Property
by Valerie Martin
Summary
Manon Gaudet narrates, and Manon Gaudet is the experiment: a novel of slavery told entirely from inside the head of a slaveholding woman, without a paragraph of authorial rescue.
It is 1828, on a sugar plantation north of New Orleans. Manon despises the husband she was married to for money, and the household's third figure is Sarah, the enslaved woman Manon received as a wedding present, whom her husband has used for years and who has borne his child. Manon's grievance is entirely for herself: she sees her own humiliation in every detail of the arrangement and Sarah's not at all, and Martin's cold discipline is to keep it that way, letting the reader watch a woman who is genuinely wronged, trapped by law and marriage with no property rights of her own, wield against Sarah the exact machinery that holds them both.
The middle of the book breaks it open: a slave revolt reaches the plantation, with consequences Manon narrates with her unfailing eye for her own injuries, and in the aftermath Sarah escapes, passing as a free man. The long pursuit and recapture that follow, and Manon's satisfaction in them, close the novel on one of the bleakest final notes in contemporary historical fiction, with nothing redeemed and nobody excused.
It is short, exact and completely without comfort.
Around two hundred pages.
Best for readers who can bear a narrator the book never forgives, and want to see the ownership of human beings anatomised through the mind of a beneficiary who believes herself the victim.
Historical Context & Significance
Property won the Orange Prize in 2003 as the shortlist's outsider: the bookmakers had Donna Tartt's The Little Friend as favourite, with Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man strongly tipped beside it, and the judges took the short, cold book instead, a decision that has aged extremely well. The Observer later placed it among the ten best historical novels.
Valerie Martin, raised in New Orleans, had form with ventriloquism: Mary Reilly, her 1990 novel, retells Jekyll and Hyde through the housemaid's voice, was nominated for the World Fantasy and Nebula awards, and was filmed with Julia Roberts. Across a dozen novels her method has stayed constant, finding the servant, the wife, the witness at the edge of a familiar story and handing them the microphone.
Property sits inside the contemporary novel of slavery alongside Beloved and The Known World, and is the discomfiting member of the family on purpose: it is the one that stays with the owners.