In a 2021 New York Times interview marking the publication of her last novel, The Vixen, Francine Prose confessed that she is "easily bored by books."
What? The author of more than 30 uncommonly smart volumes of fiction and nonfiction is a reader who often loses interest? So she says. Which is why she has worked so hard over the past half century to make sure her books are engrossing.
Prose's novels, including her latest, Five Weeks in the Country, are never prosaic. She engages readers with a remarkable range of subjects that span multiple emotional registers, from wry and comic to distressing and heartbreaking. She's written about on-campus political correctness (Blue Angel), a washed-up children's theater troupe (Mister Monkey), and pre-World War II proto-fascist hoodlums (Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932).
Five Weeks in the Country – Prose's account of Danish author Hans Christian Andersen's distressing, ill-timed visit to Charles Dickens' country house during the summer of 1857 — offers a memorable twist on the classic English country house drama.
This intimate, fictionalized portrayal of Dickens' home life also explores the trade-offs between "perfection of the life, or of the work," a dilemma that has been addressed often in literature (including W.B. Yeats' "The Choice"). Here, personal happiness presents the greater challenge for Prose's two literary titans. Andersen, the awkward, desperately lonely author of "The Ugly Duckling" and "The Snow Queen" assumes that Dickens has it all — enormous literary prowess, a passionate readership, a loving wife, nine children, two homes. He's shocked by what he encounters during his stay.
In Prose's telling, which tweaks the events on record and turns a footnote in these two writers' lives into a pivotal moment, Dickens had uprooted his teeming family from Tavistock House in London to a brick manor in Kent, 27 miles away not long before Andersen's arrival. He had admired Gad's Hill on boyhood walks with his insolvent father, and buying it was a dream come true for the successful author. For his weepy wife, Catherine Hogarth Dickens, and his children, who ranged in age from 5 to 20, it was more exile than privilege.
Prose has set herself several challenges in this historical novel. As in much of her fiction, she delights in jumping between characters to channel multiple perspectives. We hear first from Dickens' adoring but unhappy children. Presumably, an unnamed older child speaks for the group : "Father used to love us. He didn't love us anymore." The result suggests a tricky first personal plural, a sort of Greek chorus complaining in unison of the isolation of their move to Gad's Hill: "How could a man who had imagined his way into the minds of so many characters not notice how much his children had lost?," they intone.
Their father had always worked hard, but now his disinterest in anything but his work made them feel dull, noisy, expensive and disappointing. They miss his well-chosen gifts and birthday poems, family picnics, trips abroad, treasure hunts and magical Christmases. When Katey, his favorite, dares to ask why he has forsaken them, he says, "You are my children. I love you. All my pretty ones." Alarmed, Katey reminds her siblings that all my pretty ones is what MacDuff calls his murdered children in MacBeth, their father's favorite play.
Hans Christian Andersen steps into this simmering brew a day before he's expected in June, 1857. (Dickens had invited the Dane with the hope of ingratiating himself to an attractive woman who was a fan of Andersen's work.) The socially awkward Andersen, who speaks no English, is a sorry, unwelcome sight after a rough voyage. Tall, bony, with exaggerated features, he looks like David Copperfield's Uriah Heep.
Why had Andersen accepted Dickens' peculiar invitation, and why did he persist in staying? With neither wife nor close relatives, he was hoping to find a soulmate, home and family in Dickens' household. Instead, his host — distracted by concerns that eventually become clear — ignores him. The children, who are unfamiliar with Andersen's fairy tales, evoke his bullied childhood by taunting him about his fear of dogs, ghosts and a comet purportedly heading their way. Only Catherine, the spurned missus, beached in her bed, which is sanded with scattered pastry crumbs, opens her broken heart to him.
In the novel's second section, Prose shifts to Dickens' perspective. Initially, his unflattering portrait of the unfortunate houseguest aligns so closely with his children's that the narrative suffers from repetition. There are further repetitions when we hear from Andersen but, gradually, differences emerge between the three accounts — which is where the intrigue lies.
Andersen, who seems so pathetic from the Dickenses' perspectives, comes across as a more astute and self-aware oddball than we'd given him credit for -- despite the laughably unsubtle fairy tale into which he channels his experiences at Gad's Hill. Dickens' moral standing, in contrast, suffers mightily from his spurious rationalizations for saving his "one life" by renouncing the mother of his children and taking up with an actress less than half his age. (It's no secret how that sat with his public.)
Prose plays all this for humor, pathos and, yes, Schadenfreude. Touchingly, the much-maligned, pastry-stuffed Catherine emerges somewhat redeemed.
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