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Mayhem: Three Lives of a Woman
Winner of the Gival Press Novel Award
A violent and unusual crime is committed in a frankly imagined rural Texas of 1936: two ranchers attempt to castrate a neighbor under circumstances deriving from standard gender and social relations. The daughter of prominent landowners, regarded as the cause of this crime, is outcast from home and family, rescued by clergy in the role of plot angels, and becomes a paid laborer in other people's homes, where she undergoes a muted, nearly twenty-year recovery from trauma. An authorial narrator who as a girl observed women nursing the elderly, as this character does, invents her story for reasons of her own. A read both absorbing and stylish.
"Mayhem is an extraordinary achievement."--Evan Carton
A violent and unusual crime is committed in a frankly imagined rural Texas of 1936: two ranchers attempt to castrate a neighbor under circumstances deriving from standard gender and social relations. The daughter of prominent landowners, regarded as the cause of this crime, is outcast from home and family, rescued by clergy in the role of plot angels, and becomes a paid laborer in other people's homes, where she undergoes a muted, nearly twenty-year recovery from trauma. An authorial narrator who as a girl observed women nursing the elderly, as this character does, invents her story for reasons of her own. A read both absorbing and stylish.
"Mayhem is an extraordinary achievement."--Evan Carton
200 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2015
1 person is currently reading
202 people want to read
About the author
Elizabeth Harris
2 books10 followersLibrarian Note:
There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Winner of the 2014 Gival Press Fiction Award, Elizabeth Harris is a native Texan who grew up in Ft. Worth. She won the John Simmons Prize, awarded by University of Iowa Press, for her first book, "The Ant Generator", a collection of stories praised for their “sense of wonder, comedy and acid-etched existentialism.” Those and uncollected stories appeared in Antioch Review, Epoch, Chicago Review, North American Review, Shenandoah, and other magazines, and have been anthologized in New Stories from the South, Best of Wind, The Iowa Award, and Literary Austin.
“Mayhem: Three Lives of a Woman" is her second book, coming October, 2015. She was a runner up in a previous Gival Press contest with “The Look Thief,” a novel still in manuscript; and in a Faulkner Pirate’s Alley competition for an earlier novel. As yet untitled, her current project is a contemporary novel with a historical setting.
Harris taught fiction writing and modern literature for a number of years at The University of Texas at Austin. Elizabeth Harris and her husband are avid birders and divide their time between the Texas coast and Austin.
There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Winner of the 2014 Gival Press Fiction Award, Elizabeth Harris is a native Texan who grew up in Ft. Worth. She won the John Simmons Prize, awarded by University of Iowa Press, for her first book, "The Ant Generator", a collection of stories praised for their “sense of wonder, comedy and acid-etched existentialism.” Those and uncollected stories appeared in Antioch Review, Epoch, Chicago Review, North American Review, Shenandoah, and other magazines, and have been anthologized in New Stories from the South, Best of Wind, The Iowa Award, and Literary Austin.
“Mayhem: Three Lives of a Woman" is her second book, coming October, 2015. She was a runner up in a previous Gival Press contest with “The Look Thief,” a novel still in manuscript; and in a Faulkner Pirate’s Alley competition for an earlier novel. As yet untitled, her current project is a contemporary novel with a historical setting.
Harris taught fiction writing and modern literature for a number of years at The University of Texas at Austin. Elizabeth Harris and her husband are avid birders and divide their time between the Texas coast and Austin.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
January 14, 2016
“A young woman climbing out of an old Essex in a cloche hat and a flowered maroon rummage-sale dress in front of the Prince Carl County courthouse, that’s what some observers will remember . . . part of her fascination, escorted and left waiting in the lemony light of the October morning, is that she seems almost in custody . . . she is the trial’s most intriguing spectacle, the origin of the crime, the modest, obedient, well-regarded woman taken in adultery.”
Thus begins Elizabeth Harris’s elegantly written novel Mayhem about a frankly fictional female, Evelyn Kunkle Gant, whose imagined life story suggests how women, in particular, can be reduced to oft-repeated caricatures such as “the adulterous wife,” a woman on whose account a crime was committed that “made men cross their legs.” This is the kind of story that often attached itself to “a category of able-bodied white women who ‘lived in’ and took care of invalid old people. . . Stories of wrong clung to these women . . . .” And the author, who makes herself a character in the novel at times, has grown up with them in a small rural town in Texas. Always curious in her youth about their lives, Harris feels she is “just a college degree and a few decades of change” from having been one of them.
