy an entire garden this way, quietly choking the other plants. What a metaphor, I thought.

Third ingredient: my old, bad manuscript about art looting in WWII. Gosh, it is dreadful. Flat characters, odd dialog, clumsy descriptions. But there’s some good research there, and even the tiny details stoked my interest. I’d forgotten, for example, that the swastika was actually an ancient symbol; the Nazis bent the four arms of the cross in the other direction, so it twisted counter-clockwise, instead. The symbolism poked at me.

I am often compelled by stories of injustice, of individuals who must counter the weight of large institutions, of times when empathy fails. This feeling I have, that individuals can make small, important pronouncements and conduct themselves in quiet, profoundly significant ways, compels me. This next novel features a young female surgeon, a police detective, and an embittered, twisted man who is bent on evil and operates with the quiet cunning of thistles.