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Oct. 14, 2005
Flu epidemic killed millions
Wickett's Remedy author, Myla Goldberg, reads in city.
CYNTHIA RAMSAY
Tens of millions of people worldwide died from the Spanish flu
in 1918. According to this month's National Geographic, the
H5N1 bird-flu virus that is killing poultry and people in Asia could
kill hundreds of million around the globe. This estimation, coupled
with the fact that the medical establishment seems as stymied about
how to combat the avian flu as it was the Spanish flu 87 years ago,
makes Myla Goldberg's latest novel, Wickett's Remedy, especially
timely and interesting.
As part of the 18th annual Vancouver International Writers and Readers
Festival, Goldberg will be in the city next week to read excerpts
from her most recent work. It is a book that was five years in the
making and one that is completely different in style than her best-selling
first novel Bee Season, which was published in 2000. Goldberg
also has a book of essays, Time's Magpie (2004), to her credit.
The heroine of Bee Season is Eliza Naumann, a young Jewish
girl who seems average in every way until she unexpectedly wins
a spelling bee that leads to an invitation to a national competition,
as well as to her father's inner sanctum, his study, where he explores
kabbalah. The tenuous family stability is jeopardized by Eliza's
success and the story follows how she tries to hold everyone together.
"With Bee Season, I was called a Jewish writer and it
was called a Jewish book," Goldberg told the Independent
in a phone interview from her home in Brooklyn, N.Y. "While
I was writing it, I wasn't thinking about those things. It being
a Jewish family just followed from the fact that I was Jewish and
it was dealing with the kabbalah, and that was just the easiest
[place] to start from.
"It wasn't until it was done and I was getting reaction from
people that I was being called a Jewish author and Jewish writer,"
she continued. "I had no problem with it. I mean, I was really
warmly embraced by everybody. But one concept that really does interest
me is when is a Jewish writer a Jewish writer and is a Jewish writer
ever not a Jewish writer? You know, [when a book] is written
but doesn't have any Jews in it, does that then [mean] that [the]
writer is not a Jewish writer anymore or is that book not a Jewish
book? How does that work?
"I guess my answer to that question is my Judaism is very much
kind of an intellectual and a cultural foundation for me, so I can't
help but assume that background and that grounding is going to influence
everything that I do, although I don't think about it in specific
when I'm in the process of doing it. I would say broadly that, for
me, one of the things I derive very much from Jewish culture and
Jewish thought is the idea of questioning everything and analyzing
everything from as many perspectives [as] you can, to really try
to understand it and get inside it. That's a skill that equips you
really well to be a writer in this world.
"That skill served me very well with Wickett's, because
I was having to put myself in a very different head and behind a
very different set of eyes to get the lay of the land and understand
the story I was trying to tell," she said.
Wickett's Remedy takes readers to Boston in the early part
of the 20th century, during the First World War, and centres around
Lydia, an Irish American girl with dreams of leaving the poor district
of South Boston, where she was born and grew up. Through her job
as a salesperson in Gilchrist's shirt department, she meets and
marries Henry Wickett, a medical student and the son of wealthy
Bostonians. However, soon after their wedding, Henry abruptly quits
medical school to create a mail-order patent medicine called Wickett's
Remedy.
Just as the Wicketts seem to be settling down, the Spanish influenza
epidemic of 1918 begins its deadly sweep across the world and, eventually,
Lydia volunteers to work as a nurse in an experimental ward dedicated
to understanding the epidemic through the use of human subjects.
In her telling of this story, Goldberg includes actual newspaper
accounts, period songs and medical reports, which are quite fascinating
and provide a great depth of context.
The parallel narrative in Wickett's depicts how Henry Wickett's
one-time business partner, Quentin Driscoll, steals the recipe of
his remedy to make QD Soda, which becomes a soft drink empire. This
story is told mostly through QD newsletters, letters from the company's
current president (in the 1990s) to honor Driscoll on QD Soda's
75th anniversary and letters from an elderly Driscoll to his dead
wife and son.
"Before I began to write [Wickett's]," said Goldberg,
"all I knew is that I wanted this book to be as humanly different
as possible from Bee Season and then my topic found me in
the form of the flu.
"I was reading a New York Times article that did the
five worse epidemics of all time and the 1918 epidemic was among
them and I had never heard of it before and I thought that was very
strange.... The more I read about, the more shocked I was by how
terrible it had been and the degree to which it had been effaced
by memory. It was the event itself that compelled me to go back
to that period and write about it, and not any [particular] interest
in historical fiction."
Throughout Wickett's, voices of people who have died provide
a running commentary from the book's margins, playing off the ongoing
narrative and intended to show the interplay of perception and memory.
About these interjections and the focus on kabbalah in Bee Season,
Goldberg said, "I would call myself a spiritual person, but
my spiritual leanings really are very much deeply seated in humanism.
For me, the things bigger than ourselves are the collective power
and the potential of humanity and I derive solace and confidence
and the will to go on thinking of that. So, when you see the stuff
that's in Wickett's, the voices of the dead, that's more
deriving from my own interest in melding fantastical elements with
fiction in stories. My very favorite books tend to add just a little
bit of fantastical to an otherwise fairly realistic setting, because,
I think, by doing that, you can see the world we live in from a
new angle or can show some things in sharper focus that allow you
to see truths that you wouldn't be able to get at necessarily [otherwise]."
Goldberg was born in Maryland. She has lived in New York for 11
years, about eight of which have been spent in Brooklyn. She said
she has always wanted to be a writer.
"You know how some kids will play house or they'll play school?
I would sit at an electronic typewriter and pretend I was writing
a novel," she said.
Before becoming a full-time writer, Goldberg also worked as a freelance
reader for television movies, determining whether submitted manuscripts
would make good TV movies. This experience may help her in future
endeavors.
While Goldberg said she hadn't thought much about her next project
– "My brain is tired and it needs a chance to recharge"
– she added that she is currently working on a couple of short
stories and may even try a play or screenplay.
"For me, the way to be a better writer is to try and do as
many different things as possible," she said. "The only
thing I have right now for the next novel is that I think it's probably
going to be set in present day, because I've never done that before.
Even Bee Season was the '80s, which wasn't contemporary at
the time [I wrote it].
"The idea of writing a contemporary story really scares me,
which is why I think it's probably the thing I'm supposed to do
next. It scares me because, when you're not telling a contemporary
story, you can kind of pull the wool over your reader's eyes. You
can say, 'Oh, well, it was like this.' And they'll be, either 'I
wasn't born then and I'll take [her] word for it' or, 'Gee, I guess
I just don't remember.' [For] contemporary stuff, everyone's going
to be a critic and an expert. They're like, 'You know what, that
isn't the way it is.' And they'll be right. So, I want to try that
[type of writing] because it seems like such a daunting task."
This bravery must come through in Goldberg's writing because Wickett's
Remedy is not a completely satisfying book: some of the QD newsletter
items are too long, several of the marginal comments from the dead
serve to interrupt rather than add to the main stories and the dialogue
is poorly written in parts. However, you don't really mind these
flaws, because the story is compelling enough and you feel that
Goldberg deserves credit for attempting such a creative novel, one
so utterly different from her first.
Goldberg reads at the Writers and Readers Festival on Oct. 21. Other
participants in the festival, which runs from Oct. 18-23 at various
venues on Granville Island, include Baba Brinkman, Jennie Erdal
and Sheri-D Wilson. The entry fee to events varies. More information
can be found at www.writersfest.bc.ca
or by calling 604-681-6330.
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