Product Description

Here at last is the eagerly awaited new novel from New York Times bestselling author Gail Godwin. Queen of the Underworld is sweeping and sultry literary fiction, featuring a memorable young heroine and engaging characters whose intimate dramas interconnect with hers.
In the summer of 1959, as Castro clamps down on Cuba and its first wave of exiles flees to the States to wait out what they hope to be his short-lived reign, Emma Gant, fresh out of college, begins her career as a reporter. Her fierce ambition and belief in herself are set against the stories swirling around her, both at the newspaper office and in her downtown Miami hotel, which is filling up with refugees.
Emma’s avid curiosity about life thrives amid the tropical charms and intrigues of Miami. While toiling at the news desk, she plans the fictional stories she will write in her spare time. She spends her nights getting to know the Cuban families in her hotel–and rendezvousing with her married lover, Paul Nightingale, owner of a private Miami Beach club.
As Emma experiences the historical events enveloping the city, she trains her perceptive eye on the people surrounding her: a newfound Cuban friend who joins the covert anti-Castro training brigade, a gambling racketeer who poses a grave threat to Paul, and a former madam, still in her twenties, who becomes both Emma’s obsession and her alter ego. Emma’s life, like a complicated dance that keeps sweeping her off her balance, is suddenly filled with divided loyalties, shady dealings, romantic and professional setbacks, and, throughout, her adamant determination to avoid “usurpation” by others and remain the protagonist of her own quest.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #565848 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-30
• Released on: 2007-01-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In the summer of 1959, plucky North Carolinian Emma Gant escapes overbearing parents to begin her career as a reporter at the Miami Star. Lodged at the colorful Julia Tuttle Hotel (a fictional Florida property named after Miami's real-life founder), Emma meets a group of Cuban families who've recently fled Fidel Castro. Emma spends her days learning the ropes as a reporter and her nights bantering (in broken Spanish) with the eclectic group of exiles. She also arranges rendezvous with her married lover, Paul, an innkeeper largely responsible for her decision to move South. Godwin, a three-time National Book Award nominee, taps into her experiences as a fledgling Florida journalist to render a tale whose ambling, amiable plot is redeemed by a cast of memorable characters. Among them are an arms-smuggling dentist, a diminutive German perfumer, a nefarious reporter with an "overall gleaming effect," and a distinguished academic who flees Cuba with his memoir stitched into his wife's wedding dress. Topping the list of provocative personalities is Ginevra Brown, aka the Queen of the Underworld, a former Miami madam once betrothed to a mobster. Readers who can't get enough Godwin can snap up the first installment of her two-volume memoir, The Making of a Writer: Journals, 1961–1963, also due out this month (and reviewed on p. 44). (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
The twelfth novel by Godwin, a three-time National Book Award nominee best known for her sharp women characters and Southern sensibility, is a disappointing attempt to recycle in fiction the youthful passion, determination, and self-doubt that she has written about with vitality in recently published journals. Emma Gant, Godwin's alter ego, is an eager young reporter just out of college, who lands at a Miami paper in 1959 and makes her way through a landscape populated by scheming journalists, Jewish mobsters, Cuban exiles, a schmalzy ex-beauty queen, and the former madam of an "elite island whorehouse." Unfortunately, Emma's flat first-person narration blanches even such an eclectic cast of characters of its native color.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

