Review: Gilded Needles

Gilded Needles by Michael McDowell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I nearly gave up on this one at the start, but I’m glad I kept at it.

The first few pages make clear that this is saturated with great atmosphere. It’s set near the legendarily bloody Five Points area of New York in the gilded age (as the title references in nice double-entendre fashion), and it’s an era I know fairly well from my own gangster researches. McDowell brings it to life with details that give a sense of the corruption and decay of the place.

And yet, ugh, it’s all exposition early. For a time I felt as if I were reading something from an encyclopedia. We’ll get introduced to a character and get a full backstory. Then another character and another backstory. I felt as if I should have been taking notes.

To be fair, in retrospect, I see a lot more sophistication to the method. I think McDowell is trying to push against conventional narrative and the sympathies it engenders. He keeps us at arm’s length from the characters for the same reason he immerses so fully in the Five Points world. He’s working to unsettle us, to take us to a chilling place.

Still, it’s tough sledding for a bit, but the great setting helps get you through it.

As the novel moves along, though, we get exposed to more of a traditional narrative. The at-first separate characters begin to affect each other across a web of the city, and the results get increasingly compelling. I went from thinking I’d drop it to racing through to the end.

Along the way, we get, first, a thoughtful critique of class. The upright, moralistic Judge Stallworth can’t conceive that Lena, our Five Points fence, and her family have the intellectual wherewithal to plot revenge over his sentencing and killing three of their number. He’s so caught up in an unarticulated social Darwinism that he doesn’t see them as fully human.

Meanwhile, McDowell never lets Lena and her family become objects of pity. For one, they don’t pity themselves. For another, they’re still repugnant in a lot of ways. They’re cruel, and [VEILED SPOILER:] what they do to the judge’s grandchildren is chilling.

Even more impressively, I think we get a novel that refuses to let us settle into comfortable story. It’s clumsy – even if intended – opening chapters estrange us as do the troubling doings of the later sections. Everyone is ugly either internally, externally, or both. We can’t readily sympathize with anyone – except maybe Helen, though even she is a bit much in her becoming consumed by the effort to help the poor whom her grandfather scorns.

Instead, we’re left with a Victorian-era sense of a world that’s dark whether it exposes its underbelly or lives in utter denial of it.

In any case, unusual as this is, it grew on me the more I read it. I’m glad I hung on to the end, and I recommend it.


View all my reviews