Transcendentalists' Gossip Feels Soapy

I have nothing against “Us Weekly” magazine. I mean, who doesn’t love to skim its pages for gritty gossip and fashionable celeb photos? But when it comes to a biography of the literary heroes of Transcendentalism, I just can’t get behind this style of all hype and no substance.

In a delivery disastrously aimed at the hip-intellectual readership, Susan Cheever’s “American Bloomsbury” reduces Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau to a group of 19th Century Bennifers and Brangelinas.

Cheever aims to make “Bloomsbury” a colorful yet historically accurate piece of literary criticism, and her ostensible desire to liberate her subjects from the stuffy realm of academia and to recapture the vibrant intellectual community they created is certainly laudable. As Cheever assures us in a personal note to the reader, her intentions are “to honor the characters, their lives, and their intimate connections with each other.” That’s great. Unfortunately, by treating her subjects more like personalities in a melodramatic soap opera than distinguished writers, she does just the opposite.

Cheever apparently wanted “Bloomsbury” to be a fun, accessible read—maybe more page-turner than history lesson. Instead of a spoonful-of-sugar intellectual discourse, however, Cheever’s style mocks her supposedly honored subjects with such prize sentiments as “Fuller was unafraid, unafraid of her own brilliance and not afraid to be bitchy.”

Even the facts of “Bloomsbury” feel like contrived elements in a poorly written script. Cheever’s framework for the book breaks the interaction between her subjects into four sections of 12 (very short) chapters each. Every few chapters follows a different central characters through the same cluster of years and experiences, which results in a mercilessly irritating repetition of events. Cheever claims in her introductory note that this purposeful redundancy reveals “an important turning point…through Hawthornes’ eyes and then through Emerson’s or Louisa May Alcott’s before it is finally completely described.” The actual effect is something akin to dozing off over your chem textbook and reading the same page about 20 times.

That’s not to say that Cheever’s work is completely devoid of content. From time to time she makes insightful connections between the authors’ journalized experiences and their literary achievements. For instance, the parallels she suggests between Fuller’s influence on Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” and on Alcott’s “Moods” seem to be spot-on. But Cheever only sprinkles in these academic observations and then ignores them to gush scandal, contrive imagined scenes, and give undue importance to an ever-shuffling deck of secondary characters. This ratio, if it were inverted, might have made for an entertaining, perceptive, and focused presentation of the facts. Sadly, “American Bloomsbury” centers so much on shock factor that it completely breezes over necessary information (like a mention of the Bloomsbury Group—the 20th century British intellectual bohemians for whom this book is named).

“American Bloomsbury” feels wedged between genres, stuck in limbo between educated reading and fluff. Cheever’s desire to make the Transcendentalists seem cool to a younger generation would have worked, except that she underestimated the intelligence of her intended audience. Anyone who might be interested in learning about these influential American authors—“the mothers and fathers of our literature,” as Cheever puts it—would be better served by simply looking them up on Wikipedia than by reading this book of jumbled anecdotes and witless witticisms.

—Reviewer Mollie K. Wright can be reached at mkwright@fas.harvard.edu.