And so Harris tells her own story about this woman named Evelyn, giving her a fuller life than the stereotype of the “woman taken in adultery” can possibly do. Harris speaks for Evelyn, on her behalf, telling her “secret” for her, and she gives her character “a feeling for everything she has lost to this local immortality.” Harris speculates that Evelyn may dwell upon her losses “to remain a person in her own world, understanding that she has already become a character in a local story.”
Harris’s emphasis upon the fictional nature of Evelyn’s tale might seem distancing at first, but its deeper effect is to suggest a deliberate expression of empathy on the part of the author, who makes careful choices about how to shape the story of her character. It is an empathy that powerfully draws the reader into Evelyn’s experiences and into the life of the small rural Texas community in which she lives. It pays homage to Evelyn, expresses solidarity with marginalized white women from small rural towns, performs a sophisticated act of sisterhood.
The novel is also deeply about community and place. Set in rural Texas from 1909, when Evelyn is born, to the middle of the 1950s, it makes vivid the way in which country neighbors, and especially men, need each other to survive and prosper — they mend fences together, butcher cattle, and maintain communal fishing docks. Rural people, and especially women, need family, as well, for a sense of belonging. And it is the power of these needs that accounts for the way in which families and communities so easily impose traditional habits of mind and action on those who live within them.
Violence, for example, which Harris’s roots historically in the settler’s early wars with Native Americans, is so deeply ingrained a tradition in this rural southern world that it seems like nature itself. Hence the title of the novel, Mayhem, alludes not only to castration, the focus of the book’s central dramatic action, “a willful and permanent deprivation of a bodily member resulting in the impairment of a person’s fighting ability,” but also to the “needless or willful damage or violence” that is a part of everyday life for men and women both.
It is mainly white men who damage, and damage each other, largely to prove they are men according to the community’s code. White men must be richer, more skilled in enacting status than other males. They must take revenge for perceived insults or threats, and, above all, they must control their women.
It is not a good life for white men, who direct male coalitional violence against each other — a group of men, turned vigilantes, lynch a white man, one of their own, who is suspected of stealing. Men who are victimized can become subjects of local stories too. Such is the fate of the young man hanged from on an old oak tree, the menacing roots of which seem to appear on the novel’s cover. There are traces of racial violence here as well, largely alluded to in memories of people once enslaved, but the book is on another trail.
It is white men’s need to prove their manhood, often through violence against each other, that makes control of women so essential, since controlling females is a form of asserting masculine superiority. And control of women, especially wives, is the one thing white men can agree on in this novel. This need for control shapes the whole course of female experience in rural Texas. Evelyn expects nothing more of life than to get married and become a good, obedient wife, taking small pleasures where she finds them–in the smell of clean sheets and clothing and in organizing her time and her household chores. She also quietly endures martial sex, such as it is: “. . . it was over so quickly.” And she reflects on how “a woman’s fate and that of her children was determined by the man she married.”
When Les Gant, Evelyn’s husband, refuses to believe that a ne’er-do-well neighbor, Charlie, is making sexual advances to his wife, as she has claimed, when he angrily insists that Evelyn maintain his fishing lines at the pond where Charlie hangs out, he engages in an act of male bonding that is specifically aimed at discrediting Evelyn’s assertions — and the assertions of wives in general.
And so, the inevitable happens. Charlie approaches Evelyn and whines to let him “put it in you.” He has a knife, so Evelyn agrees, and though Charlie fails to complete the act, Les, seeing them through the screen of the communal fishing cabin, assumes otherwise. He takes off after Charlie, ultimately slicing off one of Charlie’s testicles with Charlie’s own knife.
The greater violence, however, is enacted against Evelyn — for being the “cause” of this crime. She becomes a pariah, a woman reduced to a false story, a woman who loses her place and her identity in life, except that Harris refuses to end her character’s tale there. Instead, Harris gives Evelyn a hunger to live and the strength to make a new beginning. Evelyn’s gradual and limited healing, in the life Harris has created for her, implies the possibility of partial recovery from the violence of the past and, more than that, suggests the bigger story of female compassion for, and interventions on behalf of, other women.
