who,
with her doctor husband, relocates to a small Colorado town in the midst of
the Depression, The Mineral Palace flaunts
its share of adultery, snobbery, prostitution, even infanticide.An Interview with novelist Heidi Julavits on her Pueblo-based novel, The Mineral Palace
by David Keplinger
As the first wave of hate mail began to pour in,
novelist Heidi Julavits wasn't thrown. Her book, The Mineral Palace
(Putnam, 2000), set in Pueblo in 1934, clearly has its issues. The
tale of a Minnesota debutante who,
with her doctor husband, relocates to a small Colorado town in the midst of
the Depression, The Mineral Palace flaunts
its share of adultery, snobbery, prostitution, even infanticide.
But she was surprised—miffed—when she discovered that few of her detractors even mentioned those controversies. The great majority written by older, former residents of Pueblo, Colorado, the letters took offense to her use of their very real town in a story at best only loosely based on fact. And they reprimanded the young writer for her misinformation.
“They scolded me that this street didn’t intersect with that street,” Julavits writes in a January, 2002 column for Poets and Writers magazine, “that the sort of events I claimed went on inside their defunct, now-razed museum—namely the actions of my made-up characters—never happened.
“They alerted me to the fact that they were actively trying to persuade their local libraries to ban my book and urging everyone in Pueblo to refuse to buy it—not because I had written a book about infanticide, but because I had behaved in a factually liberal manner and, moreover, characterized their town as dreary and desolate.”
The scandal her novel has provoked is, in one sense, deserved. If we are to judge The Mineral Palace as historical fiction—a term Julavits herself cringes at, preferring to call the story a mythic novel— then she’s defied history, defied the facts: her Pueblo is a mining town; her Arkansas River runs south, through Trinidad.
Since the novel’s debut, critics and fans of Julavits’ work have bumped heads over how to—or whether one should—read a historical novel as a work of art. Can historical fact be sacrificed for the sake of art?
Historian Jonathon Rees at the University of Southern Colorado read the book but was not transported, he claims, because of its lack of period details. “If you want to read a book about infanticide,” says Rees, “this is a pretty good one. If you want to read a book about a western town during the 1930s, this is not the book for you.”
Ultimately, it is the individual reader’s preference –history over art or vice versa—that will determine their enjoyment of such a novel. Outside of Pueblo, The Mineral Palace has reaped praise for its gripping narrative and its author’s knack for dialogue and metaphor. Those readers seem to be paying little attention to hard, factual details about the Pueblo of that period.
Should they? Most readers of literary fiction say no.
NEXT: Who is Heidi Julavits and what does she have to say?
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