newcritics

The last time I visited New York, before 9/11, a colleague directed me through the narrow streets of the Village off Washington Square. After twisting around several blocks, we found what we were looking for: a small plaque marking the spot where 146 workers perished in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. It’s one of those events that terrifies and fascinates to this day: young women and girls locked into a crowded sweatshop, working long hours for miniscule wages, the ultimate immigrant tale of early 20th century New York. When a fire erupted in the crowded building, the laborers choked and burned, screaming in horror, unable to escape. And in an eerie foreshadowing of what would occur mere miles away on 9/11, many jumped from upper floors to their death.

The failure and the blame was widespread: the owners locked the poor workers in without adequate escape routes, the fire escapes that existed were dilapidated and useless, the fire department’s ladders didn’t reach above six floors and therefore couldn’t reach the eighth-to-tenth floors where the workers were trapped and when some workers jumped into nets being held by firemen on the ground, the nets disintegrated. When you stand on the street corner and look up at the building’s relatively modest height, it’s hard to imagine what it must have been like that day when the sidewalk was a river of blood.

Reading the opening pages of Katharine Weber’s haunting novel Triangle, now out in paperback from Picador, is a difficult experience. I almost put the book away. In 13 pages set up as the transcribed memories of fire survivor Esther Gottesfeld, Weber brings the experience to vivid, terrifying life. After Esther escapes through the roof, she recalls watching the scene unfold: “So I crossed the street and there were all these people looking up and so I looked up, and what I saw was so terrible, the girls jumping, jumping from so high up, they weren’t like people, it was like watching insects or animals…and the sound was so terrible when (they) fell, like a bag of wet laundry falling.”

After this apocalyptic, unforgettable beginning, which reads as coldly precise as fact, Weber wisely gives us a needed breather. She slowly sets up a story that will not only be an intended echo of 9/11, but will also encompass a mysterious, long-held secret by Esther, a modern urban love story between Esther’s granddaughter and a famous composer and a pseudo-comic savaging of politically correct feminist academia.

There are long, engaging digressions on musical theory and disease research and immigrant life in the early century, but it all slowly spins back into the central triangle of the story: the pregnant Esther who watches her fiance Sam and sister Pauline perish in the flames and the nagging questions of whether the story she tells is the real truth of what happened that day. And what is truth, anyway, and who should it serve?

I could go on, but I don’t want to spoil the pleasures of this intriguing, interlocking novel for you. I want you to read it for yourself. It’s not a perfect book. Weber is a clean, smooth writer, but a postmodern trickster, who plays with form and linear progression to tell her story, setting up parts of the book as transcribed interviews and newspaper articles. It may be a little longer than it needs to be, and the comic interludes with the humorless “herstorian” are a bit cliched and obvious. But you find yourself caring deeply for these characters, especially the proud and prickly Esther and her equally vibrant granddaughter. Weber lets the reader easily guess Esther’s secret, by the way, but for a reason: The secret isn’t as important as the details of the secret, which when unspooled, are as emotionally devastating as the disclosures that fuel the close of William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice.

Triangle is a novel that has rattled around in my head for days. It takes fiction and uses it to bring the past into the present. The Triangle fire is a footnote in American history, not known to many, but Katharine Weber doesn’t want to let us forget it. It’s more than just an interesting story to her. It’s part of her own family history: The book is dedicated to her grandmother, Pauline Gottesfeld, “who finished buttonholes at the Triangle Waist Company in 1909.”

(Cross posted at www.badfortheglass.blogspot.com)