New York Review of Books Review

EMMA DONOGHUE'S NOVEL "Room," published in 2010, was rightly celebrated for its terse depiction of love in a dark place. Narrated by a small boy, it's a claustrophobic and sparsely furnished exercise in horror and redemption. A mother and her young son, held captive for years in a locked room, do not go mad and destroy each other. Instead they make a sort of world, a private civilization of tenderness and warmth, population two. The novel is a triumph of the obsessed imagination thriving on a real paucity of resources. The same cannot be said of Donoghue's new novel, "Frog Music," which is based on a true-life unsolved murder that occurred on the outskirts of San Francisco in the summer of 1876. On the night in question, two women were staying in a rented room at a saloon in a place called San Miguel Station. One was a cross-dresser called Jenny Bonnet, who lived off the proceeds of the frogs' legs she sold to restaurants in the city. The other, Blanche Beunon, survived largely from the proceeds of prostitution. Blanche cohabited with a former trapeze artist named Arthur Deneve and his old circus partner, Ernest Girard. All were French. San Francisco was wilting under a heat wave so intense that horses were dying in the street. There was also an outbreak of smallpox, and growing tension between the whites and the Chinese in the city. Despite these various exotic ingredients, "Frog Music" refuses to come to life, quietly collapsing under the weight of its own tedium. This may be a function both of the thinness of the actual story on which it's based and of Donoghue's failure to develop it. When the murder occurs, Blanche is on the edge of her bed in the shabby room. As she bends down to unlace her gaiters, shots ring out, a window shatters and Jenny falls dead to the floor. Blanche was presumably the intended victim. To complicate matters, Blanche's baby, a sickly and unprepossessing infant called simply "P'tit," has recently disappeared. Blanche suspects Arthur, the baby's father, of having stolen him away. She also suspects Arthur of being the shooter who killed Jenny by mistake. It's hard to become imaginatively engaged with any of these characters. Sketchily drawn, their personality traits are superficial and fail to cohere. Nor are their various predicaments delineated with enough clarity or urgency to hold the reader's attention through pages of talk. The writing itself is weak and cliché-ridden. Blanche's "hackles rise," her "mouth hardens," she "chews her lip." Too often easy phrases substitute for a more earnest attempt to render character or situation with freshness and depth. There's an awful lot of grinning and guffawing, scoffing and smirking, chuckling and giggling. San Francisco emerges as marginally more interesting than its inhabitants. It swelters in the heat as the smallpox sweeps through, nearly claiming the life of the malignant Arthur, as meanwhile the liquor flows and mayhem and gaiety abound. And yet the picture of a ribald, boozy city of jolly hookers, hard-drinking con men and other lovable rascals soon grows wearying - in large part because the plot doesn't gain any traction, repetitively hitting the same two beats, the loss of the child and the unsolved murder. The reader stops caring, and all the roistering hilarity in the world can't mask the novel's lack of narrative energy. PATRICK MCGRATH is the author, most recently, of a novel, "Constance."