Heartbreak in a pair of centuries

The story of Margaret Fuller is a heartbreaking one. This passionate, prodigiously erudite New England woman -- feminist, transcendentalist, champion of the downtrodden, pioneering journalist and literary critic, intellectual companion to the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson and others -- was destined to throw her heart at seemingly kindred spirits who wouldn’t or couldn’t return her love.

Only in Rome in 1847, when she was 37, did she finally meet a man capable of loving her, although the Marquis Ossoli, a minor aristocrat, was far from wealthy and barely literate. She conceived his child out of wedlock, though apparently they did marry later, and in 1850, they headed back to America, where Margaret hoped to earn more as a journalist. But she and her family perished in a shipwreck off Long Island.

Barbara Novak’s “The Margaret-Ghost” is about a modern-day woman whose heart and mind are captivated by Fuller. A professor at a small college in Boston, Angelica Bookbinder is working on a book about Fuller that she hopes will gain her tenure. What particularly fascinates her is not Fuller’s contributions to transcendentalism, her literary criticism, her concern for the fate of Native Americans or even her ardent espousal of women’s rights. What obsesses Angelica is Fuller’s quest for love.

Indeed, more than a century and a half later, in our own supposedly liberated times, Angelica is having some of the same problems. Men, she is beginning to suspect, are not attracted to intellectual women. Worse yet, it is intellectual men -- who should be seeking out intellectual equals as their life’s companions -- who seem especially threatened by brainy women. Take the man Angelica has picked out: handsome James Apthrop, a junior faculty member at Harvard who is also hoping to receive tenure with a book on Fuller’s contemporary, Herman Melville. They meet at the library, discuss their projects over coffee and, before long, are engaging in sex. But there’s another woman in James’ life, and Angelica fears this shapely blond “Baywatch girl” will win out.

A noted art historian who has written influential books on 19th century American art and culture, Novak understands the extent to which the concerns of that age remain today. In this novel, her second foray into fiction, she sets forth the parallels. “The Margaret-Ghost” has a certain formal elegance: It is sparely written, transparent -- indeed, schematic -- in its structure.

But it is perhaps too schematic: more like the working out of an exercise than an exploration of complicated individuals living in a complex culture. The modern characters in particular are almost comically dim. James recoils in horror when Angelica ventures to suggest that Melville may have had homoerotic feelings for Nathaniel Hawthorne, an unlikely reaction these days. If Novak intends James’ reaction to show us -- and Angelica -- that there’s something peculiar about him, why should we or Angelica take him as a typical modern male intellectual? And why doesn’t either scholar mention Melville’s poem describing the plight of brainy woman losing out to a pretty face, “After the Pleasure Party”?

As for Angelica, it’s hard to tell if we are meant to take her at her own estimation or to see her as an object of satire. It’s one thing to establish her as a scholar, not a sex kitten, but even so, she seems unusually inhibited: “James is a considerate lover.... He accepts whatever limits on our activities I impose. I do impose some, of course. I don’t like things to get sweaty or messy. I’m not too happy about body fluids.” This is a woman who has already been married once, not a shy 19th century Bostonian virgin like Margaret.

Yet Angelica approaches everyone and everything in a manner that’s astonishingly naive, tactless, simplistic and programmatic. Curious about Margaret’s intense relationships with women, she seeks out her lesbian colleague, Natasha Owens, who (predictably) tells her that women want a whole relationship but men want only sex. Natasha offers Angelica a “whole relationship.” Looking at Natasha’s dry skin, Angelica muses, “I must tell her about getting a moisturizer for her wrinkles. Ivana Trump has said that if she were shipwrecked on a desert island the one thing she must have would be her moisturizer. Can I have a whole relationship with Natasha if she doesn’t know about moisturizers?”

Novak’s pared approach nicely balances the comic and the poignant. But she has missed an opportunity to explore the material in depth or to exploit its full satiric potential. Angelica and her colleagues seem risibly shallow, even more so in comparison to Fuller and her contemporaries. Far from having come a long way, baby, Angelica not only seems mired in the same confusions that troubled Margaret; she actually seems to have lost ground, to be but a pallid parody -- a ghost -- of her illustrious predecessor. Too limited to be taken seriously as a heroine, she is finally too eccentric to function effectively as a satiric social type.