An arresting story about an ordinary woman, about the inner life of small communities, and about the dynamics of rural southern culture — so important now in the political sphere — the quietly insightful and beautifully written Mayhem intrigues and enlightens.
Thus begins Elizabeth Harris’s elegantly written novel Mayhem about a frankly fictional female, Evelyn Kunkle Gant, whose imagined life story suggests how women, in particular, can be reduced to oft-repeated caricatures such as “the adulterous wife,” a woman on whose account a crime was committed that “made men cross their legs.” This is the kind of story that often attached itself to “a category of able-bodied white women who ‘lived in’ and took care of invalid old people. . . Stories of wrong clung to these women . . . .” And the author, who makes herself a character in the novel at times, has grown up with them in a small rural town in Texas. Always curious in her youth about their lives, Harris feels she is “just a college degree and a few decades of change” from having been one of them.
And so Harris tells her own story about this woman named Evelyn, giving her a fuller life than the stereotype of the “woman taken in adultery” can possibly do. Harris speaks for Evelyn, on her behalf, telling her “secret” for her, and she gives her character “a feeling for everything she has lost to this local immortality.” Harris speculates that Evelyn may dwell upon her losses “to remain a person in her own world, understanding that she has already become a character in a local story.”
Harris’s emphasis upon the fictional nature of Evelyn’s tale might seem distancing at first, but its deeper effect is to suggest a deliberate expression of empathy on the part of the author, who makes careful choices about how to shape the story of her character. It is an empathy that powerfully draws the reader into Evelyn’s experiences and into the life of the small rural Texas community in which she lives. It pays homage to Evelyn, expresses solidarity with marginalized white women from small rural towns, performs a sophisticated act of sisterhood.
The novel is also deeply about community and place. Set in rural Texas from 1909, when Evelyn is born, to the middle of the 1950s, it makes vivid the way in which country neighbors, and especially men, need each other to survive and prosper — they mend fences together, butcher cattle, and maintain communal fishing docks. Rural people, and especially women, need family, as well, for a sense of belonging. And it is the power of these needs that accounts for the way in which families and communities so easily impose traditional habits of mind and action on those who live within them.
Violence, for example, which Harris’s roots historically in the settler’s early wars with Native Americans, is so deeply ingrained a tradition in this rural southern world that it seems like nature itself. Hence the title of the novel, Mayhem, alludes not only to castration, the focus of the book’s central dramatic action, “a willful and permanent deprivation of a bodily member resulting in the impairment of a person’s fighting ability,” but also to the “needless or willful damage or violence” that is a part of everyday life for men and women both.
It is mainly white men who damage, and damage each other, largely to prove they are men according to the community’s code. White men must be richer, more skilled in enacting status than other males. They must take revenge for perceived insults or threats, and, above all, they must control their women.
It is not a good life for white men, who direct male coalitional violence against each other — a group of men, turned vigilantes, lynch a white man, one of their own, who is suspected of stealing. Men who are victimized can become subjects of local stories too. Such is the fate of the young man hanged from on an old oak tree, the menacing roots of which seem to appear on the novel’s cover. There are traces of racial violence here as well, largely alluded to in memories of people once enslaved, but the book is on another trail.
It is white men’s need to prove their manhood, often through violence against each other, that makes control of women so essential, since controlling females is a form of asserting masculine superiority. And control of women, especially wives, is the one thing white men can agree on in this novel. This need for control shapes the whole course of female experience in rural Texas. Evelyn expects nothing more of life than to get married and become a good, obedient wife, taking small pleasures where she finds them–in the smell of clean sheets and clothing and in organizing her time and her household chores. She also quietly endures martial sex, such as it is: “. . . it was over so quickly.” And she reflects on how “a woman’s fate and that of her children was determined by the man she married.”
When Les Gant, Evelyn’s husband, refuses to believe that a ne’er-do-well neighbor, Charlie, is making sexual advances to his wife, as she has claimed, when he angrily insists that Evelyn maintain his fishing lines at the pond where Charlie hangs out, he engages in an act of male bonding that is specifically aimed at discrediting Evelyn’s assertions — and the assertions of wives in general.
And so, the inevitable happens. Charlie approaches Evelyn and whines to let him “put it in you.” He has a knife, so Evelyn agrees, and though Charlie fails to complete the act, Les, seeing them through the screen of the communal fishing cabin, assumes otherwise. He takes off after Charlie, ultimately slicing off one of Charlie’s testicles with Charlie’s own knife.
