Summary | Author | Book Reviews | Discussion Questions
Jarrettsville
Cornelia Nixon, 2009
Counterpoint
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781582435121
In Brief
Based on a true story from the author’s family history, Jarrettsville begins in 1869, just after Martha Jane Cairnes has shot and killed her fiancé, Nicholas McComas, in front of his Union cavalry militia as they were celebrating the anniversary of the Confederate surrender at Appomattox.
To find out why she murdered him, the story steps back to 1865, six days after the surrender, when President Lincoln has just been killed by John Wilkes Booth. Booth belongs to the same Rebel militia as Martha’s hot-headed brother Richard, who has gone missing along with Booth. Martha is loyal to her brother but in love with Nicholas McComas, a local hero of the Union cause, and their affair is fraught with echoes of the bloody conflict just ended.
The story is set in Northern Maryland, six miles below the Mason-Dixon line, where brothers literally fought on opposing sides, and former slave-owners live next door to abolitionists and freed men. Such tension proves key to Martha’s motives in killing the man she loves, and why — astonishingly — she is soon acquitted by a jury of her peers, despite more than fifty eyewitnesses to the crime. (From the publisher.)
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About the Author
• Birth—N/A
• Where—N/A
• Education—B.A., University of California, Irvine;
M.A., San Francisco State University; Ph.D.
University of California-Berkeley
• Awards—Michael Shaara prize; First prize O. Henry
Award; O. Henry Award; Carl Sandburg Award;
National Endowment for the Arts; Pushcart Prize (twice);
Carnegie Fellowship to the Mary Ingraham Bunting
Institute. at Radcliff
• Currently—teaches in Oakland, California
Cornelia Nixon is an American novelist, short-story writer, and teacher. She is most well known for her literary works and critical writings. She has authored three novels, a book of literary criticim, and many stories, which have appeared in periodicals and earned top prizes.
Nixon attended the University of California, Irvine where she earned her B.A.. She received an M.F.A. from San Francisco State University and the Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
She served as a teacher at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana from 1981 to 2000. Then she joined the faculty at Mills College in Oakland, California, in 2000 and continues to teach there today.
Nixon's first book was Lawrence's Leadership Politics and the Turn Against Women a critical essay that examined what Nixon felt to be the negative portrayal of women in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love.
In 1991, Nixon authored Now You See It, a novel in stories. The book earned acclaim from several critics at prominent periodicals such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Mademoiselle.
Nixon's next literary work, Angels Go Naked, published in 2000, is a collection of interrelated short stories that together form a larger narrative. This work also received critical acclaim from periodicals such as the New York Times Book Review, Library Journal, Booklist, and the Washington Post. Jarrettsville, Nixon's most recent novel, came out in 2009. It was reviewed, in the New York Times, Washington Post, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, and San Francisco Magazine.
Nixon has also contributed to several periodicals such as the New England Review, Iowa Review and Ploughshares. (From Wikipedia.)
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Critics Say . . .
[Cynthai Nixon] ably conveys the dark atmosphere of Reconstruction, which, in a place like Jarrettsville, could be more brutal—and even, at times, more bloody—than the wartime period itself.... Yet Nixon fumbles repeatedly when it comes to the finer details of history that, woven together, form a credible fabric of the past. For anyone who knows a bit about American history, it’s irksome when—to pick out just a couple of examples—she talks about the supposed cotton plantations of antebellum Maryland or uses the 20th-century word “segregationist".... Such errors are all the more jarring because the book’s various chapters are written in what purport to be 19th-century voices.
Adam Goodheart - New York Times Book Review
On April 10, 1869, in Jarrettsville, Md., a young mother shoots her lover to death in the middle of the main street with 50 witnesses looking on in horror and then sits down with her victim's head in her lap, weeping uncontrollably, asking to be hanged before dark. How this remarkable scene came to pass and its equally remarkable aftermath make up Cornelia Nixon's fine and compelling new novel. Jarrettsville describes the tangled and ultimately tragic romance between Martha Jane Cairnes and Nick McComas. Their story is inextricable from the history of their small town, six miles below the Mason-Dixon line, and of the still unended agony of the Civil War.
