Reviewed by Hubert O’Hearn
As a work of historical research, Marina Endicott’s The Little Shadows is impressive. As a detailed narrative of the lives of vaudeville artists circa World War One, it is invaluable. As a novel, it is as lousy a book as I’ve read in years.
Sorry to be so blunt, but the usual reviewer’s trick of pointing out several noble, even praiseworthy achievements before sliding in the dagger at the end just doesn’t apply here. The Little Shadows is the moral equivalent of purchasing the most beautiful plot of land in Canada, one overlooking vistas of mountains, lakes and majestic waving fields and then building a one-hole outhouse on it. This is a positively murderous waste of great material.
The story (and there is one) is about the three Avery sisters, Aurora, Bella and Clover, who form The Belle Auroras singing and dancing vaudeville act under the watchful eye of their mother Flora, a vaudeville veteran herself. Just for a tiny example of the annoyance that awaits the reader, although the sister’s names start with A, B and C; in age they run eldest to youngest A, C and B. I found myself having to do a mental reminder of who the baby in the bunch was for the first, oh, 300 pages or so because there is little if anything to differentiate Bella from Clover. And if parents want to be cutesy-poo and name their children in alpha order, why would they do so in dyslexic fashion? I guess it must have seemed writerly and symbolic of something or other. It isn’t. It’s just annoying.
By the time one gets deep into the novel, the question starts to percolate: why did Endicott go to the bother of writing in three sisters in the first place? Their lives run in such parallel that it just doesn’t seem worth the bother. Aurora seems to be the prettiest, Clover a better monologist and Bella from the sounds of things had a pretty nice rack, but beyond that (or those) they all lead the same life. They all fall for Inappropriate Men, two become pregnant, two get regularly humped by Influential Producers, all abandon the act without proper notice, etc.
The above is a pretty serious literary point. It seems to me that the opportunity a writer has in creating three sibling characters is this: three people come from the same background, go through similar experiences, yet have differing perspectives on the world. The reader, by looking at that world through three pairs of differently-viewing eyes, gains a holistic understanding. Instead… well we have the fictional equivalent of the real-life Baldwin brothers. Alec/Aurora achieves first prominence and gets the better roles, but I defy you to tell me what difference there is between Daniel or Stephen. Or, if that was too opaque a comparison, it is like going to an advertised Marx Brothers reunion only to find that the Brothers in question are Zeppo and Gummo.
Speaking of… my interest did spark when I read the following:
They had a dressing room of their own. or, if not quite all their own, they were only sharing it with one other number, the strawberry-haired woman from Swain’s Rats & Cats. The cats, and most fortunately the rats, were housed in another dressing room, and the woman assured Mama that never, not once, had a rat been known to escape.
Now that made my little ears perk up because I had heard of Swain’s Rats & Cats. That was a very real vaudeville act. Where I heard of it was on a recording (an LP, kids ask your parents) of Groucho Marx’s concert tour that he did with Marvin Hamlisch in the 1970s. There is also this version of the act as told in The Groucho Letters, which is by the way the funniest book I have ever read:
In case you are too young to remember this offering, it consisted of six rats, dressed as jockeys, perched on six cats, dressed as horses, galloping furiously around a miniature race track. It was an extraordinary act.
Of course, I get more salary than Swain paid his actors; as a matter of fact, they didn’t get any salary. Swain paid them off in cheese. Each rat got two pounds of mouse-trap cheese a week. With the country facing a three-hundred-billion-dollar [this was 1946] deficit, this doesn’t sound like much, but you must remember, this was all net. These rats didn’t have an agent— they knew their own kind and booked themselves independently. They didn’t even have to shop for cheese— they just sat in their dressing room and waited for Swain to throw their salary over the transom.
If I may ask a question that would be termed as leading by any awake and sober judge, did you find Groucho’s description funny? You have a good sense of the act, now don’t you? Well you’ll get none of that from The Little Shadows.
Not that Endicott doesn’t describe other acts in detail that can only be described as forensic. I’m going to pick a passage at (I swear) random. Feel free to skip forward. Trust me, you won’t miss a thing.
His feet flicked in a low flutter of ecstatic dance, then stilled. The wind began to blow, small particles of paper scudding towards Victor in the wind machine’s draught, and he was blown aside, farther off gravity than ought to have been possible, before he turned to face the wind and was tumbled backwards into a slow-flurrying roll. He picked himself up and carefully brushed his coat.