The greater violence, however, is enacted against Evelyn — for being the “cause” of this crime. She becomes a pariah, a woman reduced to a false story, a woman who loses her place and her identity in life, except that Harris refuses to end her character’s tale there. Instead, Harris gives Evelyn a hunger to live and the strength to make a new beginning. Evelyn’s gradual and limited healing, in the life Harris has created for her, implies the possibility of partial recovery from the violence of the past and, more than that, suggests the bigger story of female compassion for, and interventions on behalf of, other women.
An arresting story about an ordinary woman, about the inner life of small communities, and about the dynamics of rural southern culture — so important now in the political sphere — the quietly insightful and beautifully written Mayhem intrigues and enlightens.
March 15, 2015
Fiction
Elizabeth Harris
Mayhem: Three Lives of a Woman
Arlington, VA: Gival Press
Paperback, 9781940724003; ebook, 9781940724010
Page count and price TBA
October 5, 2015
Mayhem: Three Lives of a Woman by Elizabeth Harris, winner of the 2014 Gival Press Novel Award, is unconventional historical fiction spanning the years from the 1920s to the 1950s in a fictional Central Texas settled by German immigrants in the nineteenth century. Alternating between delighting you with pastoral descriptions of the Hill Country, lulling you with sepia-toned portraits of the good ol’ days, and smacking you in the face with the gender, race, and class conventions (convictions? crimes?) of the period, Mayhem is a surprising blend of plot-driven crime story, character study, and social critique.
The story begins as Evelyn, chief witness and “adulterous” (define, please) wife of Les Gant, arrives at the criminal trial of her husband and his brother Marvin. The charge? Castrating a neighbor. Yep, you heard me. The narrator notes it’s “[t]he kind of crime an angry person says he or she would like to commit against some particular man so much more often than anybody ever does it that, in the allegation of its having been done, language seems to have been released to become an actor in the world.” But this horror is not the point of Mayhem; the horror is why? And the point is what next? The answers to why are at once devastating and prosaic. The answers to what next involve an approximation of justice that isn’t altogether satisfying. But how could it be?
Fittingly, I read Mayhem on International Women’s Day. I was immediately enchanted by the sensibility of the nameless, omniscient narrator and tour guide. Her sardonic humor is welcome in this devastating story. “Iron Rock society comprises not only the living but several generations of dead, and these, although incapable of opinion, are not so dead as in some places.” Biting commentary takes aim at the social hierarchies and pretensions of the Old South, toted to the frontier along with more perishable goods.
A place where, as the white men’s law scrabbled for a hold, it was still a day’s ride away…. So the suspects of crimes might be punished by the victims instead, or their survivors, in a tradition of personal and approximate justice we now call barbaric. The arrivals of telegraph and railroad might have changed the need for that but only in one understanding of need.
Elizabeth Harris’s word choices are impeccable. This is how she introduces us to Evelyn:
She is … the trial’s most intriguing spectacle, the cause of it all, the modest, obedient, well regarded woman taken in adultery. People think of her in that phrase, out of its context except as it explains her being sheltered by Sister and Brother White of Iron Rock First Baptist, a charitable act possible because no Baptists are parties to the trial.
You’ll think you know where Mayhem is headed and you will want to holler and point and grab someone by the shoulders and just shake them. When you decide you know where this is going, Evelyn hijacks the plot. It’s not what you think it is – it’s better.
Review originally published by Lone Star Literary Life.
Elizabeth Harris
Mayhem: Three Lives of a Woman
Arlington, VA: Gival Press
Paperback, 9781940724003; ebook, 9781940724010
Page count and price TBA
October 5, 2015
Mayhem: Three Lives of a Woman by Elizabeth Harris, winner of the 2014 Gival Press Novel Award, is unconventional historical fiction spanning the years from the 1920s to the 1950s in a fictional Central Texas settled by German immigrants in the nineteenth century. Alternating between delighting you with pastoral descriptions of the Hill Country, lulling you with sepia-toned portraits of the good ol’ days, and smacking you in the face with the gender, race, and class conventions (convictions? crimes?) of the period, Mayhem is a surprising blend of plot-driven crime story, character study, and social critique.
