History lesson trumps story

MYLA Goldberg knows people. She knows what makes them flinch and what makes them blush, and she knows about those rare implosions of joy that make all that flinching and blushing bearable. She knows that people usually aren’t as they seem, that you have to peel away that first deceptive layer if you want to see what is really there. The skill with which she conveyed this, combined with her determination to keep on peeling, to the point of rawness if necessary, is what made her first novel, “Bee Season,” so compelling.

She may have allowed us to burrow into virtually every emotional nook and cranny of “Bee Season’s” unhappy modern-day Jewish American family with a spelling bee champion daughter at its center, but she keeps us at a mostly polite distance from the characters in her ambitious new novel, “Wickett’s Remedy.”

Set in Boston during the deadly 1918 Spanish influenza epidemic, “Wickett’s Remedy” tells the story of Lydia, a young Irish American woman who wants so much more than to awaken each morning to the vegetable man hawking his wares. As we follow her from shopgirl to genteel wife to inadvertent nurse, we find ourselves immersed in the sights, sounds and stenches of a pandemic that killed more Americans in 10 months than in all the wars of the 20th century combined.

Goldberg’s descriptions of a city under siege are often breathtaking, and her most fully realized character turns out not to be a person but the epidemic itself and the panic and dread that surrounded it. The all-pervasive presence takes on form and substance in a way that most of the people who populate “Wickett’s Remedy” never quite get the chance to do.

This may be due to the fact Goldberg has simply taken on too much. The pages are crowded with numerous devices that run through and alongside the narrative, including a chorus of the dead in the book’s margins who can’t resist setting the record straight on the characters, and excerpts from the newsletter of a soft drink empire. Some readers may welcome all this peripheral activity, but many will come away with a feeling of being fed too much of what they’re not hungry for and too little of what they are.

Take the remedy of the title. A pleasant-tasting placebo concocted by Lydia’s husband, Henry Wickett, a delicate young man who quit medical school to follow his entrepreneurial dreams, the mail-order elixir was “designed to lift the spirits and improve the outlook” of those suffering a range of woes, including rheumatism, ungrateful spouses and cats who shed out of season. The wonderful and utterly plausible part is that the healing power of the remedy lies not within the bottles but in Henry’s thoughtful and elegantly scripted “pale blue letters of hope” that accompany the orders. “The dyspeptic stomach is like a child, longing for Mama’s comfort,” he writes in one. “Be kind and patient and feed it wholesome foods.”

There is so much we could glean about the times from Henry’s clients and from his responses to them -- but Goldberg barely touches on the letters, choosing instead to move on to other story lines and focusing on the perspective of the characters who hover in the margins. The result is that when an unscrupulous ex-business partner steals the recipe and uses it to create a soft drink empire, our sense of outrage is diluted.

At times it almost feels as if this book is written by two people, so varied is the style of Goldberg’s prose. On the one hand we have the woodenly formal “Lydia was not swayed by the argument, but could not bring herself to oppose Henry’s potential liberation from the drudgery of the import trade should the fellow’s unlikely plan work.” And then we have this description of a man’s hand: “She remembered his palms being unshaped by any sort of work but now saw this was no longer the case: on his writing finger, just below the top knuckle of the left middle finger, was a single callus.” When read in an age of e-mail and instant messaging, the detail of that callus almost breaks your heart.

In the end one is left with the sense that Goldberg has sacrificed some of her natural storytelling gifts in an attempt to bring to life a tragic slice of history. Readers wanting to learn about the epidemic will not be disappointed, but those who were looking for more of what they experienced in “Bee Season” probably will be.

Brigid Brett is a columnist for San Diego’s North County Times.