The Further Adventures of Daisy Miller: A Novella

 

The Further Adventures of Daisy Miller: A Novella

by Lawrence Kessenich

Pierian Springs Press

ISBN: 1965784151

140 pages

Review by Kevin M. McIntosh

Oh, Daisy. Since Henry James birthed (and killed) you in 1878, readers have celebrated, defamed, lamented, but, mainly, puzzled over you. A rich man’s daughter touring Switzerland and Italy in the socially essential company of your mother and little brother, seeing the culturally significant sights, attending the mandatory ex-pat parties, flirting with the men at hand, foreign and domestic, we continue to argue what you’re about. Libertine? Naif? Or proof of Cyndi Lauper’s timeless proposition that Girls just wanna have fun? Whatever. But James left us with an ugly question to ponder: Must a nice, high-spirited girl from Schenectady pay for her high spirits with her life?

No, says triple threat novelist-poet-playwright Lawrence Kessenich, in his charming, graceful, provocative answer to James, The Further Adventures of Daisy Miller.

Kessenich’s Daisy, having suffered but survived that Roman miasma, emerges toughened by her near-death experience, more a woman and less a curious, drifty girl. Winterbourne, the fellow ex-pat who squired her about those Swiss sights, enraptured by her beauty, critical of her indifference to nineteenth century gender norms, is put on his heels by this tougher Daisy. Encountering him in Paris, she takes him to task for having “deserted me on my sickbed.” When he is appalled at her strolling, unescorted, in the company of a married male friend, she tells him she has “no intention of misshaping myself into a society whose customs I disrespect.” Then she befriends the man’s spouse. Take that, old bean.

In granting Daisy further adventures, Kessenich answers the question James left hanging as to whether Miss Miller is a beautiful and smart force-of-nature or merely another pretty, wealthy American girl, flitting about Europe, fatally drunk, as some might say now, on her class-and-looks privilege. This new-and-improved Daisy is an emerging first-wave feminist. (And why not? As she points out, she was raised a stone’s throw from Seneca Falls.) Daisy’s natural curiosity and social courage draw her into the sphere of French suffragist Hubertine Auclert, make her a subject for famed portraitist (and Henry James buddy) John Singer Sargent. Daisy taking her rightful place among Sargent’s self-possessed beauties is, for my money, Kessenich’s historical masterstroke.

In addition to these engaging real-life figures, Further Adventures supplies the pleasures and avoids the pitfalls of historical fiction. As the tale unfolds in dueling first-person narratives between Daisy and Winterbourne, Kessenich wisely makes no attempt at imitating his source material. His voice deftly evokes James’s characters and settings, but he rightly eschews any attempt at Jamesian prose (a thicket of dependent clauses and semi-colons from which some have never escaped). And though this volume, like the original, is slim, we still get to stroll the Exposition Universelle, fly over the newly electrified City of Lights in a hot-air balloon. We get a sense of the old world made new, a world––like Daisy––reborn.

But, Daisy-being-Daisy, she can’t get past––even in reincarnation––being attracted to a man of the wrong sort. This time, however––Daisy 2.0––it’s not a fatal attraction. Her pursuit of said man and Winterbourne’s attempts at intervention form much of the climactic tension in this novella, but that’s not this Daisy’s real heart or the heart of her story. In this retelling, this addendum, Kessenich shows us the capacity for human growth (yes, even in a stick-in-the-mud like Winterbourne) and how that growth––plus courage––can change the world. The ending needn’t be inevitable, predictable. We can rewrite it if we have the guts. “I just want to be allowed to be myself,” Kessenich’s Daisy says. “But apparently in order to do that I will have to be strong.” True that. And a message worth embracing, for her world, and ours.

Class Dismissed, by Kevin M. McIntosh

Class Dismissed, by Kevin M. McIntosh

Regal House Publishing, 2021 218 pages, $16.95





Review by Denise Provost


I’ve just finished one of the most intelligent, funny, and beautifully written novels I’ve read in a long time. It leaves another novel I’ve recently read – a former Booker Prize winner, which shall go unnamed – in the dust. On the chance that this novel may not receive the same attention as some of the trendier material out there, I’ll tell you why Class Dismissed is worth seeking out.

Class Dismissed is a tale as unpretentious as its protagonist, Patrick Lynch, who pursues a vocation as an English teacher in under-resourced public school. “Marcus Garvey High School” in New York City serves mostly black, Latinx, and immigrant students, and Lynch learns soon enough that teaching these students is a low-status occupation. Most women Lynch’s age, on the prowl for investment bankers or attorneys as potential partners, keep their distance.

