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2021
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
THE HEART OF THE STORY a review by Tanya Long Bennett Monique Truong. The Sweetest Fruits: A Novel. Viking, 2019.
TANYA LONG BENNETT grew up in Texas and earned her PhD in English at the University of Tennessee. She is a Professor of English at the University of North Georgia. In addition to numerous journal publications, she is the author of “I have been so many people”: A Study of Lee Smith’s Fiction (University Press of North Georgia, 2014). She is a regular reviewer for and an editorial board member of NCLR. MONIQUE TRUONG was born and raised in Saigon, South Vietnam, before coming to the US as a refugee. She settled in Boiling Springs, NC, which also served as the setting for her second novel Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010). This novel received the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Rosenthal Family Foundation Award. Her first novel, The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), was a national bestseller and received seven different awards. This third novel has so far received the 2020 John Gardner Fiction Book Award and was named among the best fiction of 2019 by Publishers Weekly, Mental Floss, and PopMatters. Read an essay on a Truong short story in NCLR 2004 and, in NCLR 2015, an essay on her North Carolina novel and an interview with her.
Monique Truong’s readers have come to expect from her novels both captivating storytelling and rich, delicious prose. Those expectations are certainly met and exceeded in her 2019 novel, The Sweetest Fruits. Narrated by four women, over six decades, the novel unfolds the life of historic figure Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, who was born in 1850 on the Ionian island of Santa Maura and died in 1904 in Ōkubo, Japan. In between, Hearn found his way to Ireland, England, the US, and the Caribbean Islands. Born of a Greek mother and an Irish father, Hearn experienced loneliness, poverty, and creative frustration at times, yet over the course of his life, he achieved fame and success as a writer and earned respect as a translator and as a professor of English literature in Japan. A keen observer of culture and an adventurer at heart, he is best known today as one of the first to provide Westerners with a glimpse into the culture of Japan, which, upon his arrival in 1890, had only recently opened up to the West. Portrayal of such a fascinating though underappreciated figure through historical fiction is certainly a worthwhile pursuit. Yet, Truong goes a step further: To portray Hearn in all his complexity, this work of historical fiction diverges from the conventional strategy of a single point of view, instead decentering the narrative provocatively in order to remind us that “you can’t understand only one man’s story. Those around him have things to say too” (150). To render a richer version of Hearn and, simultaneously, reflect the complex and important dynamic of human story-
telling, Truong yields the floor first to Hearn’s mother, Rosa Antonia Cassimati, who, as she dictates a letter to her son, has just left two-year-old “Patricio” with his Irish great aunt. This great aunt has agreed to make “Patrick” her heir under the condition that he be left to her guardianship, so Rosa is returning to Santa Maura to deliver and raise her third child, with whom she is now pregnant. Although Hearn never receives the letter, the story Rosa tells in it is intended to explain why she has made the decision to leave him and to provide him with an understanding of his own history, which is contingent on hers. In a narrative that follows this letter, Alethea Foley describes Hearn’s early adult life in America in an interview with biographer Elizabeth Bisland. Having been released from slavery at age nine or ten by the Emancipation Proclamation, Alethea is still unable to read and write, but having been married to “Pat” for over five years, and possessing a strong imagination and narrative voice of her own, she is able to illuminate for Bisland a great deal about Hearn’s character, experiences, and development as a young journalist. Finally, his second wife, Koizumi Setsu, tells of Hearn’s later life, of their time together in Japan where he seems to have matured and his reputation solidified. Although it might be tempting to oversimplify the novel’s message and view these three women’s stories as political usurpations of Hearn’s own, Truong places these narratives, to interesting effect, in relief against excerpts from the more conventional biography that
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