CONCEIT by Mary Novik is a rather naughty tale filled with vivid
wit and imagery about love and love lost. It is set in seventeenth
century London and the author draws freely from historical remnants
of the period, creating a lovely tapestry about one of the more
notorious personalities of the day: John Donne. The historic figure
is a poet, preacher, and parliamentarian (please forgive the
alliteration). In Novik's portrait the youthful Donne becomes a
creature of tremendous gaiety and warmth who in his later years
veritably abandons his more charitable nature for a life devoted to
the church. Despite the centrality of this towering figure the
novel is really about the thoughts and longings of the women in his
life, his wife Ann More and daughter Pegge.
The novels begins somewhat opaquely in 1666, the great London fire.
We meet Pegge who is hurrying down the river. What we know about
Pegge is that "Fish make her think of love" (7) and that she's
hell-bent on rescuing her father's effigy from the consuming fire.
At the time John Donne has been dead some thirty years. From the
fire we go back to 1622 and are properly introduced: Pegge is
learning French and Latin from a tutor.
The novel itself is narrated through the lives of several
characters, most of them living, one dead, and one betwixt and
between. This oscillation of perspectives reaches out like an epic
without the Herculean effort or volume. The prose is beautiful and
easy to read.
"But Pegge listened. She could hear the bodies decomposing under
her feet in the privacy of tombs. Her hearing was acute, able to
pick out threads of silence…" (25).
And how can one not be pleased to read this gem:
"Musing over how pleasant it would be to tocar her mamelles so as
to make himself espender, he crawls back into his solitary bed"
(4).
Later, it is equally delightful to discover why fish make Pegge
think of love.
Each voice in the novel is independent from the rest. In reading
through the novel one is struck by a peculiar quality of
reflection: each character seems to be silently and secretly asking
questions of the other, making demands, fashioning different
outcomes, ascertaining what is and is not the case. In many ways
this is a literary attempt to create a record of private life and
it is in my view one of the great elements of Novik's novel, the
conveyance of a scintillating internal world as it comes to be
constituted externally from one generation to the next.
All in all, this is a versatile novel about passion, anguish,
seduction, bitterness, curiosity, pregnancy, and lonliness.
Enjoy!
* * *
"A conversation between lovers should never end. My amorous soul
lives for its outings, my visitations upon your body. What once was
pleasure has become addiction" (229).