Undoubtedly exhausted from all the excitement. But really— scudding? Slow-flurrying? In trying to write, shall we say, ‘in period’ Endicott throws in clunky phrasing that brings to mind nothing other than The New Yorker and Wolcott Gibbs’ famous description of Time magazine’s style: ‘Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.’ One other point— Groucho actually was from that period, and he sure never talked like that, nor did Bob Hope, George Burns, Jack Benny, Fanny Brice or, hell, anyone who ever drew a living breath.
(Reviewer Note: I’m not enjoying writing this. Then again, I didn’t enjoy the book either. Although I suspect you’ve already come to that conclusion.)
I was going to point out an example where Endicott trying to slide in a pun makes an absolute clunking banger off the word ‘Ho’, but why torture you further? Let’s leap ahead to what is actually the most critical mistake in the novel.
I note in Endicott’s bio that she has been an actor, playwright and director. That’s swell, for so have I. Within a span of 107 opening nights, I ran a teaching theatre for three years. The most critical lesson I taught my actors was that a play is a conversation between the actors and the audience. That’s why people go to live theatre: because it’s real, the audience can feel. And nowhere— I emphasize nowhere— in The Little Shadows is there the slightest sense of the audience. Who were they? How did they feel? Where are the stage door Johnnies? Were they poor, rich or middle-class? What jokes did they repeat, what songs (and dear God this book is a hymnal of long-forgotten songs) did they hum while the next day doing… whatever they did.
The average reader in 2011 hasn’t got a clue what it means to be a performer. But that same reader does know what it means to be an audience. Yet Endicott only presents her acts from the perspective of other performers, leaving the reader without familiar eyes through which to view the show. This is such a massive mistake that I’m honestly shocked that it wasn’t noticed and fixed during the editing process.
The shame of it all is that there is so much material here for a really great, entertaining book. Where The Little Shadows rises is in the excerpts from old comedy sketches and the inner life of the performers as they reach out to connect with that nameless, faceless audience. Were the story of vaudeville put in the hands of an E.L. Doctorow or J. B. Priestley (whose The Good Companions is still the best novel written about traveling theatre companies), this book would have been a little gem. Instead, it will serve as a serviceable research piece for theatre students. Marina Endicott was short-listed for the Giller Prize for her previous book Good to a Fault. I admit I haven’t read it. But it had to have been better than this, which is a fault to good material.
Doubleday Canada | 544 pages | $32.95 | cloth | ISBN #978-0385668910
‘The Little Shadows’ by Marina Endicott
Book Reviews
As a work of historical research, Marina Endicott’s The Little Shadows is impressive. As a detailed narrative of the lives of vaudeville artists circa World War One, it is invaluable. As a novel, it is as lousy a book as I’ve read in years.
Sorry to be so blunt, but the usual reviewer’s trick of pointing out several noble, even praiseworthy achievements before sliding in the dagger at the end just doesn’t apply here. The Little Shadows is the moral equivalent of purchasing the most beautiful plot of land in Canada, one overlooking vistas of mountains, lakes and majestic waving fields and then building a one-hole outhouse on it. This is a positively murderous waste of great material.
The story (and there is one) is about the three Avery sisters, Aurora, Bella and Clover, who form The Belle Auroras singing and dancing vaudeville act under the watchful eye of their mother Flora, a vaudeville veteran herself. Just for a tiny example of the annoyance that awaits the reader, although the sister’s names start with A, B and C; in age they run eldest to youngest A, C and B. I found myself having to do a mental reminder of who the baby in the bunch was for the first, oh, 300 pages or so because there is little if anything to differentiate Bella from Clover. And if parents want to be cutesy-poo and name their children in alpha order, why would they do so in dyslexic fashion? I guess it must have seemed writerly and symbolic of something or other. It isn’t. It’s just annoying.
By the time one gets deep into the novel, the question starts to percolate: why did Endicott go to the bother of writing in three sisters in the first place? Their lives run in such parallel that it just doesn’t seem worth the bother. Aurora seems to be the prettiest, Clover a better monologist and Bella from the sounds of things had a pretty nice rack, but beyond that (or those) they all lead the same life. They all fall for Inappropriate Men, two become pregnant, two get regularly humped by Influential Producers, all abandon the act without proper notice, etc.
The above is a pretty serious literary point. It seems to me that the opportunity a writer has in creating three sibling characters is this: three people come from the same background, go through similar experiences, yet have differing perspectives on the world. The reader, by looking at that world through three pairs of differently-viewing eyes, gains a holistic understanding. Instead… well we have the fictional equivalent of the real-life Baldwin brothers. Alec/Aurora achieves first prominence and gets the better roles, but I defy you to tell me what difference there is between Daniel or Stephen. Or, if that was too opaque a comparison, it is like going to an advertised Marx Brothers reunion only to find that the Brothers in question are Zeppo and Gummo.
