Eliza is not sorry when her husband dies. Peter Cargill is 20 years older than his 18-year-old bride, and persuades her parents back in Kalamazoo, Michigan, that he will be a tender and supportive spouse. But as they chase the gold rush and head out west, the opposite turns out to be the case. The year is 1851, and there is little recourse for Eliza against his cruelties: “He had made it clear that he intended to put it to her, whether she liked it or not, once or twice every day.” So when he’s shot in a bar fight in Monterey, it’s a relief. But how will the young widow support herself? Fortunate, then, that one Mrs Parks offers her work in a brothel. The place is spacious, with a nice veranda, “and the first fellow who came to her treated her much more kindly than Peter ever had”.
So begins A Dangerous Business, the latest from Jane Smiley, best known for her prize-winning 1991 novel A Thousand Acres, King Lear recast on an Iowa farm. She returned to Iowa more recently for the Last Hundred Years trilogy, a family saga stretching across the 20th century. In these and many other books she has proved herself a sensitive chronicler of the American scene. Yet A Dangerous Business is startlingly flat and unsatisfying. It is a mystery with no mystery, a book in which the characters develop not a whit.