From The Washington Post
If we're finally done beating up on memoirists who fictionalize their lives too much, let's start complaining about novelists who don't fictionalize theirs enough. Gail Godwin, a three-time National Book Award nominee, has portrayed plenty of lives besides her own, but this winter, with the publication of the first volume of her journals, The Making of a Writer: 1961-63, also comes Queen of the Underworld, her most autobiographical novel, which demonstrates a severe lack of authorial distance. It tells the story of Emma Gant, an ambitious young woman who leaves home after graduating from the University of North Carolina with a journalism degree to take a job on the Miami Star in 1959. People in the know can match up some of the other characters to real-life counterparts on the Miami Herald, such as Al Neuharth, who appears here as a slick editor nicknamed Lucifer, years before he founded USA Today. And yet Queen of the Underworld isn't a juicy roman à clef. There's no score-settling here. Like the journals of an ambitious young person, it's self-absorbed, rambling and dull, despite a number of fascinating side characters and the makings of a fantastic plot spread over 10 action-packed days: Emma comes down to Miami to escape her abusive stepfather and be with her secret lover, a married man (20 years older) who owns a beachfront club that the mob is targeting. An old family friend takes Emma under her wing and enlists her in arms smuggling. The hotel where she's staying is filling up with wealthy Cubans waiting for Castro to fall. (Now there's a hotel bill!) And when a hurricane sweeps through the city, Emma meets a suicidal woman -- the Queen of the Underworld -- who once managed a notorious whorehouse. But nothing really ruffles Emma's beautiful hair except the thought that one of her little feature stories might get trimmed by the copy desk. Choosing to write this most personal story in the first person was Godwin's first mistake; leaving her sense of irony locked in a drawer was her second. Emma may be a promising journalist -- she and others tell us often enough -- but again and again it's clear that she's not up to the task of narrating this novel, which suffers from a deadening lack of psychological insight and a maddening unwillingness to allow events to resonate as they could. We have here, for instance, various kinds of revolution -- personal, cultural, sexual and political -- but Godwin fails to connect them in any meaningful way. The Queen of the Underworld cries out for a storyteller who can treat her own youthful vanities with some illuminating distance, maybe even a little humor. "I made up my mind," she tells us early in the novel, "to adopt this concept of 'Emma-ness' as a talisman against those loss-of-self times that flattened me." But in fact, it's the flatness of her perspective that drains the passion from her affair, the terror from the Cuban revolution and the comedy from her ridiculous feelings of envy toward anyone with more responsibility at the paper. Sneaking into the newsroom library to read her editor's clippings, she says, "My jealousy animal reared up dangerously on its hind legs when I laid my hands on Norbright's corpus: six stuffed envelopes in as many years. If I was still here in six years, how many would I have? I would be twenty-eight. Would I have a novel published by then? Would I have won a Pulitzer for investigative reporting? Oh God, so much to get done.... The positive thing about my envy of others was that it could be depended upon to rev up my incentive motor. I sat up straighter at [the] Remington, pounded its keys harder, and mentally steamrollered over my picky inner critic." Rise up, inner critic, we need your picking! The trouble isn't that Emma is naive and vain (though she is), it's that her clunky, pedestrian voice -- all revved up -- steamrolls over any potential insights about what's happening to her. Godwin hasn't supplied anyone in the novel to place Emma's ordinary human foibles in an interesting context; nor has she spiked Emma's voice with any dramatic irony to imply some larger or more mature perspective, which would make all the difference between analyzing a self-absorbed person and being stuck with one. Toward the very end of the story, Emma receives a bureau assignment that she fears will retard her skyrocketing career. Pouting in her room, she wishes she had a television to watch Ingrid Bergman in "The Turn of the Screw." Could that allusion to the Master's tale about an overconfident young woman be intentional? One can't help but wonder wistfully how Emma's story might have been handled by Henry James -- or even the novelist Gail Godwin. Ron Charles is a senior editor for Book World.

Reviewed by Ron Charles
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

frustrating
This book starts out with everything going for it: intriguing characters, an intimate look at the underbelly of Miami in the
1950's. But somewhere in there, Godwin seems to have completely bypassed the plot. She gets the nitty gritty of a newsroom right, and then does very little with it.

There was, I felt, an element of "Mary Sue-ishness" in it. Except for the evil stepfather (a minor character without the rich extensive history given most of the others), everyone seems to be standing in line to tell Emma (protagonist) how clever, pretty, stylish, bold, talented writer/reporter, she is. This got annoying. Except for a streak of perfectionism, she was perfect! That makes for a boring heroine no matter how "grirry" her job.

Also, the title is misleading. Emma, through sheer coincidence, manages to make contact with a young woman who gained notoriety by running a charm school for call girls. I expected much more of her story, which was dropped for pages before being brought up again at the end. This was frustrating because the "Queen of the Underworld" was a truly fascinating character, even more so than the heroine.

In addition for someone who has been extensively physically and sexually abused as a girl, Emma's adult relationships were amazingly stress free and wholesome. How can she possibly trust men as partners wholeheartedly after being beaten and raped by her stepfather? This rang false.