Yet Lynch pushes on, determined to connect with and educate his students. He finds his opportunities to do so by striving to understand of them and their world, which he absorbs with such clear-eyed perception that observant readers, too, may begin to parse and diagram social situations in a similar way. For instance, Lynch has the discernment to know that when his student, Abdul, “chairman of the too-cool-for-school crew,” finally turns in his late homework, he could do so “without damaging his rep, for the act of handing in an assignment was understood by his cronies as the highest form of satire.”

McIntosh’s book, for all its wit, is not satire, but is undeniably a novel of manners; specifically of the subgenre New York City fin-de- 20thcentury novel of manners. Like Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, it skewers that city’s self-regard, political posing, and virtue-signaling. But unlike Wolf, who seems to hate all his characters (except the beleaguered judge in the final courtroom scenes,) McIntosh displays a generous spirit towards his characters, making his book as humane as it is laceratingly funny.

Class Dismissed is also a coming-of-age novel, chronicling Patrick Lynch’s growing up as a school superintendent’s son in a small Minnesota town. We meet his family, his brilliant and disreputable best friend, his first crush. We see for ourselves Lynch’s pattern of conformities and rebellions in his early years.

In his New York City days, page by page, Lynch aptly pegs his students, colleagues, school administrators, the few parents who cross his path, and members of his various social circles. Through Lynch’s unsparing eye - and usually through the grace of McIntosh’s devastating humor - we see what’s wrong with the System in which teacher Lynch is undertaking to administer the sacrament of education.

Grading an exam after school hours, reads that of “Carmelita Fuentes…. The voice of this girl was so vivid, he could see her….[She] dismissed the Emancipation Proclamation with a finger snap and head roll. Everybody say Lincoln free all the slaves. But NO! he only free slaves in the South. And that’s the onnest truth if you want to know. Even tho he’s Lincoln he’s still a politishun. Just like them all….

“Patrick checked the rubric. Level 5: Does the writer display a thorough of the role of tone and audience in persuasive writing? No. Level 4: Does the writer demonstrate command of paragraph and sentence structure, the use of evidence in supporting a single clear thesis? No, no. Level 3: Does the writer have fundamental control of grammar, spelling, and punctuation? No, no, and no….

“He slapped Abe Lincoln down on the stack of unevaluated tests. Why did they always ask the wrong questions? Why did the rubric capture none of this girl’s aptitude or enthusiasm? Why not:

Does the writer display passion for the subject? Yes.

Does the writer appreciate the connection between history and her life? Yes.

Does the writer show evidence of having paid attention in a history class of thirty-five students, taught by an apathetic man with a degree in Phys Ed, seated next to a big girl with a sharp nail file who promised to mess her up after school? Yes.”

Standardized testing in a nutshell, stamped with the indelible voice of a girl almost no one will ever care much about – rather brilliant. Similarly, a teacher later stuck in administrative limbo with Lynch sees him carrying a volume of Proust, and asks him, “Is that the Moncrieff translation or the Enright revision?” Th question, and Lynch’s reply, speak volumes. So does Lynch’s assessment, also while under suspension from his classroom, of the mission of those “agents of the Department of Education whose full-time job it was to find enough dirt on [him] to deny him the opportunity to explain to Julio what an infinitive was….”

McIntosh’s Lynch is also a cultural anthropologist of the various flavors of religion typically lumped together as “Christianity.” Lynch attends a funeral in an Evangelical Lutheran church, where the “organist ponded the opening chords to “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.” Decidedly not a hymn on St. Immaculata’s playlist, but plenty familiar to Patrick….

“And then the Lutherans began to sing. Nothing like this had been heard in the history of St. Immaculata’s, perhaps not of the entire Holy Roman Apostolic Church. The somber, aged assembly broke into the lushest four-part harmony. On-pitch, God-fearing four-part harmony.”

Lynch also wrangles with the social and theological puzzles underlying these religious differentiations: ”[f]eeling guilty and pleading guilty were very different. One Catholic, the other criminal.” He asks himself such questions as “[C]ould there be confession without actual sin?”

As its title suggests, the whole of this story of repeated failure, growth, and redemption is laced through with a finely tuned appreciation of the many – and typically dismissed - stratifications of class in America. These observations are displayed in the streetwise wisdom of Lynch’s students. These include the professors’ son, who wears his white boy’s hair in deadlocks, and plays rap, to the hierarchy of teachers and administrators, in the school, and the city’s education bureaucracy.

Lynch’s social spectrum takes in ethnic enclaves, as well as the remote world of the upper middle classes in their distant suburbs. These are mainly represented, in his world, by Patrick’s girlfriend and her family in Connecticut. He sees them – with their immersion in privilege - as “a people who viewed problems in practical terms, as soluble.”

I’ve carefully avoided revealing spoilers about the actual plot of this well-crafted story. That’s for you to find out. Read this book.