Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
Sadly, Sept. 11, 2001, wasn't the first time New Yorkers watched in horror as helpless souls jumped from a burning building to certain deaths.
On March 25, 1911, a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory took the lives of more than 145 workers. Most of them were young women and recent immigrants with little money or clout.
The tragedy helped expose the dire conditions under which these socio-economic outcasts were forced to eke out a living.
In this new novel from the author of The Little Women and Objects in the Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, vivid accounts of the tragedy intersect with reflections on the fragility and mystery of modern life. Katharine Weber's paternal grandmother, Pauline Gottesfeld Kaufman, finished buttonholes at the doomed factory in 1909.
Esther Gottesfeld, the fictional 106-year-old in Triangle, is the fire's oldest living survivor and may have deeper emotional scars than those she has revealed to her granddaughter, Rebecca.
Esther is on her deathbed in a West Village nursing home, and Rebecca is in New Haven, Conn., where she has spent two decades juggling a career in clinical genetics with a not-so-long-distance relationship. Her partner, George Botkin, is a New York composer whom Weber portrays with loving detail as a brilliant eccentric.
When Esther dies, days before 9/11, George and Rebecca must confront Ruth Zion, a nosy, humorless academic who is bent on uncovering Esther's role in a scandal. Ruth crows about her feminist credentials and tells Rebecca, "I really do want to dialogue with you."
If women such as Ruth exist, I've been lucky enough to avoid them. George isn't entirely convincing, either. His genius, which extends to crafting musical masterworks on patterns found in labor contractions and DNA, can seem exaggerated. Some of his unassuming quirks also defy credibility. Would an internationally renowned artist who can turn away seven-figure commissions adopt a cat just to rid his unkempt apartment of rats? Couldn't he get an exterminator? Or a housekeeper?
But however contrived the characters may seem at times, Weber's intellectually and emotionally engaged writing ensures we care about them. Triangle's structure enhances our empathy and adds suspense, incorporating Esther's testimony and interviews, amusing magazine profiles of George and a moving passage that evokes his music and Esther's spirit.
At its sharpest, Triangle affirms the often tricky relationship between fact and fiction and the subjectivity of all human experience.
Triangle
By Katharine Weber
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
242 pp., $23
To see more of USAToday.com, or to subscribe, go to http://www.usatoday.com
© Copyright 2006 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
