Sat 28 May 2022
An Archived Review by Barry Gardner: JOANNA SCOTT – The Manikin.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[5] Comments
JOANNA SCOTT – The Manikin. Henry Holt, hardcover, 1996. Picador, softcover, 1998.
Scott is the author of four novels and a story collection, the latter of which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Holt characterizes this is a part coming-of-age story and part Gothic mystery, and uses some other more literary terns as well.
Outside of Rochester in rural upstate New York lies The Manikin, a baroque mansion designed by and ‘built for the man known as “the Henry Ford of Natural History.” His business specialty was taxidermy, and the house is filled with mute and sometimes startling testimony to it. A motley crew of humans live there as well, made up of his aging widow and her servants and his former chief taxidermist.
They exist in slowly dwindling splendor, isolated from the real world, until a house guest arrives as winter sets in one year in the late 1920’s, a wandering son returns, and everything changes forever.
Holt misspoke; though this does have Gothic overtones, and though there are crimes including rape and animal mutilation, it is no sort of a mystery. Nor are there any genre trappings whatsoever. It is a Novel, by a Novelist, and to my eye an exceptional one. Scott has created .a strange and wonderful set of characters, and her prose is simply outstanding. The countryside and the strange old house are evoked so well as to become characters in themselves.
Scott is a writer both lyrical and mannered, and this isn’t a book to read quickly. It’s one to read, though.
May 28th, 2022 at 4:36 pm
Even with Barry’s rave review, I couldn’t get a handle on the story itself. So I went looking, and FWIW, here’s what PUBLISHERS WEEKLY had to say about it:
“The Manikin
Joanna Scott, Author Back Bay Books $22.5 (0p) ISBN 978-0-8050-3974-0
With versatility and virtuosity to spare, Scott has employed her fecund imagination and intensely observant eye in three highly praised novels (the most recent was Arrogance) and one short-story collection (Various Antidotes). Each of the novels was distinguished by an unusual protagonist, meticulously detailed settings, a gothic atmosphere and Scott’s interest in the junctions where life and art, or life and science, meet. Here the “art” is that of taxidermy, the business that enabled Harold Craxton to build the estate called the Manikin, a huge, gloomy house situated in the isolated countryside of upstate New York, where the narrative is set in 1927. Manikin is the word used in taxidermy for “the durable forms used to replace the animal’s skelton,” and dozens of stuffed creatures share the house with its human inhabitants: cranky widow Mrs. Craxton and a devoted (but overworked and underpaid) staff, some black, some white. In the course of the novel several dramas are played out, romance is both thwarted and fulfilled, a young woman comes of age and antagonisms between parents and children are endured and resolved. During a blizzard on Christmas Day, three momentous events occur in which everyone’s future is instantly changed; six months later, the balance is again altered as Dionysian revels end in harsh reality. Scott’s skilled handling of the interplay among a group of disparate people forced to live in close proximity is psychologically keen. But she miscalculates in the character of eccentric taxidermist Boggio, variously compared to the devil, a clown, a prophet, a wizard and “a true artist, rebellious in spirit.” His sudden insight at the end is neither credible nor convincing; nor are the narrative’s various segues from bildungsroman to gothic novel to Midsummer Night’s Dream scenario. Yet Scott’s formidable observational skills result in some enchanting writing. Her precise, evocative descriptions of the region’s “irascible climate” and its flora and fauna, and of the zoological collection eerily inhabiting the house, glisten with brilliant specificity. (Feb.)”
May 28th, 2022 at 10:05 pm
Interesting, but I think not, at least not until I’m in the right mood.
May 28th, 2022 at 10:10 pm
It’s a major change o pace for this blog, that’s for sure.
May 29th, 2022 at 8:33 am
I always enjoyed Barry’s reviews but have no memory of this one (or the author) at all.
May 29th, 2022 at 11:37 am
Nor did I, until coming across it again last week. Back then and it not being a mystery per se, I’m sure I glossed over it very thoroughly.