Those opposed to Rees and the former Puebloans upset at the historical liberties Julavits takes will also probably not scour the narratives of Homer or Sophocles’ Oedipus for concrete details about ancient Troy or Thebes. They prefer not to search texts for specific anthropological details that will indicate street maps, popular pastimes, or tidbits on the fashion trends of Greece and its environs, circa 800 B.C.E. These works are read for their metaphorical value, as they apply to our lives today.
In her column, Julavits fully admits that she “utilized facts not as a stabilizing substructure, but as a source of inspiration from which an enhanced fictional world could be built from the ground up.”
But Professor Rees, and others like him, who emphasize the informational value of the prose, fail to be convinced. “It affected my enjoyment of the book a significant amount,” he says of the book’s lack of hard, factual resources. “The dialogue is engaging and the characters are extremely well-developed. I think Julavits is a very good writer, but I also think if she wants to do fiction set in an historical setting again, she needs to do a lot more research.”
Very
good, and lucky. At thirty years old, Heidi Julavits’ life had been
transformed after a series of serendipities that put her in contact first with
a journal editor, then an agent, then a publishing house, all of whom saw in
her work-in-progress the vitality and courage of a real thing. Before the novel
was finished, she had already landed a two-book deal with Putnam, a feat almost
as impressive as the writing itself.
Certainly, to her New York agent and to her editor, the late Faith Sale, Julavits’ choice to set the novel in Pueblo was no scandal. To those who saw her novel as a work of art and a good investment, Julavits might have set her story in Kalamazoo.
She recalls that she set The Mineral Palace in the southeastern Colorado city because Bena, the story’s protagonist, shared a lot of similarities with her late grandmother. Like Bena, Julavits’ grandmother had come to Pueblo on the eve of having her first child with her doctor husband. Like Bena, she had hated Pueblo. But there, Julavits insists, the similarities end between the two.
“Everybody has got to find an autobiographical hinge,” she says of her readers, blaming that in part on the fact that she’s a woman writer. “When you’re a woman, you don’t get asked about the book, you get asked about your personal life.”
Having dealt with her share of reporters since the novel’s publication, Julavits has found that her interviewers seem less concerned with her treatment of the issues than with how she came to be invested in them.
“The unspoken conclusion,” she tells me, “is that women are emotional and confessional…women make their mark on literature by spilling their guts, it’s assumed, whereas men are more into universal concerns.”
Now under fire by those who know she could not have lived in the “real” Pueblo of 1934, she has found herself growingly perturbed at the assumption that a young woman might lack the insight to fully imagine a time and place which she did not experience first hand.
She’d had little exposure to Pueblo before she began writing, she admits. In 1996 she visited the town for five days, staying at the Baxter bed-and-breakfast downtown, within walking distance of Mineral Palace Park, where, in 1934, an actual “palace” had stood, in ruins, at the center of the park. It has long since been razed. In the course of her research, she kept in close contact with the Pueblo Historical Society and the librarians at the Pueblo Public Library.
Her most invaluable companion, however, was a 90-year-old Pueblo resident named Red Hart Withers, a rancher, who had lived in Pueblo during the period in which her novel was to be placed.