The story begins as Evelyn, chief witness and “adulterous” (define, please) wife of Les Gant, arrives at the criminal trial of her husband and his brother Marvin. The charge? Castrating a neighbor. Yep, you heard me. The narrator notes it’s “[t]he kind of crime an angry person says he or she would like to commit against some particular man so much more often than anybody ever does it that, in the allegation of its having been done, language seems to have been released to become an actor in the world.” But this horror is not the point of Mayhem; the horror is why? And the point is what next? The answers to why are at once devastating and prosaic. The answers to what next involve an approximation of justice that isn’t altogether satisfying. But how could it be?
Fittingly, I read Mayhem on International Women’s Day. I was immediately enchanted by the sensibility of the nameless, omniscient narrator and tour guide. Her sardonic humor is welcome in this devastating story. “Iron Rock society comprises not only the living but several generations of dead, and these, although incapable of opinion, are not so dead as in some places.” Biting commentary takes aim at the social hierarchies and pretensions of the Old South, toted to the frontier along with more perishable goods.
A place where, as the white men’s law scrabbled for a hold, it was still a day’s ride away…. So the suspects of crimes might be punished by the victims instead, or their survivors, in a tradition of personal and approximate justice we now call barbaric. The arrivals of telegraph and railroad might have changed the need for that but only in one understanding of need.
Elizabeth Harris’s word choices are impeccable. This is how she introduces us to Evelyn:
She is … the trial’s most intriguing spectacle, the cause of it all, the modest, obedient, well regarded woman taken in adultery. People think of her in that phrase, out of its context except as it explains her being sheltered by Sister and Brother White of Iron Rock First Baptist, a charitable act possible because no Baptists are parties to the trial.
You’ll think you know where Mayhem is headed and you will want to holler and point and grab someone by the shoulders and just shake them. When you decide you know where this is going, Evelyn hijacks the plot. It’s not what you think it is – it’s better.
Review originally published by Lone Star Literary Life.
August 16, 2016
I have never before read a book like Mayhem, and it’s nearly impossible to describe what sets it apart. Reading it is like opening a set of nesting dolls, one after the other, never quite knowing which doll will be the last in the set. When you finally get to that last doll in the set, despite knowing it’s coming, there is still some surprise. This is Mayhem.
Initially, I had some trouble getting into the cadence of the writing, and I found that I was in turn frustrated and delighted by it. This book requires patience and focus, but the rewards are richly detailed passages and an intricate, imaginative story – which is encased by another intricate, imaginative story . . . and possibly encased once more. For those readers who like novels to fit into nice, neat boxes: good luck. In Mayhem, Author Elizabeth Harris provides historical literary speculative crime fiction with contemporary issues.
One element which makes this book fascinating is the narrator, who speaks directly to the reader and readily provides spoilers and confesses to making-up parts of the story. Ah, but which parts are fiction and which parts are truth is often left for the reader to discern. Main character Evelyn is real enough, as are her trials and tribulations of playing the role of a wife and woman adhering to societal rules and expectations in the early 20th century. Also real enough are the consequences of adhering too much or not enough to the rules.
Something about Harris’s writing reminded me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Perhaps it was the build-up and the grand unraveling? Or the blurry line of reality and remembered reality. In any case, Mayhem: Three Lives of a Woman lingers and its events keep tumbling around in the brain, begging to be re-visited.
Thank you to Lone Star Book Blog Tours for providing me a print copy in exchange for my honest review -- the only kind I give. Read full post with additional features on Hall Ways Blog http://kristinehallways.blogspot.com/...
Initially, I had some trouble getting into the cadence of the writing, and I found that I was in turn frustrated and delighted by it. This book requires patience and focus, but the rewards are richly detailed passages and an intricate, imaginative story – which is encased by another intricate, imaginative story . . . and possibly encased once more. For those readers who like novels to fit into nice, neat boxes: good luck. In Mayhem, Author Elizabeth Harris provides historical literary speculative crime fiction with contemporary issues.
One element which makes this book fascinating is the narrator, who speaks directly to the reader and readily provides spoilers and confesses to making-up parts of the story. Ah, but which parts are fiction and which parts are truth is often left for the reader to discern. Main character Evelyn is real enough, as are her trials and tribulations of playing the role of a wife and woman adhering to societal rules and expectations in the early 20th century. Also real enough are the consequences of adhering too much or not enough to the rules.
