Mary Coin

Mary Coin


Dorothea Lange’s iconic photograph inspires a skillful novel

The glory of a great photograph is its brevity, how it discovers stillness in the unremitting motion of the world. It's a very different medium than the novel, which more closely mirrors the immersive chronology of life, developing over time, immune to the pressures and freedoms of the instant.

Many writers have fallen into that gap. Novels fictionalizing the visual arts often have a stridently historical atmosphere that's false. Their intensity is unequal to their subjects' vivid work. No novel about a Girl with a Pearl Earring could hope to stand up to Vermeer's painting.

Special recognition therefore goes to Marisa Silver, whose new novel, Mary Coin, fictionalizes the circumstances of the most famous image of the Depression – Migrant Mother, by Dorothea Lange. Though imperfect, the book is a skillful, delicate apprehension of that photograph and its moment in history.

The photograph is justly iconic: an exhausted mother, eyes vigilant and fearful, hand to her chin, two children's faces turned into her shoulders. Lange took it in 1936, her subject an itinerant farmworker named Florence Owens Thompson. Almost immediately it made both of them famous.

Silver's novel imagines the lives of these two women on either side of the fateful day when Lange took Thompson's photograph, across a period ranging from the 1920's to the present day. Each figure receives a new name from Silver, Thompson becoming Mary Coin, Lange becoming Vera Dare, though these substitutions (and the reductive, rather snide wordplay of the two surnames) seem pointless, since Silver's tale hews closely to real life. Coin, like Thompson, has seven children, who subsist on "dead birds and frozen vegetables," desperately trying to survive history, while Dare, like Lange, limps badly after childhood polio and has a father who vanished when she was a girl.

The novel also features a third central character, unfortunately, a contemporary cultural historian named Walker Dodge. He is intended to frame the stories of the two women, but at best his presence seems inessential, and during the book's twist ending it becomes faintly embarrassing. His creative writing-class problems – a dying father, a divorce, a recalcitrant teenage daughter – are pallid indeed compared to Mary's hunger and Vera's crushing insecurity.

For the two female leads seem deep and real in Silver's fictionalization, strong in different but crucial ways. Both become more comfortable as the decades pass, but neither wholly sheds the decisive traumas of the Depression. Silver is the right writer for their story. She's a fine, delicate stylist, with an aphoristic style that fills even simple moments with meaning – an infant is "completely intact, missing only its future" - and sometimes Silver recalls the great Southern novelists Peter Taylor and Eudora Welty.

Lange and Thompson are both dead. Migrant Mother lives on as an astonishing picture, an act of politics, art, empathy, and challenge. Like all great art, it is, first and last, necessary. Mary Coin only intermittently achieves that same vitality, and never entirely rises to the level of the photograph it caresses and interrogates. Nevertheless, its skill, reticence, and humanity deserve our gaze.



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