Rochester Knockings
The subtitle of this offbeat novel is “A Novel of the Fox Sisters.” Written in French by the Tunisian-born Hubert Haddad (translated by Jennifer Grotz), the book dives deep into American waters and finds rich, unexpected treasure there. The time is the 1840s onward to the end of that century, when the Spiritualist Movement was in full swing and mediums were as popular as movie stars, thanks to their ability to communicate with the dead.
In ROCHESTER
KNOCKINGS the Fox sisters, Kate and Margaret have genuine psychic gifts,
gifts they were born with (honed by a childhood spent in a farm house
inhabited by a ghost they playfully called Mr Splitfoot.) Haddad follows
their fortunes as they grow up, turn professional, become famous and wealthy,
meet such luminaries as Frederic Douglass, Horace Greeley (whom Kate eventually
marries), Victoria Woodhull and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Always, even as they
rise in life, the sisters are under attack from their many enemies: priests,
Puritans, lawyers, scientists, scoffers and scam artists (some of whom
try to turn the sisters’ calling into a lucrative racket).
Haddad weaves various strands of 19th century history into his narrative:
the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, the industrial revolution, mass
immigration, the opening up of the West, the battle for women’s rights,
the class war between capital and labor. It makes for a rich and insightful
novel, one whose broad canvas manages somehow to keep the Fox sisters
front and center. Although Kate ends up in drunkenness and poverty (but
is still being vilified as a witch), she continues to “perceive the
voices of Creation, barely audible, and the geometric figures of an infinite
precision that were endlessly in the middle of her skull.”
(Openletterbooks.org)