The first Kathryn Davis book I encountered was The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf (1993). It was packaged to intrigue: pleasantly hefty and square, with a dull-gold cover and red-edged deckled pages. The cover image was a 19th-century design for a toy theater, the title a reference to one of the more grotesque and oblique of Hans Christian Andersen’s tales. I remember the scent of the pages, sweet, dry, and faintly gluey, a smell I associate, weirdly or maybe not, with the liner notes of a particular cassette tape I had during that same adolescent era: Tori Amos’s album Boys for Pele, also grotesque and oblique, feminist and furious, in ways both similar and distant from Davis’s oeuvre. The novel, borrowed from my mother, became a touchstone for me, and still is. It also made me a lifelong Davis fan, a bemused but nonetheless passionate one. Is there any other kind?
I was once lucky to get to know a novelist who was friendly with Davis, someone who admired Davis greatly but whom I heard say “Oh! Her books are too hard for me!” in a tone both light-hearted and resigned. I’ve read The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf many times — half a dozen? — but have rarely reread her other novels. I hasten to say that this is on me. When The Girl came out, I was 13 and Davis had published only one other book, Labrador. Shortly thereafter, another novel, Hell, came out. I got each from the library and soldiered through. I tried to like them both for the same reasons I loved The Girl: Precise language, a certain austerity and wit that could pool into lusciousness or horror, a tone that said the world ordered by men was actually full of disorderly shadows where, unbeknown to their male counterparts, it was women who knew the score. But as my novelist acquaintance would say later, they were, for me, much too hard. They pushed the boundaries of narrative so far into the realm of experimentation that I couldn’t find my footholds. The Girl was full of landscapes and history; I could follow the voice of the narrator through golden cornfields and Danish bogs, early 20th-century taverns and tattoo parlors, puddles of moonlight and forests of music. But in Labrador and in Hell, I felt I was skating across the surface, and try as I might, I could never quite fall in. When occasionally I did, I had no idea where I was or what to do with it. I saw Davis as brave, uncompromising, austere, brilliant — I was just unequipped to know what else to think.
Ten years later, in 2003, the year after I graduated from college, Davis came to the Brattleboro Literary Festival to read from her new novel called Versailles, about Marie Antoinette. I wasn’t so sure about Marie Antoinette. She seemed like kind of a jerk to me. Okay, it wasn’t her fault that her life was what it was, since, like most aristocratic young women in Europe, she had very little personal agency, but nevertheless, I was not particularly sympathetic. Still, I was excited about another historical novel by Davis, one that might situate me in a world I could recognize and understand, and I was excited to hear her read. I listened, bought the book, read and liked it — but found it, maybe, a bit slight, lacking that pleasurable confusion I’d been hoping for. After all that time forcing my way through Davis’s more obscure books, I’d been hoping to get just a little more lost. Now, 20 years later, Graywolf has reissued the book, and I reread it. As it turns out, I love it — in ways I didn’t, or couldn’t, when I read it the first time.
Like the palace it’s named after, Versailles is a confection that belies its baroque complexity, layers antic whimsy over the seats of dead-serious power and humorless authority. In places, it indulges indulgence itself to the exclusion of the ethical imagination. But it’s a confection on Davis’ terms: luscious but precise, icy here and there, sweet here and there. There’s a kind of earnestness and heartfelt straight-forwardness that leavens its sidelong archness. That’s one of the best things about Davis’ novels — the way they balance chthonic critique with a tenderness for human weakness. As it turns out, Davis herself sees this trait as one she shares with the century in which Versailles unfolds: “I am an eighteenth century girl, through and through,” she writes in the afterword to the Graywolf reissue: “The secretly hopeful heart, the coolly ironic exterior.” This describes her Antoinette as well.
“My soul is going on a journey,” the story begins. “I want to talk about her.” Most commentaries I’ve encountered assume that the voice speaking to us — at least in the sections that read like a novel, rather than like a play — is the voice of Marie Antoinette’s soul, especially because we hear her continue after her death. “My soul is a girl: She is just like me,” the voice goes on. “My soul is also powerful, but like a young girl it has wishes and ideas — yes! — a soul can have ideas like a mind does.” But if the voice is speaking about her soul, then it can’t be that soul — so who is speaking? Not the body, not the mind — some other piece. It’s the voice of this other piece that has our attention: appealing, fetching, a little bit dopey, but smarter than it might first appear. This speaking identity is one of the mysteries of Versailles. “I want to talk about her. I want to talk about her,” the voice says on the first page. “Why would anyone ever want to talk about anything else?”
The assumption behind this question is both the genius and the limitation of Versailles. Of course, the soul of Marie Antoinette (if that’s the voice we hear) wouldn’t want to talk about anything else. But it’s actually pretty easy to think about why we might want to talk about something, anything — anyone! — else, especially in France around 1789. Hundreds of historians have made the case that myriad characters and occurrences from that world are more relevant and intriguing than a constrained, corseted queen, wealthy and pampered beyond imagining but ultimately powerless and, in the end, doomed. (Even Lynn Hunt, in her wonderful Family Romance of the French Revolution, is more interested in perceptions and presentations of Marie Antoinette than in the living queen herself.) Davis has to work against this salient fact to get us to follow Antoinette’s voice into the maze of Versailles the palace and the maze of Versailles the book. She succeeds via her lucid prose and sharp eye.
