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[truepenny]

The Man Who Wanted Seven Wives by Katie Letcher Lyle

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



This book could have been so good. Lyle had all the pieces she needed: a fascinating story, comprehensive research into both the original crime and trial and into what had happened to the story in the intervening century., her own innate knowledge of the part of West Virginia where it happened. She's quite good as a historian/journalist, understands what her evidence does and does not prove; she even has an interesting theory about what "really" happened.

But she also has a fatal flaw. She didn't trust her material. "I am not the first to observe that fiction is, or can be, more real than truth. Thus I feel that the purposes of history, in this instance at least, are better served by a carefully documented account interspersed with invented scenes based on the best information I could find, than by an account so dry no one would have wanted to read it" (xv).

She could not be more wrong.

The parts of this book that are historiography are great, compelling and lively. The parts of this book that are fiction (and, credit where credit is due, she does delineate very clearly the bits that are made up) are terrible. They're not necessarily badly written, but they feel false because I was so aware, as a reader, that she was just making it up. She doesn't know how Zona Heaster Shue met her murderer. She doesn't know the story Mary Jane Robinson Heaster told about her daughter's ghost. And she doesn't know a goddamn thing about what was going on in Trout Shue's head.

Part of being a historian, it seems to me, is owning the parts of your story you will never find. She could have written a lovely chapter on the kinds of ghost stories that Mary Jane Heaster would have known as someone who grew up in the Appalachians (her endnotes indicate clearly that she did the necessary research into folklore and ballads)--and on that very interesting tidbit in the local paper, printed the same week as Zona's funeral, about a man in Australia who invented a ghost because he knew of no other way to convince people that the victim was in fact murdered. Instead, she makes up her own ghost story, with an endnote saying: "Mrs. Heaster must have told Preston something like this" (37). It's just wrong, and it's disappointing.



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Comments

[sovay]

It's just wrong, and it's disappointing.

I'm so sorry. She could have published the nonfiction first and then branched into fiction if she felt the story needed it.

Am I correctly interpreting from the last paragraph that Lyle believes Mary Jane Heaster invented her own haunting in order to get the question of her daughter's death reopened? I saw from the internet that the ghost story caught on in the community to the point where the judge at Shue's trial had trouble getting the jury to disregard it, which means either that Heaster was a particularly effective storyteller (mistyped "storyterror," which I wish I could use for something) or that the community felt similarly that there was something fishy about Zona's death and backed her up on the ghost story to get to it. Or both.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

From what Lyle says, Trout Shue behaved very oddly when his wife's death was discovered and at her wake, doing apparently everything in his power to keep anyone from examining her (broken) neck. He also bragged about wanting to outlive seven wives (hence the book's rather odd title), and had been married twice before. (One wife got the hell out of Dodge and divorced him while he was serving time for horse-stealing; the other wife died under unknown circumstances.) So there were reasons for the community to be suspicious.

Mary Jane Heaster apparently went to the county prosecutor and told him her ghost story to pressure him into having the corpse exhumed for an autopsy. At the trial (as Lyle reconstructs it from the newspaper accounts, since the transcript has vanished), the prosecution didn't ask the witness about the ghost story, the defense did--trying to discredit her by making her look insane. Which strategy seems to have backfired.

I'm dubious about Lyle's theory that Mrs. Heaster consciously and deliberately lied about being haunted by her daughter. The folk tradition of murdered people appearing to friends and loved ones to demand justice is very, very old, and it's perfectly possible for people to have dreams that they are convinced really happened. Lyle's only (circumstantial) evidence that Mrs. Heaster lied and lied again and then committed perjury is that coincidence that the story about the fake haunting in Australia appears on p. 1 of the same edition of the newspaper in which the report of Zona's funeral appears on p. 3. Lyle is committed to rationalism, that not only must there be a rational explanation, but all actors must be making conscious rational choices about their behavior, and while I approve of being rational and assessing evidence rationally, you can't impose your rationality on your subject, especially when there's not a shred of other evidence to suggest Mrs. Heaster was deliberately lying.

[sovay]

The folk tradition of murdered people appearing to friends and loved ones to demand justice is very, very old, and it's perfectly possible for people to have dreams that they are convinced really happened.

Agreed. (I was actually talking about the former belief with my father yesterday—he watched a movie in which a ghost persisted after the loose ends of its life had been solved and it felt fundamentally inaccurate to him.) And it is possible for people to take action based on dreams which they know are dreams, but which nonetheless feel true to them, without lying to themselves or to anyone else. I would consider that a rational explanation. That is a very odd insistence on Lyle's part.