The Women of the Copper Country by Mary Doria Russell
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I loved Doc, I loved Epitaph, I respect and admire Mary Doria Russell greatly. I’m originally from Michigan, and today is Labor Day. I wish I loved this book.
Russell is brilliant at historical research, and turns it into vivid, living human stories. Copper Country, unfortunately, feels like the historical notes have overwhelmed the narrative. The completely fictional or more heavily invented characters have more life than the historical ones do. Eva Savicki, Carla Coretto, and Jaaki Kivisto are warm, living, feeling people; Annie Clemenc, for all her amazing courage and perseverance, remains a stoic “Lady Liberty,” mostly known for being tall and carrying a flagpole no one else can shoulder. While mine manager James McNaughton’s Snidely Whiplash character is documented unmistakably in the memo and letter excerpts embedded in the action, we hear more about his house, his bathroom, and his curtains than we ever get to understand about him. Famous leaders like Mother Jones and Ella Bloor appear, make inspiring speeches and bring money, then disappear. Even the horrifying Italian Hall disaster in which 73 people – mostly children – were crushed in a panicked stampede down a steep stairwell feels more like reportage than tragedy, even in the hands of a skilled writer like Russell. Her afterword note describing how a friend’s grandfather, a survivor of that night, pulled the car over as they passed the site decades later and sobbed at the wheel with no explanation, carried more power.
It’s perhaps not fair to compare Copper Country to Germinal. But Zola added an atmosphere of menace by making the mine itself a character: brooding, gasping, rumbling, smoking, always looming. Calumet’s mines are dark, dangerous holes, to be sure, and perhaps Russell shows us less of them because the women themselves don’t go down into them. But they do not have the same life – or death – force. Both novels end roughly the same: the miners lose. The workers shuffle back down. Good people suffer and die, bad people prosper. In that regard, Zola would be proud of Russell.
Well-intentioned, some fine writing (“A scrawny boy comes at the third [man], all stupid bravery and righteous anger, but he goes down like a dropped doll when one of Fisher’s men clocks him.”) And a message that we should not ignore. But not her best novel.
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