'Vera,' by Carol Edgarian book review
“For fifteen years I’d been waiting for a catastrophe greater than my birth,” says the eponymous protagonist of Carol Edgarian’s new novel “Vera.” “The quake gave it to me.” By “the quake” Vera means the devastating San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Vera, at 15, feels like most things revolve around her experience, including this disaster. She has a flair for the dramatic. Brought up by Swedish widow Morie (a diminutive for “mor,” or mother) alongside her stepsister Pie (for Piper), Vera has always known that her biological mother is notorious brothelkeeper Madame Rose, with whom she has intermittent contact.
Vera takes readers on a necessarily brief tour of her prosperous, thriving West Coast city. She and Pie negotiate steep streets to visit their friend Eugenie Schmitz, daughter of the mayor, and to head for open spaces away from their shabby home on Francisco Street. In the early 20th century, the City by the Bay is home to great beauty, great riches — and great crime. On a trip to Chinatown with Rose’s major-domo, Tan, Vera gets a close look at the violence the local Tong clans inflict on those who cross them.
Rose summons Vera, Pie and Morie to her grand house at the apex of Pacific Heights one night to gift them gowns and tickets to see the famous Italian tenor Enrico Caruso. She has a reason for this generosity, one that will entangle Vera in citywide corruption. First, though, the earthquake. “It was the sound of the earth breaking,” Vera tells us. “Forty-five seconds is an eternity. Time it, if you don’t believe me.” In a matter of seconds, San Francisco is in ruins, and so is life for Vera and Pie.
Eventually, the girls make their way back to Rose’s mansion, a gaudy exemplar of a Painted Lady Victorian. When we’re hearing about Vera’s experiences, the book races along, even more so when we’re meeting other catastrophe survivors. There’s Bobby Del Monte, whose enormous horse Monster helps effect a rescue, and Tan’s aloof daughter, Lifang, plus “the girls” who camp out at Rose’s mansion. Vera’s post-disaster education includes plenty of historical characters. We see city residents lining up, trading wine for soup, or some precious water for a teacup. Vera confesses that from then on, “the only folks I could ever care about would be fellow scrappers.”
While the history strikes an authentic note, some of the narrative rings hollow. We care about Vera and her companions, but a subplot about urban graft doesn’t add much to the story, even when Vera’s path crosses with those of real-life pols Abe Ruef and Mayor Eugene Schmitz. Too much happens too near the end in a novel whose spiky, proto-feminist heroine should have been given more space to absorb the one lesson her mother imparts: “I know you because I know me. . . you do not fit in. You never will.”
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Vera doesn’t quite fit the usual parameters for a heroine of historical fiction, but perhaps that’s why she makes such an arresting narrator. Readers looking for one of those, plus a new perspective on the Great Quake, will find them in this novel.
Bethanne Patrickis the editor, most recently, of “The Books That Changed My Life: Reflections by 100 Authors, Actors, Musicians and Other Remarkable People.”
Vera
By Carol Edgarian
Scribner. 336 pp. $27
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