BOOK: “The Postmistress” about three women on cusp of war, 1941

by Minnie Apolis There are many novels and films whose plots will fit easily on the back of an envelope. Most of them fill in the spaces with lots of action or car crashes. This one does not; instead we we are smothered in more detail than is necessary to explain the plot. Believe you me, it was about enough to make me scream – or at least take a stern red pencil to the pages of the novel. A small-town doctor suffers guilt after a patient dies in childbirth. Said patient should have known enough to get to a doctor or hospital when her water broke, but that is an issue not addressed. This part of the story was much too drawn out, in my opinion. So anyway, the good and decent Dr. Fitch leaves his young wife to volunteer his services in London at the height of the Blitz. I was going to say that the story follows two women in the days before the United States got involved in World War Two. But on second thought, there are actually three. The young wife of the above doctor, named Emma. The postmistress in the same small town that Dr and Mrs Fitch live in; her name is Iris James. Then Frankie Bard, the radio reporter who gets a minute or two on Edward R. Murrow's broadcasts to relate her stories. The basic plot is that Dr. Fitch leaves a letter in the care of Postmaster James in case of his demise to give to Emma. But since the doc is overseas on his own, no one is responsible to report whether he is missing or not. The postmaster does receive a letter from Fitch's landlady in London, saying that he seems to be missing, but that letter is not delivered. Well, needless to say the doc buys the farm fairly early in the novel. By chance, Frankie scoops up his last unmailed letter to his wife, intending to mail it to Mrs. Fitch. But Frankie is about to spend three weeks in France and Germany, riding the rails and recording people's stories. She never mails it, but after a rest, travels to the Fitch's hometown to hand deliver it. Well! Is she ever stunned to realize that no one has told Mrs. Fitch that she is a widow. She never delivers the letter, but the postmaster finally delivers the doctor's letter that he had entrusted to her safekeeping. So that is the basic synopsis. If it sounds like something you might want to read, by all means follow up on that. It did not do much for me, sorry about that. It reads like it might have been a memoir written by the fictional Frankie Bard. The author did a fair amount of research on the era, on postal equipment and regulation, on Mr. Murrow, and on the war in Europe 1938-1941. Yet the resulting story seems awfully wispy, with few plot turns and rather sketchy character delineations. The one theme that could have been hammered home a bit more, but is not even mentioned in the study guide in back, is the rationale for telling the news. WHY do reporters insist on telling the news, and to whom are they speaking anyway? And WHY for gosh sakes do they insist on telling us BAD news? How much of that do they think we can take, as if we don't have enough to struggle with in our own lives. So as the sage reporter, Martha Gellhorn, once told Frankie, “I belonged to a Federation of Cassandras, my colleagues the foreign correspondents, whom I met at every disaster.” And all the Cassandra reporters gasp out their reports of news so bad that we cannot believe it is really so, we cannot see it for ourselves, and then when the press does show us, we cannot bear any more of it and look away. The fictional Frankie keeps trying to tell the story of the millions of refugees in Europe desperately trying to get out, but no one wants to hear about those horrors. While it was a novel and a theme worth addressing, I remain disappointed in the result. Oh, BTW, one cool tidbit is that the first notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony are the same as the Morse code for the letter V (dit dit dit dash), which the resistance hums as a message of defiance at their Nazi oppressors. (Morse code video on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0HrbCbfwlg) THE POSTMISTRESS, by Sarah Blake, Berkeley, 2010, 352 pages of novel plus brief notes and study guide. ISBN 9780425238691