I read The Prospectors by Ariel Djanikian for book club. One of the joys of book club is that it forces you to read books outside your wheelhouse. That’s also one of the sorrows of book club. The Prospectors could have gone either way. It’s historical fiction, which I’m typically ambivalent towards, but it also extends its focus to a population often ignored by the genre, which I like. I typically don’t care for literary fiction, but I do like genre fiction with a literary bent. I wasn’t sure which direction The Prospectors was going to go, and unfortunately it ultimately tipped to the negative side.
What’s it about?
When Alice’s sister and her husband strike it rich during the gold rush, Alice decides to seize her destiny by joining them in the dangerous Klondike. As a single woman, Alice knows that she has to seize any opportunity… even if it means seizing it from others, specifically from the indigenous people who predated the white settlers. While helping her once-hardy sister through poor heath, Alice clashes with her brother-in-law and cultivates an actively antagonistic relationship with the two native workers employed by her relations. A hundred years later, in 2015, Alice’s descendant also makes the journey to the Klondike, but for a decidedly different reason: her dying grandfather, out of a sense of guilt and responsibility, wants to make financial reparations to the descendants of the people displaced by the rush.
What’d I think?
I was surprised how quickly I was sucked into The Prospectors. I liked the easy writing style, and I found it captured my attention quickly. Unfortunately, it didn’t keep my goodwill very long due entirely to one element: Alice.
I knew from the summary of The Prospectors that a major part of the novel was going to involve viewing the gold rush with the awareness that the rushers were stealing land. I knew that the characters weren’t going to be paragons of virtue when it came to their dealings with the indigenous population. I was still taken aback by how disgusted I was with Alice’s conduct. I thought that her story was going to be that of tenacious and opportunistic young woman who scrabbled for everything she could get. I knew that the 2015 reframing of the rush was going to see the larger-picture indignities and acknowledge that while the rush and the seizing of all that land was wrong, the poor individuals who partook in it didn’t necessarily realize the damage they were dealing or, at least, not the extent of it. That’s how it is portrayed to some extent through Alice’s sister and her husband. Not so for Alice.
Alice is immediately and acutely aware that they are stealing the land and that they are achieving their fortunes by the exploitation of the land’s first inhabitants. This knowledge in no way makes Alice reflect on her actions. There’s never a moment when she either makes a stand or even thinks to herself something along the lines of I don’t have the power to stop these men from doing this, and I’m very poor, and if I can’t do anything to stop it I may as well profit even if it makes me complicit. Instead, that awareness makes her more actively racist than anyone else in the book. She sees the indigenous people—and specifically Jim and Jane, the brother sister pair that work directly for her brother-in-law—as a threat who have been legitimately wronged and who are clever enough and ruthless enough to drag down the white family who has wronged them. She takes it upon herself to actively push them down before they can ruin her. She orchestrates conspiracies against them, and even stoops to doing harm to her own family so that she can pin it on Jim or Jane and have them removed from her life. She is truly despicable.
I lost all ability to sympathize with Alice early in the novel. She, her sister Ethel, and Ethel’s husband Clarence, are returning to the Klondike with Jim as a guide. A heavy snowbank has blocked their way, and they have to wait for a thaw to keep moving. When the path clears, Jim refuses to immediately return to the path with the other travelers, and they are forced to wait a day because he won’t pack their things due to the danger. Alice decides that Jim is too lazy to pack their things and rails against him, telling her brother-in-law that Jim will be responsible for Ethel (who is ill) dying. Instead, an avalanche comes and kills nearly everyone on the pass. Had they followed Alice’s timetable, they would have been among the dead; Jim saved their lives. Instead of any number of appropriate responses—relief that they are alive, gratitude to Jim, terror at what might have happened, newfound respect for Jim’s expertise—Alice decides that Jim is smug at having showed her up and claims him as her ultimate nemesis. She despises him from that point on. The audacity, the racism, and the insanity of that response!
Antiheroes can be fascinating characters. When an author writes a character who does terrible or selfish things but makes us still care about them, to for them despite our reservations? It’s incredible. Alice is this novel’s main protagonist. In the 2015 segments, we look back at her actions as her descendants try to make reparations for the things she did. Those sections are important to the narrative structure, but they’re there more as commentary on Alice’s story than as their own narrative. Alice is the character with whom we spend the most time, and by a wide margin. The Prospectors is Alice’s story, and we are in Alice’s head almost the whole time. She is not despicable in an intriguing way, the way that sees her doing bad things but with strong rationale that makes the reader understand and root for her in the moment, and only reflect on the awfulness after having taken that step away from the moment. The Prospectors puts so much emphasis on Alice that and spends so much time in her head that I think the reader is supposed to be sympathetic to her or at least to have respect for her tenacity. The problem is that she is almost cartoonishly evil, and I feel that the message of the novel would have been more powerful if she’d just been a regular girl doing her best and not realizing what her best was doing to someone else.
