You Should Read MARY COIN by Marisa Silver
You Should Read MARY COIN by Marisa Silver
She's got an eye for the human side of history and a knack for the shiver-sigh line.
Check out a You Should Read author interview with Tiffany Quay Tyson after my review! Click on “View entire message” to read the full post in your email app.
Fun fact for your next stint on Jeopardy: An ekphrastic poem describes or narrates a piece of art.
I don’t know of a similar term for a novel inspired by artwork, so let’s just call it a Mary Coin.
Marisa Silver’s novel Mary Coin tells the story of photographer Vera Dare and her one-time subject, Mary Coin. The characters are based on Dorothea Lange and Florence Owens Thompson. You may not know their names, but no doubt you’ve seen evidence of their encounter. In 1936, Lange spotted Thompson with her children on the side of the road and snapped Migrant Mother, a photograph that became synonymous with the Great Depression. In Mary Coin, Silver uses that image to imagine three generations of American lives.
The novel opens in 2010 with Walker Dodge, a social historian and professor. Instead working at Dodge Farms with his father, Walker is “drawn to the buried and forgotten stories, to the molecules of the past that are overlooked by most traditional academics” (7-8). He’s also a divorced dad who struggles to connect with his troubled teenage daughter. When Walker’s father dies, he returns home to sort out his father’s affairs, where he finds a clipping of the famous photograph: “The image is so familiar that it seems like one excavated from personal memory . . . The woman holding the baby. Those two backward-facing children” (225). Luckily, Walker is just the curious type one hopes to stumble upon such an artifact.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Silver’s non-linear novel includes three narrative voices: Walker Dodge, Mary Coin, and Vera Dare. After introducing us to Walker, Silver brings us back to Oklahoma in 1920, where Mary unabashedly admires her neighbor, Toby. Although her mother tells Mary she “look[s] at people too hard,” Mary imagines “she might come to possess Toby unawares simply by the power of her gaze” (35). With these opening lines in Mary’s voice, Silver establishes the motif of looking and seeing that develops throughout the novel.
As a young woman, Mary dons a doeskin dress for a traveling photographer who wants to capitalize on Easterners’ romanticized visions of America. Posing for others and looking at them intensely make Mary “strange,” but these acts also catch Toby’s attention. The pair soon marry and have children. They happily move to California, traveling from one mill town to the next, but as the Depression sets in, they are left picking cotton or fruit in any field that will have them, living “at the pickers’ camp in a tent Toby had bought with the last of his mill wages” (87).
Mary’s story reminded me of Ron Rash’s poetry collection Eureka Mill. I used to start every year in Honors American Literature with two poems: “1934” and “Last Interview.” In “1934,” mill workers weigh the promises of the “union men” against their loyalty to their employer, Old Man Springs (l. 1). In “Last Interview,” a persona poem reminiscent of Browning’s “My Last Duchess1,” Springs brags about keeping his mill open. Speaking to a journalist, Springs taunts, “If they are so abused why don’t they go / back to the farms they flee to work in mills” (l. 8-9). Later in the poem, fed up with what he perceives as the journalist’s bias, Springs says, “I know how writers work, their luxury / of always being outside looking in” (l. 28-9). While Springs most closely resembles Walker Dodge’s grandfather, the man who created the Dodge Farms empire in Mary Coin, his statement about writers brings to mind Vera Dare.
After following Mary up to the mid-1930s, Silver’s narrative jumps back to 1920, this time to follow a young photographer. Vera considers herself a businesswoman, not an artist, but when her marriage to Everett, a charming and cheating painter, fizzles out, she finds a new purpose in photography. As the Depression worsens and the “streets [fill] with jobless men, moving sullenly along the sidewalk,” Vera can’t turn her eyes away. She travels the country and documents what she sees for the government. Although intruding into people’s lives feels uncomfortable at first, Vera soon sees her work as a necessity.
“She had to take their pictures because what she saw, what she saw, marked her as much as a limp or the fact that she was the only gentile in a school filled with Jews or that her father did not love her enough to stay” (140).
Although Rash’s Old Man Springs complains about writers, not photographers, he’s right: it is a luxury to be outside looking in. What Springs gets wrong is that such looking is synonymous with “passing easy judgment while they risk / nothing of their own” (l. 30-1). Vera Dare doesn’t judge Mary Coin or any of the other subjects in her photographs. She uses her resources to illuminate their living conditions, with the hope of improving them. If Vera judges anyone harshly, it’s herself.
For the rest of their lives, both Vera and Mary question the legacy of their shared moment of roadside intimacy. Vera’s picture becomes an independent entity, belonging to neither its subject nor its creator. Whose story does a picture tell? Is it a snapshot in time of the subject? Evidence of its creator’s unique perspective? A reflection of the viewer’s background knowledge? A challenge to a social narrative?
Perhaps Mary says it best. Reflecting on seeing the famous photo in person toward the end of her life, she thinks,
“A person was just feelings that came and went like clouds drifting across the sky and decisions that sometimes ended up to be good and sometimes bad” (257).
So, too, it is with art: We feel an emotion and create something—a photo, a painting, a song, a story—in the hope that someone else will encounter our ideas “drifting across the sky.”
You may not always see the same shapes in the clouds as I do, but I hope you’ll give Mary Coin a chance to drift across your imagination.
I’m excited to share a recommendation from Tiffany Quay Tyson today! Tiffany is the author of Three Rivers and The Past is Never. She’s also an instructor at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, where I first met her about seven years ago. If you ever have a chance to take a workshop with her, don’t hesitate! She gives thorough, thoughtful feedback. She’s basically the mascot of my weekly writing group because we all met in her classes.
You can learn more at Tiffany’s website or follow her on social (@tqtyson). Her favorite bookstore to support is The Bookies, and she thinks you should read The Sky Was Ours by Joe Fassler.
Thanks for sharing, Tiffany!
When I’m feeling stuck, I like to return to sentences I admire2. Marisa Silver offers a fabulous one in Mary Coin. Before marrying Toby, Mary is employed to help his stepmother with her children. Although Toby no longer lives in the house, Mary explores it for any evidence of him:
Dusting behind the beds, she found an old school ledger with [Toby’s] name marked on the cover in the careful, lip-bit print of a boy just learning to hold a pencil.
Two words sold me on this sentence: “lip-bit print.” As soon as I read them, I knew I would write a You Should Read post about this book. What Silver does in “lip-bit” is a tactic Geraldine Woods refers to as “coinage” (fittingly, in Mary’s case). In her wonderful (and extremely helpful) book 25 Sentences and How They Got That Way, Woods describes coinage as redefining a known word or “sliding words into a different category, making a descriptive word into a noun or a verb, for instance” (110).
Silver takes the image of a young boy biting his pencil in concentration and condenses it into a compound adjective: “lip-bit.” But to finish the reference, she needs a noun for this lovely creation to modify. By following it with “print,” she not only captures the slow labor that can be learning to write, but she also adds musicality to the sentence. All three syllables in “lip-bit print” include the short i sound (assonance), and “bit” and “print” share the final consonant t sound (consonance).
Putting them together creates a shiver-sigh line. If your creative juices are as clogged as the coffee grounds in my garbage disposal, try playing with coinage. Check out more writing prompts inspired by You Should Read posts here.
Another Mary Coin-esque novel inspired by a piece of art is Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait, which uses Browning’s poem as a springboard for a new story. You should definitely read that book, too.