truepenny @ 2016-12-07T06:04:00

The Man Who Wanted Seven Wives by Katie Letcher Lyle

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



This book could have been so good. Lyle had all the pieces she needed: a fascinating story, comprehensive research into both the original crime and trial and into what had happened to the story in the intervening century., her own innate knowledge of the part of West Virginia where it happened. She's quite good as a historian/journalist, understands what her evidence does and does not prove; she even has an interesting theory about what "really" happened.

But she also has a fatal flaw. She didn't trust her material. "I am not the first to observe that fiction is, or can be, more real than truth. Thus I feel that the purposes of history, in this instance at least, are better served by a carefully documented account interspersed with invented scenes based on the best information I could find, than by an account so dry no one would have wanted to read it" (xv).

She could not be more wrong.

The parts of this book that are historiography are great, compelling and lively. The parts of this book that are fiction (and, credit where credit is due, she does delineate very clearly the bits that are made up) are terrible. They're not necessarily badly written, but they feel false because I was so aware, as a reader, that she was just making it up. She doesn't know how Zona Heaster Shue met her murderer. She doesn't know the story Mary Jane Robinson Heaster told about her daughter's ghost. And she doesn't know a goddamn thing about what was going on in Trout Shue's head.

Part of being a historian, it seems to me, is owning the parts of your story you will never find. She could have written a lovely chapter on the kinds of ghost stories that Mary Jane Heaster would have known as someone who grew up in the Appalachians (her endnotes indicate clearly that she did the necessary research into folklore and ballads)--and on that very interesting tidbit in the local paper, printed the same week as Zona's funeral, about a man in Australia who invented a ghost because he knew of no other way to convince people that the victim was in fact murdered. Instead, she makes up her own ghost story, with an endnote saying: "Mrs. Heaster must have told Preston something like this" (37). It's just wrong, and it's disappointing.



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