Something about Harris’s writing reminded me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Perhaps it was the build-up and the grand unraveling? Or the blurry line of reality and remembered reality. In any case, Mayhem: Three Lives of a Woman lingers and its events keep tumbling around in the brain, begging to be re-visited.
Thank you to Lone Star Book Blog Tours for providing me a print copy in exchange for my honest review -- the only kind I give. Read full post with additional features on Hall Ways Blog http://kristinehallways.blogspot.com/...
March 29, 2015
Originally published in New York Journal of Books
http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-...
This is a book you have to slow down and pay attention to, because there’s a lot going on. Layers of story. Complex characterization. Rich details of time and place.
The title is our guide to what to expect: mayhem. But it’s not the loud and drastic kind; rather, except for one event, it’s the insidious kind that arises from breaking the rules of a strict society.
During the early 1900s in southern Texas, a tight group of German immigrants brings its lifestyles and ethics with them to build new lives in a new land. One of their cultural imperatives is, “What people think of you, and your family, matters.”
Oh, how it does. Part of this concept is everyone has their place, including woman, whose job is to be submissive helpmeet and breeder. The depersonalization of woman into voiceless property is what causes this sad tale.
Evelyn Gant, a compliant and nurturing person, attempts to communicate to her husband that another man is giving her problems of a threateningly sexual nature. The husband dismisses her concerns, until the day when things go too far and she is irrevocably compromised—and the husband takes revenge in “a crime whose mention makes men cross their legs.”
The author, who participates in the story as a nameless narrator between alternating characters’ viewpoints, sneaks us up to this crime. Most people in contemporary America are familiar with stories of rape and retribution—violent to begin with and violent to the end.
In this case, the first crime is coercive but nonviolent and much less appalling than the punishment. What the woman’s violation means is more important than what actually happens to her. The prosecutable crime comes from another man’s revenge, and its fallout poisons the community. As Evelyn marvels, “how much has followed from how little.”
But because of it, “when she ceased to be his wife, she had ceased to exist,” giving her nowhere to go and no one to be.
Although Mayhem is her story, she seems more like a figurehead for the real story, which is the backstory. It is presented as a tapestry showing that this happened because all that happened, but you have to know it all in order to understand the one thing that changed everything.
The trigger event is about “that few seconds of a thing in a hole that male animals lived for and women were stuck trying to regulate. Because of babies. Because people believed a woman’s honor resided at the entrance of that hole. Because—there was another reason, but in the growing roar all civilization seemed to have broken down and she could not think what it was.”
Each scene of the narrative is built around day-to-day tasks, capturing simple yet compelling moments that bring alive the setting and period. Sometimes it gets confusing, because there are so many generations and relations and viewpoint changes and tense switches. Evelyn is offstage for chunks of the book, making it difficult to know who or what to focus on.
But that’s our cue we’re in a story about family and culture as well as the person who is a product and victim thereof. She feels like an iceberg tip in a dark and stormy sea.
Mayhem is an old story of injustice brought creatively to new life by an award-winning writer. Thoughtful readers who enjoy literary historical fiction will add it to their must-read list.
http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-...
This is a book you have to slow down and pay attention to, because there’s a lot going on. Layers of story. Complex characterization. Rich details of time and place.
The title is our guide to what to expect: mayhem. But it’s not the loud and drastic kind; rather, except for one event, it’s the insidious kind that arises from breaking the rules of a strict society.
During the early 1900s in southern Texas, a tight group of German immigrants brings its lifestyles and ethics with them to build new lives in a new land. One of their cultural imperatives is, “What people think of you, and your family, matters.”
Oh, how it does. Part of this concept is everyone has their place, including woman, whose job is to be submissive helpmeet and breeder. The depersonalization of woman into voiceless property is what causes this sad tale.
Evelyn Gant, a compliant and nurturing person, attempts to communicate to her husband that another man is giving her problems of a threateningly sexual nature. The husband dismisses her concerns, until the day when things go too far and she is irrevocably compromised—and the husband takes revenge in “a crime whose mention makes men cross their legs.”
The author, who participates in the story as a nameless narrator between alternating characters’ viewpoints, sneaks us up to this crime. Most people in contemporary America are familiar with stories of rape and retribution—violent to begin with and violent to the end.