Speaking of… my interest did spark when I read the following:
They had a dressing room of their own. or, if not quite all their own, they were only sharing it with one other number, the strawberry-haired woman from Swain’s Rats & Cats. The cats, and most fortunately the rats, were housed in another dressing room, and the woman assured Mama that never, not once, had a rat been known to escape.
Now that made my little ears perk up because I had heard of Swain’s Rats & Cats. That was a very real vaudeville act. Where I heard of it was on a recording (an LP, kids ask your parents) of Groucho Marx’s concert tour that he did with Marvin Hamlisch in the 1970s. There is also this version of the act as told in The Groucho Letters, which is by the way the funniest book I have ever read:
In case you are too young to remember this offering, it consisted of six rats, dressed as jockeys, perched on six cats, dressed as horses, galloping furiously around a miniature race track. It was an extraordinary act.
Of course, I get more salary than Swain paid his actors; as a matter of fact, they didn’t get any salary. Swain paid them off in cheese. Each rat got two pounds of mouse-trap cheese a week. With the country facing a three-hundred-billion-dollar [this was 1946] deficit, this doesn’t sound like much, but you must remember, this was all net. These rats didn’t have an agent— they knew their own kind and booked themselves independently. They didn’t even have to shop for cheese— they just sat in their dressing room and waited for Swain to throw their salary over the transom.
If I may ask a question that would be termed as leading by any awake and sober judge, did you find Groucho’s description funny? You have a good sense of the act, now don’t you? Well you’ll get none of that from The Little Shadows.
Not that Endicott doesn’t describe other acts in detail that can only be described as forensic. I’m going to pick a passage at (I swear) random. Feel free to skip forward. Trust me, you won’t miss a thing.
His feet flicked in a low flutter of ecstatic dance, then stilled. The wind began to blow, small particles of paper scudding towards Victor in the wind machine’s draught, and he was blown aside, farther off gravity than ought to have been possible, before he turned to face the wind and was tumbled backwards into a slow-flurrying roll. He picked himself up and carefully brushed his coat.
Undoubtedly exhausted from all the excitement. But really— scudding? Slow-flurrying? In trying to write, shall we say, ‘in period’ Endicott throws in clunky phrasing that brings to mind nothing other than The New Yorker and Wolcott Gibbs’ famous description of Time magazine’s style: ‘Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.’ One other point— Groucho actually was from that period, and he sure never talked like that, nor did Bob Hope, George Burns, Jack Benny, Fanny Brice or, hell, anyone who ever drew a living breath.
(Reviewer Note: I’m not enjoying writing this. Then again, I didn’t enjoy the book either. Although I suspect you’ve already come to that conclusion.)
I was going to point out an example where Endicott trying to slide in a pun makes an absolute clunking banger off the word ‘Ho’, but why torture you further? Let’s leap ahead to what is actually the most critical mistake in the novel.
I note in Endicott’s bio that she has been an actor, playwright and director. That’s swell, for so have I. Within a span of 107 opening nights, I ran a teaching theatre for three years. The most critical lesson I taught my actors was that a play is a conversation between the actors and the audience. That’s why people go to live theatre: because it’s real, the audience can feel. And nowhere— I emphasize nowhere— in The Little Shadows is there the slightest sense of the audience. Who were they? How did they feel? Where are the stage door Johnnies? Were they poor, rich or middle-class? What jokes did they repeat, what songs (and dear God this book is a hymnal of long-forgotten songs) did they hum while the next day doing… whatever they did.
The average reader in 2011 hasn’t got a clue what it means to be a performer. But that same reader does know what it means to be an audience. Yet Endicott only presents her acts from the perspective of other performers, leaving the reader without familiar eyes through which to view the show. This is such a massive mistake that I’m honestly shocked that it wasn’t noticed and fixed during the editing process.
The shame of it all is that there is so much material here for a really great, entertaining book. Where The Little Shadows rises is in the excerpts from old comedy sketches and the inner life of the performers as they reach out to connect with that nameless, faceless audience. Were the story of vaudeville put in the hands of an E.L. Doctorow or J. B. Priestley (whose The Good Companions is still the best novel written about traveling theatre companies), this book would have been a little gem. Instead, it will serve as a serviceable research piece for theatre students. Marina Endicott was short-listed for the Giller Prize for her previous book Good to a Fault. I admit I haven’t read it. But it had to have been better than this, which is a fault to good material.
Doubleday Canada | 544 pages | $32.95 | cloth | ISBN #978-0385668910