“I didn’t want to write a historical novel, no,” Davis says in the afterword. This, I think, is the key to what makes the book work — it’s not a costume drama in novel form. Nor is it a fictionalized biography or any other garden variety work of historical fiction. A theory of the historical novel, and especially the subspecies of novel I’d call something like “experimental chronological/historical fiction,” belongs in another essay, one on Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, Michael Ondaatje’s Divisidero, Jenny Erpenback’s End of Days, Peter Høeg’s History of Danish Dreams, and a few others — but it would have to include both Davis’ Versailles and The Girl who Trod on a Loaf. Novels like this play with time and form. And Versailles is intensely aware of and interested in form, both architectural and literary. This includes its own form, the bounds of which it consistently pushes. It never, however, becomes overly self-aware or “meta.” The sections not narrated by the soul, but presented as theatrical scenes, are some of the most affecting in the novel. One, which dramatizes the last period in which Antoinette is together with her husband and children as a family, has stayed with me since my first reading — and was no less tender and moving when I returned to it 20 years later.
It’s not lost on me that what is emotionally powerful about this scene is that the family is not in their beautiful palace but in prison. It’s cold and the food is not very good. Their son the Dauphin is already sick; he is not a future king but a little boy. Their daughter, affectionately nicknamed the Serious One, is a pain in the ass. Antoinette is frightened and grumpy; Louis is simple and kind. The Dauphin, confused by revolution and imprisonment, doesn’t know where his loyalties should lie and is acting out. His sister complains, “Make him stop, Papa. He’s driving me crazy.” Louis, smiling, replies gently, “I’d like to see the person who could do that, sweetheart.” I’ve never liked the inept, autocratic, doomed, deposed king more.
But is it right? Not just in the sense of historical accuracy but also in terms of the aesthetic and the ethical? Although I admire Versailles immensely, like my 20-something self I still think it’s more generous to Marie Antoinette than she deserves. Of course, I’m aware that she has been a punching bag and a punchline for over 200 years. She came to stand for the worst excesses of the ancien régime when in fact she had very little personal power even within her husband’s court. Her husband, too, was a victim of his own circumstances: One of the things that recommends monarchy and primogeniture for the compost bin of history is that there’s no guarantee that sons or grandsons of good kings will make good kings. (What is a “good” king?) They may not, like Louis, even want to be kings. (Davis does a wonderful job of showing us Louis’s goofy obsession with his hobbies, including locksmithing. What a goober!) When they are not good or capable but bad and unwise, kings — in a volatile world, when certain circumstances align — stand to lose their heads. I don’t think anyone deserves that, and I don’t think Louis and Antoinette were evil.
But I think they caused evil, and not always innocently or unknowingly. It seems to me that the pleasure that a reader can expect from this book — the pleasure that Antoinette and her companions revel in, alongside the anxiety and confusion of court intrigue — should be soured a little by the insane ethical and economic ramifications of their pleasure. Davis writes “I knew I wanted to dwell in Versailles the way you get to dwell in whatever landscape becomes the subject of your fiction — the way you get to dwell in your beloved’s heart.” She goes on: “I knew I wanted to wake up at my farmhouse in Vermont, and then sit at my desk and be once again walking down those allées, along the Tapis Vert, watching the sun glint off the little frogs in the basin of the Latona fountain.” As an historian, I have felt something akin to her description of what the novelist feels — the same pleasure and desire. When you read Versailles, you get to have that precise experience — to be wherever you are (your apartment, say, in Somerville, Massachusetts) and in Versailles and in Antoinette’s life and in Davis’s mind. All of which is a delight, and not a superficial but a serious one, though I can’t help but feel that maybe it should be occasionally less delightful.
Davis tells us that she didn’t want the book to feel “over-researched,” and it doesn’t. It has a kind of lightness of historical accuracy that I esteem. Its phrasing is precise and the details are spare, doled out like hyper-favored candies. We hear about strange, specific things — the number of steps in a staircase, the number of copper tubs Antoinette has to bathe in, certain odd foods, court rituals, personal predilections. A wig, a sash, a little claw used for scratching the itchy skin bitten by lice. But the last section of the book, which is bereft of palaces and luxuries, is no less vivid than the first. Of her research methods, Davis confesses, “A real historian, watching me work, would have gone out of his or her mind,” which I suspect gives too much credit to the research methods of those of us who could be called “real” historians. No, it’s what isn’t in the book that troubles me. At the end of the day, Antoinette went to her death a scared, sick human being, and I can’t judge or blame her in those moments, especially as Davis imagines them. The last 20 pages of the novel, when the political situation shifts from volatile to desperate, are the most gripping and compelling. But when, then, do I get to judge her? After all, the ailing Dauphin was far from the only hungry little boy in France, and Antoinette had something to do with that. What exactly, and how much, is largely left unweighed.
The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf has a queen of its own, too, the Bog Queen — horrifying, vindictive, hell-bent on punishment and a bananas kind of poetic justice. Her judgment of Antoinette would be unmerciful. What should ours be? Marie Antoinette might have been prevented, or have prevented herself, from knowing what was outside the gates of Versailles (though certainly her shrewd mother, the empress Maria Theresa, knew plenty, and made it her business to know). But now I wish Davis had been just a little more curious about life beyond the palace. In the last moments of the book, the ghost voice we have been hearing for 200 pages takes the reader once more to the Hall of Mirrors and sees “Three hundred six mirrors and in every one of them no Antoinette.” Fair enough, and, in fact, in that moment, truly heartbreaking. But who said a mirror is the only window worth looking into? In this moment, our moment, rereading Versailles, I’d like to know what Davis might have seen had she turned away from the queen and her court, and looked more deeply at Antoinette’s wider world.
[Published by Graywolf Press on November 12, 2024, 224 pages, $17.00US/$23.00CAN paperback]