The LitWit Review: Enchantments viewed as a Sofia Coppola project
Periodically we ask readers to review recently-published books. This week’s review is by lestat.
Enchantments, from the author of Poison, Exposure and The Binding Chair
Kathryn Harrison’s Enchantments is the kind of novel best imagined as a movie, produced, written and most importantly, scored with music selected by Sofia Coppola. Because who else would you trust to turn historical fiction into a film about very young people in very adult situations?
It will be perfect. Harrison, like Coppola, has a knack for making privileged subjects seem much more sympathetic than they probably deserve. What Coppola did for teen royalty Marie Antoinette of the lavish parties and pastries, she could do to the Faberge egg-hoarding Romanov children. Sofia Coppola could probably do a Paris Hilton biopic and make her seem sympathetic. Harrison and Coppola are both able to shed the irony in the expression ‘poor little rich girls’ as they are capable of making affluent, attractive people seem like losers deserving of the warmest wishes of the less gifted.
Tsarkoe Selo, country residence of Russian emperors
The novel begins in 1917, towards the end of the Romanov imperial dynasty, as poor Tsar Nikolay Alexandrovich and family await their horrible fate. Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin’s daughter Masha, the storyteller, is to be shipped off to the palace of the imperial family in Tsarskoe Selo with her sister Varya. It’s not exactly the kind of life an 18-year old wishes for herself but if your father is Rasputin and he orders you to live with the royal family, you don’t get to say no. Being the bearer of his unfortunate surname, Masha is believed to have the same healing powers as her father. She is ordained to live with and magically heal the haemophiliac Tsarevich Alyosha, Tsar Nikolay’s only son, and she will do it, god damn it, even though her passion lies not in the medical sciences but in the art of taming animals.
In this thankless trip, Masha ruminates on the death of her father Rasputin—mad monk and alleged sex machine, before she plunges into the impossible role of haemophilia healer. As she soon finds, living with royalty is not easy. There’s the quietly imposing mother, the Tsarina Alexandra, and the royal sisters called OTMA—a cute acronym for Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, to deal with. With the memory of her father’s murder looming over her, Masha’s experience is not unlike being sent to war armed only with rusty bread knives. How is a poor girl from a Siberian province supposed to deal? By making up stories, fictionalizing people’s histories, adding a touch of drama to the lives of people.
Historical fiction is normally cause for the proverbial nosebleed. It sets off snide remarks about how history blended with fiction is for housewives and/or grandmothers with time on their hands. But Enchantments is really a tale of teens.
It’s also a tale of very familiar people, and it’s quite a treat seeing people you know in these Romanovs. Amusing to realize your mother-in-law is not so unique, as she is in fact embodied by Tsarina Alexandra’s very own mother-in-law, Marie Fyodorovna. And Harrison, like Coppola, has an unmistakable fondness for her female characters. She loves them too much to give them dialogue less biting than “What is it about the English? They simply can’t, or won’t speak anything but English, not comprehensibly anyway. No matter how many far-flung colonies they claim, they remain provincial. They insist on seeing every acre as another opportunity to replicate their Englishness.”
Or when talking about her potential daughter-in-law, she has only the choicest things to say: “She can’t dance, can’t smile, can’t make conversation. And she certainly can’t preside over the Russian court with that…that…that preposterous emanation, or whatever you call it, over her head. I can’t abide it when a person insists on making her unhappiness everyone else’s burden.” This woman can go big or small; she is very delightful.
Also familiar is the hopeful mother, Alexandra Fyodorovna, whose biggest handicap is that she is not, or refuses to be, a phony for the Russian court. She wouldn’t rehearse witticisms and repeat risqué anecdotes in the service of social graces. She will not ingratiate herself with Russian nobility even if it means being spared from the vicious barbs of Marie. Just like Kirsten Dunst’s Marie Antoinette in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette! But bullheadedness has an expiration date, and it’s nearer when you’re deep in the royal tradition. You’re lying if you claim you’ve never heard of a mother figure in a similar situation.
The novel not so curiously focuses on the budding friendship between Masha and the prince Alyosha. It’s a friendship based on a shared sense of doom, which is one of the sweetest reasons to form one if you think about it. Like The Virgin Suicides’s Lisbon girls, the OTMA girls go through their unique brand of adolescent yearning: to tinker peacefully with their crystal eggs in the comfort of their palatial home, to be spared from execution. A quick trip to your history books will tell you all you need to know about the Romanovs and their unhappy fates. What you won’t get is the more fanciful, more vibrant, living version of the events.
What you won’t get is the strange urge to feel sorry for these affluent kids and their royal parents. You may know how it’s all supposed to end, but you would wish for a Disney kind of ending anyway. If you want the Sofia Coppola version, here it is. As is customary, Kirsten Dunst could play the young and old Masha.
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