The best and briefest way I can think of to explain how this novel failed me was by saying that it felt like I just read an extended excerpt from a much longer novel. There’s really nothing here – just a quick little 200-page novella that doesn’t have the time or space necessary to develop the characters, complicate the plot, or explore any of the multiple interesting potential angles the story could have gone into.
The Mad Women’s Ball is Victoria Mas’s debut novel (and uh, it shows), taking place at an infamous women’s asylum in 1800’s Paris. Our two main characters are Genevieve, a respected and long-term nurse at the asylum whom the patients call “The Matron”; and Eugenie, a young woman from a bourgeois family who is locked away by her family after she claims she can communicate with spirits. The two women forge an unlikely connection and hatch a plan for Eugenie to escape the asylum on the one night a year when the hospital is open to the public: the famous Lenten ball, when the patients are allowed to dress up and mingle with the Parisian citizens who have come to witness the spectacle.
The first and most glaring problem with this novel is that Eugenie’s “gift” of speaking to the dead is clearly established as a fact. There is absolutely no doubt or ambiguity surrounding her claim that the dead communicate with her, at any point in the story. The fact that Mas had an opportunity to make Eugenie’s spiritualist claims a little more suspicious and give the readers space to wonder if maybe she is struggling with a mental illness that the 19th century doctors don’t yet have the vocabulary for, and then decided, no, it’s all definitely real, is extremely frustrating. This could have been a cool Alias Grace-style story of a mental health professional trying to figure out if a patient is telling the truth or merely saying what she thinks the doctors want to hear. Add that to the fact that in reality, every single Spiritualist who claimed to speak to the dead was actually a con artist exploiting desperate people…but no, instead Victoria Mas has decided that her story takes place in a universe where characters are given solid evidence of life after death, and then do fuck-all with it.
On top of that, the book is just drowning in what I like to call “Disney Feminism” (Eugenie doesn’t want to get married? She likes reading and hates wearing corsets? Wow, groundbreaking, what a fresh character, we certainly haven’t seen this kind of lazy feminist shorthand characterization before!!!) and tiresome “bUt WhAt If ThE pAtIeNtS aRe ThE rEaL sAnE oNeS?!” themes that show up in every single asylum story you’ve ever seen before. And Mas makes the classic debut novelist mistake where she overexplains Every. Little. Thing because she’s afraid we won’t figure it out ourselves. At one point in the story, a patient learns that she’s been cleared for release, and promptly slits her wrists. Mas then treats us to an extended paragraph where she explains, see, the patient has no family outside the asylum and she’s been here so long and this is the only place she feels safe, so she wasn’t actually trying to kill herself, she just wanted to make sure they kept her institutionalized! But we, as the reader, know all of this because it’s already been established in the text, and the fact that Mas doesn’t trust us to connect the dots is a little insulting.
The second major failure of this book is that the story is essentially a prison escape adventure, but Mas doesn’t indulge herself in any of the fun tropes of the genre. Look, I hate to reference Sucker Punch, Zack Snyder’s weird masturbatory fever dream that I once paid eleven American dollars to see in theaters, but at least he understood that when you have a group of characters planning to escape an evil asylum, you can have some fun with it. Give us a classic “here’s how the escape will go down” explanation scene! Give us a last-minute complication! Give us an unexpected betrayal! God, we don’t even get a scene where a character studies a set of blueprints or steals a key from a guard and I’m furious about it. Don’t give me the plot description “two women plot an escape from an asylum using a formal event as cover” and then do absolutely nothing with it.
Let’s hope the movie adaptation was better.
loudbookishtype 