In this case, the first crime is coercive but nonviolent and much less appalling than the punishment. What the woman’s violation means is more important than what actually happens to her. The prosecutable crime comes from another man’s revenge, and its fallout poisons the community. As Evelyn marvels, “how much has followed from how little.”
But because of it, “when she ceased to be his wife, she had ceased to exist,” giving her nowhere to go and no one to be.
Although Mayhem is her story, she seems more like a figurehead for the real story, which is the backstory. It is presented as a tapestry showing that this happened because all that happened, but you have to know it all in order to understand the one thing that changed everything.
The trigger event is about “that few seconds of a thing in a hole that male animals lived for and women were stuck trying to regulate. Because of babies. Because people believed a woman’s honor resided at the entrance of that hole. Because—there was another reason, but in the growing roar all civilization seemed to have broken down and she could not think what it was.”
Each scene of the narrative is built around day-to-day tasks, capturing simple yet compelling moments that bring alive the setting and period. Sometimes it gets confusing, because there are so many generations and relations and viewpoint changes and tense switches. Evelyn is offstage for chunks of the book, making it difficult to know who or what to focus on.
But that’s our cue we’re in a story about family and culture as well as the person who is a product and victim thereof. She feels like an iceberg tip in a dark and stormy sea.
Mayhem is an old story of injustice brought creatively to new life by an award-winning writer. Thoughtful readers who enjoy literary historical fiction will add it to their must-read list.
October 8, 2015
Mayhem
By Elizabeth Harris
2015
Reviewed by Angie Mangino
Rating: 5 stars
http://elizabethharriswriter.com/events
Evelyn Kunkle was born in 1909, married Lester Gant, Jr. in 1927, and lived in Central Texas. Immediately the author introduces readers to her.
“A young woman climbing out of an old Essex in a cloche hat and a flowered maroon rummage sale dress in front of the Prince Carl County courthouse, that’s what some observers will remember – and everything they knew about her at the time.”
Readers, however, will be privy to the different lives destiny required of her. First she lives the life of a prominent landowner’s daughter. Next, she lives as a respected married woman. Finally, she is an outcast, becoming a paid laborer in other people’s homes, surviving by holding within herself the summation of all three lives.
The writing style and dialogue seeped in the time and location transports readers to her historical time, giving an understanding of radically different societal norms than now, allowing for better understanding of her plight.
Readers bond with Evelyn as her story absorbs them. Like this reviewer, they may cry out in defense of her, wanting to save her from the rigid, patriarchal environment. It is this very personal desire to defend her that illustrates the author’s skill in making the fictional characters so very real. Evelyn’s story will stay with readers after they finish this well-crafted historical novel.
Angie Mangino currently works as a freelance journalist and book reviewer, additionally offering authors personalized critique service of unpublished manuscripts. http://www.angiemangino.com
By Elizabeth Harris
2015
Reviewed by Angie Mangino
Rating: 5 stars
http://elizabethharriswriter.com/events
Evelyn Kunkle was born in 1909, married Lester Gant, Jr. in 1927, and lived in Central Texas. Immediately the author introduces readers to her.
“A young woman climbing out of an old Essex in a cloche hat and a flowered maroon rummage sale dress in front of the Prince Carl County courthouse, that’s what some observers will remember – and everything they knew about her at the time.”
Readers, however, will be privy to the different lives destiny required of her. First she lives the life of a prominent landowner’s daughter. Next, she lives as a respected married woman. Finally, she is an outcast, becoming a paid laborer in other people’s homes, surviving by holding within herself the summation of all three lives.
The writing style and dialogue seeped in the time and location transports readers to her historical time, giving an understanding of radically different societal norms than now, allowing for better understanding of her plight.
Readers bond with Evelyn as her story absorbs them. Like this reviewer, they may cry out in defense of her, wanting to save her from the rigid, patriarchal environment. It is this very personal desire to defend her that illustrates the author’s skill in making the fictional characters so very real. Evelyn’s story will stay with readers after they finish this well-crafted historical novel.
Angie Mangino currently works as a freelance journalist and book reviewer, additionally offering authors personalized critique service of unpublished manuscripts. http://www.angiemangino.com
November 18, 2015
A deeply layered book, and one that I would tend to characterize as a writer's book. There are strains of Italo Calvino running through it. For all that it is framed as historical fiction, there is a distinct postmodern voice throughout...which, in a way, reflects the pastiche of a narrator telling a story she has been told, but who also acknowledges that she is also a fictional creation.
