You Should Read MARY COIN by Marisa Silver
Reading Notes
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 has become synonymous with the Great Depression. In Mary Coin, Silver uses that image to imagine and explore 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 loyalty to their employer, Old Man Springs (l. 1). In “Last Interview,” a persona poem reminiscent of Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” 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.”
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.”
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.
Need-to-Know
Pub Date: 2013
Setting: Oklahoma and California; 1920 - 2010
Narrator: 3rd POV of Walker (present-day), Mary (past), and Vera (past)
Length: 322 pages; audiobook runs almost 9 hours
Fun Fact: This novel imagines the story behind Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother photo.
Book Club
Vera receives a letter from Mary thirty years after their encounter: “Vera could almost hear the emotional shake of the woman’s voice. She had agreed to be photographed, but of course no one really knew what it meant to have one’s picture taken. Everyone thought they did. But no one did” (182). What do you think it means to have your photograph taken today? Who do you think “owns” a photograph? How does our online environment shape the way we take and interpret photos?
Mary’s mother warns her, “You’ll know who you are when you start losing things” (63). Later in life, Mary disagrees with this sentiment. How would you respond to her mother’s comment? What events need to occur for you to “know who you are”?
Close Reading
When Vera loses her work taking photographs of socialites, she at first turns to nature photography. However, she is not inspired by inanimate objects. The despair of people on the streets and on farms intrigue her instead, but she struggles to justify her actions:
“What right did she have to take photographs of strangers? But she knew these faces. Even if she had never seen a single one of these people before, something deep inside her recognized them. These people had been made to feel inadequate, abnormal. Their lives were disfigured by circumstance. 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.”
Although Vera’s struggles differ from those of the men waiting for work on New Year’s Day, she recognizes their emotions. Childhood polio left her with a limp, a physical defect that makes her self-conscious even as an adult. Empathy is one way Vera validates her photographs. But what I think is more important in this passage is the repeated dependent clause: “what she saw, what she saw.” The emphasis is not on the verb (“saw”), but the subject (“she”).
The sentence brings to mind a line from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”: “The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray.” In Emerson’s view, we have an obligation to “testify” about our experiences because no two perspectives will ever be alike. Vera reaches the same revelation.
But Vera doesn’t follow her new insight with platitudes. Whereas Emerson instructs us, in his very next sentence, to “[b]ravely . . . speak the utmost syllable” of our vision—an opaque and abstract instruction as ever I’ve heard—Vera reflects on the perceived shortcomings of her own life. She thinks of three specific details that set her apart. The concrete list she provides (“a limp . . . the only gentile . . . that her father did not love her”) does the work of triangulating her character. Vera is like a cell phone signal bouncing off towers. We may not know exactly where she is, but by examining the towers, or significant events of her life, we can begin to pinpoint her location. Her self-awareness demonstrates a burgeoning acceptance (if not quite celebration) of her singular, particular life.
Creative Writing
Fiction (or possibly creative nonfiction): Find a photo in your phone that does not feature you. (Even better: Flip through an old photo album, if you have access to one.) Place yourself in this scene. If the photo includes people in it, you could write as one of them. If it doesn’t, you could take an omniscient god-like voice. The only rule is that it must take place in the frame of this photo.
Fiction: Peruse a photo collection from the Library of Congress. When you find one that sparks your interest, do a bit of background research. When was it taken? What does it depict? From those basic details, craft a short scene, similar to what Silver does in Mary Coin.
Sentence Study
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.” 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 learning to write can be, but she also adds musicality. 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.