Robert Goolrick - Washington Post
Post–Civil War tensions complicate the romance between an abolitionist's son and the spirited sister of a rebel sympathizer in Nixon's uneven latest (after Angels Go Naked). Four years after the war, in Jarrettsville, Md., Martha Cairnes kills her fiance, Nicholas McComas, and demands to be arrested and hanged. The narrative then moves backward to explain how the lovers came together: Martha falls for Nick even though he has a reputation as a scoundrel. Nick, meanwhile, thinks marriage is out of the question, especially after it's revealed that his father, killed under mysterious circumstances, has left behind a mountain of debt. Yet the two are soon engaged, and Martha's brother, who may have been involved in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, resents Nick's efforts to support three former Cairnes slaves, and a tangle of crossed loyalties wreak havoc on the engagement. Nixon tells the tale a la Shadow Country, with a chorus of narrators, but here the variety of voices and the disparate narrative elements—historical account, tragic romance, courtroom drama—renders unclear what kind of story the author is trying to tell, and the riveting beginning is sabotaged by the restrained conclusion.
Publishers Weekly
The tragic end of a love affair precipitates an epic court case in a small Maryland town riven by the Civil War. Martha Jane Cairnes shoots Nicholas McComas to death at a celebration of the fourth anniversary of the Confederate surrender at Appomattox. Nixon (Angels Go Naked, 2000, etc.) stitches together multiple narratives and points of view to describe the murder, then backtracks to explore the events that led Martha to kill. From the time they fall in love at the war's end, Nicholas and Martha are caught in its residual grudges. He comes from abolitionist ilk, while she boasts a proud Southern heritage. Various narrators economically relate their story in relay, seldom overlapping and rendering the community in lively, lifelike perspective. From the former slaves who act as nurses to the doctor who witnesses Nicholas' dying throes and his son's birth, the entire community is involved in the strangulation of an innocent love affair. Nicholas' sympathy for the newly freed slaves puts him afoul of Confederate thugs like Martha's brother Richard. Yet he is not immune from the racist mores of the day and is haunted by accusations, after she is seen regularly visiting a hurt freedman, that Martha has engaged in miscegenation. For many in Jarrettsville, codes of honor trump federally imposed law, and when Nicholas gets cold feet concerning the engagement, rumors of scandal run amok. His portions of the narrative painfully trace faltering will, self-doubt and moral decline. At Martha's murder trial, more than just one young woman stands accused. Thrilling and cathartic, this imaginative, well-crafted historical fiction meditates on morality and the complexity of motivation.
Kirkus Reviews
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Book Club Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Jarrettsville:
1. Why might Cornelia Nixon begin, rather than end, her novel with the shooting? What difference does it make in how you read the novel?
2. Does the author fully develop her characters? How would you describe both Martha Jane Cairnes and Nicholas McComas? Are the two well-suited to one another? What kind of character is Martha's brother Richard? Of the primary characters, which do you most admire? Least admire?
3. Was the romance between Martha and Nick doomed? Given the hostile environment and personalities and prjeudices of the those involved, was the tragedy inevitable? Could the shooting have been avoided?
4. The novel indicates that the Civil War, while officially over, had yet to end in places like Jarrettsville. Were you suprised by the level of animosity in the wake of the war?
5. Follow-up to Question 4: How did the Civil War affect the families and community of Jarrettsville. Talk about the ways in which it tore at the social fabric of the town.
6. How are African Americans treated in Jarrettsville? Are the freed slaves better off after the war than they were as slaves before the war?
7. Discuss the friendship between Martha and Tim—what is it's nature? How does that friendship get manipulated and corrupted? Should Martha have been more cautious? Should she, could she, have known the repercussions?
8. Did you detect the double-standard between men and women, especially with regards to Martha and Isie?
9. At what point did you come to understand why Martha shot Nick? Do you sympathasize with her? If so, how does an author go about building sympathy for a murderer? If you have no sympathy for Martha, why is that?
10. Nixon uses shifting perspectives in telling her story. Does her use of multiple voices as a narrative technique appeal to you? Why or why not? Was there a particular narrator you liked more than others? Any you disliked more than others?
11. How thoroughly does Cornelia Nixon establish the novel's 19th-century setting? Does she bring to life both the era and its people? If so, how does she accomplish this? If not, why not?
12. Does the ending hold up? Were you suprised...or let down by the way the novel ended?
13. Did you learn something new by reading this historical novel, perhaps something about the aftermath of the Civil War, the treatment of freed slaves, or the hostilities that continued after the war.