The technique wavers; at times, incredibly powerful with the opportunity for insight. At others, a feeling of a falseness -- almost too contrived. This is, I think, what makes it a book by a writer for writers, because it is as much a study of technique. An étude, if you will, that will appeal to some and become burdensome to others. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it makes it the sort of book that people will recommend to each other, rather than one you'll pick up by chance at a bookstore. And maybe, given the way the story is framed, that's as it should be.
Note: I was sent an uncorrected proof for the review; no other compensation received.
The technique wavers; at times, incredibly powerful with the opportunity for insight. At others, a feeling of a falseness -- almost too contrived. This is, I think, what makes it a book by a writer for writers, because it is as much a study of technique. An étude, if you will, that will appeal to some and become burdensome to others. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it makes it the sort of book that people will recommend to each other, rather than one you'll pick up by chance at a bookstore. And maybe, given the way the story is framed, that's as it should be.
Note: I was sent an uncorrected proof for the review; no other compensation received.
September 8, 2016
I have never read a book quite like Mayhem. It started off a bit intimidating with the introduction of so many separate families and how they each played a role in each others life. I was scared how I was going to keep track of them all. Some were not so friendly to one another and it explained how they kept their distance from each other and some made a point to even marry into families to keep the neighborly respect.
This story was told in the past tense, which is my least favorite point of view. In my opinion the author can not pour out their heart as easily, which as a result has the story feeling a bit more distanced. I did enjoy in this novel the use of the authors' sporadic first person opinions and insight thrown in to point out foreshadowing instances and give us warnings as the story unfolded.
A few chapters into the story, it starts to really reel you in, pun intended, as the daily chore of bringing in the fishing line seems to be assigned permanently to Evelyn, the obstacle in the story is introduced. The rest is history as once the hook is set, you are a goner. The story flew by after the introductions and it was hard to put the book down. This was a great, short novel and entertaining to be put back into that time frame and experience the characters morales and trepidations.
This story was told in the past tense, which is my least favorite point of view. In my opinion the author can not pour out their heart as easily, which as a result has the story feeling a bit more distanced. I did enjoy in this novel the use of the authors' sporadic first person opinions and insight thrown in to point out foreshadowing instances and give us warnings as the story unfolded.
A few chapters into the story, it starts to really reel you in, pun intended, as the daily chore of bringing in the fishing line seems to be assigned permanently to Evelyn, the obstacle in the story is introduced. The rest is history as once the hook is set, you are a goner. The story flew by after the introductions and it was hard to put the book down. This was a great, short novel and entertaining to be put back into that time frame and experience the characters morales and trepidations.
May 17, 2016
Interesting writing style, capturing the dialect of another era. Also, the author actually speaks as herself a few times in the midst of the story. The characters are well-representative of many Texas farm communities. The plot line pictures the stark reality of how very different the roles and viewpoints of men and women were in the twenties and thirties. The subordination of women is at the forefront of the writing. However, the key event, a split-second lapse of judgment, presents a timeless example of Life turning on a dime, inalterably changing the course of several lives.
November 20, 2015
I just finished MAYHEM and am still breathless. So many things to be impressed by: the author’s detailed and evocative depiction of 1930s Texas, characters who ring completely true for their time and place, the way she depicts the multiple ramifications of actions and decisions -- including those that, in the making, didn't rise to the level of conscious choice.
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July 31, 2017Elizabeth Harris (MM 1965), Author
From the author:
A post-modern novel with a historical setting, *Mayhem: Three Lives of a Woman* (2015), dramatizes a series of gender crimes beginning in 1936, committed against the daughter of German-American settlers in Central Texas, the wife, later ex-wife, of a prominent stock farmer. Blamed for a violent crime she witnesses, she becomes a pariah in the community and makes the new life that she can. Winner of the Gival Press Award, Finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters Jesse Jones Best Fiction Award.
From the author:
A post-modern novel with a historical setting, *Mayhem: Three Lives of a Woman* (2015), dramatizes a series of gender crimes beginning in 1936, committed against the daughter of German-American settlers in Central Texas, the wife, later ex-wife, of a prominent stock farmer. Blamed for a violent crime she witnesses, she becomes a pariah in the community and makes the new life that she can. Winner of the Gival Press Award, Finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters Jesse Jones Best Fiction Award.
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