It strikes me as a failing in books like this to make the wrongdoers actively seek to harm. The worst thing about looking back at history with modern sensibilities is that we can see objectively the atrocities that occurred with the knowledge that, to the people living back then, they weren’t atrocities. Making Alice aware of her own evil undercuts the message in some ways. It wasn’t just the actively evil people who were doing harm; it was everyone, even people who were just doing what they thought was the best they could with the hand they’d been dealt. It makes it easy for modern readers to dismiss any harm we’re doing now because it’s so easy to say, “I’m not like Alice” and then move on.
I was truly flabbergasted when I read the afterward and found out that, while some of the details are fudged for narrative satisfaction, Alice is actually a real historical person… and not just any real historical person, but author Ariel Djanikian’s ancestor. I respect her for holding her family accountable, but I can’t imagine publicly putting a family member—even a long-dead ancestor like that—so publicly on blast. Good for her, but that was honestly the novel’s biggest twist.
The afterward clarified something else that had bothered me about the novel: Jane. She is a native woman, but most of her backstory and narrative function feel like they belong to a white woman. While Alice’s hatred towards Jane’s brother Jim is decidedly based in racism, her animosity towards Jane largely stems from Jane’s beauty and the fact that Jane is cultivating or has had relationships with the powerful men closest to Alice, the men with whom Alice is trying to ingratiate herself for opportunity. Djanikian explains in the afterward that Jane an amalgamation of a real (white) woman and the idea that many of the settlers had indigenous housemaids. In that way, Jane doesn’t always ring true. However, I like her as a narrative foil to Alice. Jane and Alice are two sides of the same cunning, ruthless coin. Alice just always falls face up, or maybe she’s just a tiny bit more willing to rig the toss.
My main problem with the book was Alice, but there was one other thing that bothered me. It also bothered the rest of my book club group, and it was the one thing we all agreed on: the pacing is odd. For the most part, everyone liked the part in the Klondike, but there’s an odd time jump after that. Presumably because the primary conflict is between Alice and Jane (or, in any case, Alice’s absurd animosity towards Jane that isn’t necessarily motivated by anything specific Jane has done or, at least, nothing that Jane has done that Alice hasn’t also done or considered doing). Presumably for that reason, the novel skips the period of time when Jane is not an active presence in Alice’s life. It’s an odd choice. We go from the hard time in the Klondike digging for gold to a time of prosperity in a mansion in Los Angeles in the blink of an eye. Alice is suddenly married with children, her relationship with Clarence utterly transformed, and her circumstances entirely different… and the reader just has to roll with it, even though every other part of the book had been unfolding at a steady, gapless pace. Everyone in the book club was thrown off by the jump, and found the LA section the least compelling of the entire novel.
The modern section of the novel is largely forgettable until the end, but once we get to the end it actually becomes my favorite part of the novel. I’m not going to spoil it because I do try to avoid large spoilers in my reviews if possible, but I will say that there’s an ironic twist in the modern section that puts an excellent cap on an otherwise middling novel. It is both narratively and thematically satisfying, and while I didn’t particularly like The Prospectors overall, I thought it ended on its best foot.
What’s the verdict?
I was intrigued to see if The Prospectors could balance a narrative about a white woman struggling to make the best of her limited opportunities with the reality that “her best” meant participating, both passively and actively, in stealing land and other atrocities against the indigenous population. Unfortunately, I found the execution let it down. My biggest complaint is that Alice, the primary POV character, is despicable. I think, based on the way the novel is written, that we are supposed to have sympathy for her and to respect her tenacity even at her worst moments, but I hated her, finding her by far the worst of the prospectors. There’s something to be said for featuring a historical antihero and making her cruelty and racism apparent even through her own flawed perspective, but the narrative balance of the book elevates Alice’s voice far above those of the others—including her descendants who are trying to set things right and the indigenous characters who lack POV entirely. I liked the concept of The Prospectors better than the execution. I love it when historical fiction makes the effort to elevate minority voices that are often forgotten or ignored in typical historical narratives, but I feel that The Prospectors missed its target slightly.
What’s next?
I don’t read a huge amount of historical fiction, and I don’t know any other gold rush books, but I can’t write a historical fiction review without reminding everyone to read The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. It’s the best one.
Here are a few other historical fiction titles I’ve reviewed in recent years:
Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo (Red and Lavender scares)
Good Night, Irene by Luis Alberto Urrea (WWII)
Kindred by Octavia Butler (antebellum south)
Pulp by Robin Talley (1950s)
The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory (Tudor England)
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café by Fannie Flagg (1920s-30s)
A Clash of Steel by C.B. Lee (1820s)
Hour of the Witch by Chris Bohjalian (witch trials)
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett (1950s/1980s)
A Blog of Books and Musicals 