Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon Knopf Doubleday Publishing 2023 448 pgs
Frozen River is not an easy book to read. The prose is excellent, the dialogue skillful and the plot fast moving and suspenseful. Suspense hovers throughout the plot, as does a solid sense of history. It is history told in numerous small ways: the making of candles, the difficulty of having a warm bath, the complications of a legal system still in its infancy and the social mores that go along with a setting in largely unpopulated Maine just after the Revolution. The characters are entirely believable, if a bit extreme; the heroine is enormously heroic against all odds, and the villain is about as nasty a character as a reader could hope to find.
The book is written in the present tense and in the first person, making it feel urgent and immediate. The narrator is a midwife, the villain is a judge. There are two related motifs underlying the plot: the position of women and the institution of marriage in a remote day and age, and the ongoing and barely hidden sexual activities of the village residents, both positive and negative, legal and illegal. The book opens with an account of a violent rape and an equally violent murder; later there is a vivid description of each event; and throughout the chapters the havoc wrought by what has happened is painfully evident.
The midwife, Martha Ballard, has learned to read and write as an adult, enabling her to record each day’s goings-on in a journal. She is fierce in her defense of the innocent and in her anger toward offenders, and unstoppable in her pursuit of justice–justice outside of the courtroom when necessary. She is blessed with a devoted husband who stands by her when all looks lost and defended by some among the townspeople while vilified by others. Her sharp tongue knows no fear, however, and in the end–in a startling climax that is entirely unexpected and both shocking and satisfying–right overcomes might.
There are multiple scenes in the book of childbirth, scenes which are not timid or hesitant. Every woman seems to deal with many pregnancies, though not all babies survive. There are no remedies available in any kind of emergency, no medications except herbal ones and medical training for doctors is clearly ineffective. The role of midwife is an important one, made more critical in this case by the isolation and size of the small community. Because Martha knows many families intimately as a result of her work, she is able to provide more than just birthing care to the women for whom she feels great sympathy–particularly those young mothers who produce babies out of wedlock, as often happens.
Frozen River is a story laced with tension and with issues of right and wrong. It goes against our tendency to romanticize early American life. It argues for the ability of one strong person to make a difference by fighting an indifferent system which provides privilege for some and encourages bias toward others. Its details give the reader a look into everyday life in a different time and place. In many ways it is a kind of history; the author reports that it is loosely based on historical facts, with her assumptions about the way things might have happened and with date changes thrown in. In any case it rings true and is certainly a book well worth reading.