Tania the Revolutionary: A Short Novel by Michael Pritchett
michaelpritchett.co, 2020
Michael Pritchett’s style here is intense to the point of poetry. He uses historical events and characters, e.g., Patty Hearst, a.k.a. Tania, the American war in Vietnam, and more from the late 1960s and early ‘70s, to re-engage the complex and—I add from experience—unsettling swirl of those times. Yes, that includes the explicitly bloody murder of actress Sharon Tate by the maniac Charles Manson and his women. As main character, Judy, says to her mom in this novel, “Calamities tend to cluster around certain dates.”
“It’s called bad intersection,” Mom replies to her daughter. Yes, and we tend to forget, or I do, not so much the events of history but the hollowing out of hope and love and compassion when such calamities eat at our civilization. As in a good poem, the details that Michael Pritchett brings to this novel revive other details in the mind of the reader. Pritchett mentions the My Lai massacre and does not need to mention all the other outrages—e.g., President Johnson’s defense secretary Robert McNamara, who helped orchestrate, obfuscate and lie about the expansion of the war.
The novel’s mastery comes in creating the effect these many events have on the individual psyche, on a single character, Judy, her family, and then her marriage. Judy’s husband, Terry, who rarely sleeps for his own unsettled life, has had enough of Judy’s obsession with the violence of the Manson murders. “You need to stop this,” he says to her over coffee at 4 a.m. “It happened okay are you gonna go nuts yourself trying to act like this isn’t really about what happened to you—?”
There it is, what this is really about: the same emotional captivity and violence to the human psyche many of us experienced as recently as 2020, under a compassionless political system, children separated from their parents, ineptness in managing the pandemic, and so on. It is, indeed, happening to you, and sometimes only through novels of the highest order do we see ourselves, presently, in our past. A great novel stretches outside of plot.
Michael Pritchett, himself, is no rookie to writing fine, historical fiction. His novel about the Lewis and Clark expedition, with a parallel, contemporary narrative, The Melancholy Fate of Capt. Lewis, appeared from Unbridled Books in 2007; his collection of stories, The Venus Tree, won the University of Iowa Press prize in 2008, among other honors. I co-directed with him the Mark Twain Writers Workshop at the University of Missouri-Kansas City for several years during the early 2000s.
In the novel Tania the Revolutionary, the separation of the character Judy from her own dad is the psychic hole in the world through which everything else becomes personal. All she has left of him are his books, and she reads them all, quoting from them in her attempt to cope in that world we, even now, undersell compared to the traumas of 2020. Don’t be duped. Judy and her family live with us today and will, if the reader allows, comfort us with insight. I remember Judy’s world well and needed to revisit it, faced with events that cluster around these times.
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Robert Stewart’s latest book of poems is Working Class (Stephen F. Austin Univ., 2018); his latest collection of essays is The Narrow Gate: Writing, Art & Values (Serving House, 2014). For many years, he edited New Letters, the quarterly magazine of writing and art at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.