Memories help us make sense of ourselves. But because they are always tinged with subjectivity, memories can also tempt us to distort the truth into fairy tales of our own making.
In Maria Hummel‘s new novel, Goldenseal, two 70-year-old friends meet after a long estrangement in a grand Los Angeles hotel that has seen better days. Suffused with the atmosphere of the past, this exquisitely evocative tale pays tribute to the glamour of old Hollywood. But Goldenseal is no mere nostalgia fest. With wit and acumen, Hummel explores how our divergent interpretations of events can color our memories, locking us in spirals of alienation.
The LA setting is familiar territory for the author and University of Vermont professor; her novels Still Lives and Lesson in Red are mysteries set in the city’s art world. While those books ranged all over the metropolis, Goldenseal takes place almost entirely in the unnamed hotel — inspired, Hummel writes in an afterword, by the Biltmore Los Angeles.
Rather than a whodunit, this novel is a psychological chamber drama. It still starts with a mystery, though: After four decades of silence, why would a woman fly across the country for a single conversation with her former friend?
Hummel notes in her afterword that Goldenseal‘s central conceit mirrors that of Hungarian writer Sándor Márai’s 1942 novel Embers, in which the main characters are male friends who both loved the same woman. Here, the year is 1990, and the friend who initiates the meeting is Edith, the retired headmistress of a private school in New England. Her destination is the 38th-floor suite of Lacey Crane, the reclusive daughter of the hotel’s founder, who hasn’t stepped outside the building in five years.
Lacey keeps her visitor in suspense for an entire day, forcing her to wait in the lobby while she prepares for their meeting. Hummel keeps us in suspense, too, by withholding a central piece of information: What caused the rift between the two women?
The novel’s first third consists mostly of flashbacks to Lacey’s childhood as a wealthy immigrant from Prague. She meets the scrappy, working-class Edith at a New York summer camp where the latter’s father is the caretaker. Despite the economic gulf between them, the two girls form a powerful bond that carries them into their young adulthood, which they spend together in midcentury Hollywood.
The novel’s title refers to an herbal remedy that teenage Edith gives Lacey to cure her cough — a gesture of loving care that, to the much older Lacey, seems wildly at odds with Edith’s later betrayal. But the gift of goldenseal will turn out to have more significance than Lacey could have imagined.
Goldenseal is a thought-provoking read that makes us question the stories we build from our own memories.
The flashback sections of the book evoke the Great Depression era with the lushness of a good historical novel. After being immersed in Hummel’s descriptions of prewar Prague (“swans melted ovals in the ice of the Moldau”) and the summer camp (“the cabins, the moths and june bugs, the smelly latrines”), readers may be startled to learn that the bulk of the book is simply an extended conversation between our protagonists in Lacey’s hotel suite.
But that bare-bones conversation weaves a spell of its own. With a formality reminiscent of courtroom dramas, Lacey states her case against Edith (even referring to the “order of discovery”), and Edith responds. Their dialogue also has a larger, archetypal dimension of which both characters are aware: Stories of female friendship rarely end well.
“So many fairy tales begin with one woman envious of another, secretly or openly,” Lacey tells Edith. “At the end, only one woman gets to become queen. The other is banished, beheaded, or rolled down the stairs in a barrel of nails.”
In Lacey’s version of their shared past, she is the sheltered princess who yearned only to be loved. Edith is the envious upstart who plotted to steal everything Lacey held dear, leaving her in a hotel suite with only books and memories for company.
But Lacey herself admits that “[t]he same story can be told infinite ways.” When Edith finally tells her side, she challenges Lacey’s belief that “true, devoted friendship between women is a fantasy that life dismantles,” refusing to accept the patriarchal framework in which women must always put aside their bonds to each other. While Lacey sees herself as a dethroned princess, Edith embraces other archetypes: the wise fool, the trickster crone.
Through this heady dialogue — accompanied by an elaborate, multicourse dinner — the women reveal long-held secrets, each discovering that her own memories are an incomplete record of the past. They may not part reconciled, but both will gain valuable insight.
So does the reader. Those who come to Goldenseal for glitz, glam and old Hollywood scandal may be disappointed, since those elements are the novel’s backdrop rather than its focus. But Hummel’s hypnotic prose draws us into Lacey and Edith’s world — whether they’re young or old, riding the sustained highs of girlhood or kvetching about time passing them by.
The author’s cinematic descriptive skills particularly shine as she explores the hotel, a haunted place where the passage of time is achingly visible. In the lobby, for instance, Lacey remembers how
Long ago, Lacey and Edith had swept over that floor in the arms of young men while a live brass band played … This chamber hadn’t been the Music Room in years. Young people [now] didn’t dance their afternoons away in sky-lit atria, under the eyes of chaperones. They could escape the confinement of their bodies, their age, into a thousand different lives.
Reading is one of those ways to escape the confinement of our temporal selves. Goldenseal is a thought-provoking read that makes us question the stories we build from our own memories. At the same time, it leaves us with vicarious nostalgia, as if we’ve spent a few golden hours in this hotel full of “tiny pockets, little eddies in the river of time” where past and present meet.
From Goldenseal
The city had changed, but the hotel’s name was the same. Its thirty-eight-story facade would be spiffed and scrubbed, but unaltered. She’d know it on sight: the columned entrance, the redbrick walls above, bordered by a lace of cream-colored stone. The texture of a castle, the shape of a fortress. The height of a spiraling hawk. An outdated tribute to human majesty, plunked among skyscrapers, like orchestral music suddenly piping through a rock station.
She’d know the hotel. On sight. She clung to the notion. In all this tarmac, this adobe and glass and paint, in all these structures rising up, falling down, and replaced again, the hotel would be the one fixity, the center of the clock, the pin that held the moving hands. Her friend had chosen it for this reason, and others. And because her friend had chosen it, because it was her domain, hers, always, the stranger would never sleep there. But she would have to stay somewhere. She was already exhausted. She leaned her head against her window and felt the hum run through her, until she fell into an uncomfortable doze.
Goldenseal by Maria Hummel, Counterpoint, 240 pages. $27. Book launch on Thursday, January 11, 7 p.m., at Venetian Cocktail & Soda Lounge in Burlington; reading on Monday, February 5, 1 p.m., at Manchester Community Library.
The original print version of this article was headlined “The Hotel Nostalgia | Book review: Goldenseal, Maria Hummel”
This article appears in Jan 10-16, 2024.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