Lackluster, trite and disappointing
Like many of the others who have reviewed this book, I am a longtime fan of Gail Godwin and found most of her other books rich, complex and rewarding. I was pleased to see she had a new book out.

After completing around 100 pages, I was still waiting for anything to happen, other than the introduction of characters, the writing of a few newspaper stories by Emma, and several meals. I determined that I would finish the book regardless, and it was a disappointment that by the end, I still felt that essentially very little of interest had happened.

Many plot threads were introduced and never resolved. These dead ends were distracting, because I had noted them and imbued them with future significance, which never happened. For example, Emma's aunt Tess is involved in a plot with her employer, a Cuban expatriate dentist, to smuggle weapons into Cuba. We never learn how either of them became involved in this, what eventually happened with the weapons, or the significance of their involvement. The plot, if you can call it that, was thin and aimless. With such rich potential - the Miami of the late 50s, during the early days of Castro's regime - the plot could have been incredibly meaningful and complex - but unfortunately it's almost as if we see it through the eyes of an uninformed person who doesn't understand what she is seeing.

Most of the characters are rather flat and undeveloped. I hate to say it, but they seem like caricatures. An example is Lydia, the Cuban mother of Alex, the manager of Emma's hotel. From statements that Alex makes, we realize that he feels manipulated and used by his mother, but this is never explored or explained. She's just a self-centered fashion plate who likes to throw parties. The only really well-developed character is Emma, and I found myself disliking her more and more as she was fleshed out. I too realized that this book must be autobiographical, and wondered to myself about a character who accepts the gifts and kindnesses of her lover Paul's wife, while carrying on an affair with her husband behind her back. With apparently no guilty conscience! The book also implies that she accepts gifts and money from Paul too. It happens, but it's not endearing, and doesn't seem to cause Emma any remorse.

Every author has a right to a clunker or two, and the usually reliable Gail Godwin must have had a bad year with this one. I gave it two stars because her writing is still enjoyable and there are moments when it shines, usually when she is describing something. She can evoke a time and place, although I don't think she did justice to her setting, other than the Julia Tuttle Hotel, which was nicely described.

The Education Of A Young Woman
Gail Godwin's latest novel is all about Emma Gant, recently graduated from a university in North Carolina, and embarking on her first real job as a beginning reporter (she writes obits) for the MIAMI STAR. Apparently we are to think of both Jane Austin's EMMA and Thomas Wolfe's LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL when we meet this character. She has all the enthusiasm and naivete we expect from a young woman who celebrates her twenty-second birthday during the week or so that this novel spans in 1959. A bourbon and beer girl, she hardly knows the difference between a yarmulke and a guayabera, is subject to the many pitfalls that a novice makes on any beginning career and of course encounters the sexism at the newspaper we would expect from males of that era. She sometimes asks the wrong questions and is provincial when it comes to world events. She works hard, however, at being sophisticated and hopes that not many people in the Julia Tuttle, the hotel where she is staying, will witness her first visit to the hotel pool since neither her swimsuit nor her Bass Weejuns are what a fashionable young woman would be wearing. Naive she may be, but not too naive to be having an affair with Paul Nightingale, a Jewish restaurant owner twenty years her senior, and not above taking money from his unsuspecting wife to purchase an expensivse pair of pumps from Saks Fifth Avenue.

Godwin makes both Emma and the many characters she encounters, many of them refugees who have fled Castro's Cuba, as well as the City of Miami itself, come alive in vivid detail: Paul's Aunt Stella, a survivor of the Holocaust and a designer of custom perfumes; Alex de Costa, a Cuban American hotel employee who has a mild crush on Emma; his many-times-married mother Lidia; Emma's mother's friend Tess; the newspaper employees et al. Most importantly, however, is the suicidal character Ginevra Snow, the "queen of the underworld," a retired madam now married to a psychiatrist, with whom Emma becomes obsessed. From key lime pie to Howard Johnson's to the humidity, Godwin gets the city just right as well.

With language that only a first class writer is capable of, Godwin guides the reader through the education of this young woman with humor and flair. Emma quickly learns some lessons she didn't count on-- about her friend Tess and her lover Paul in particular. Godwin, however, leaves the reader wanting more, as we do not know how successful Emma will be on her new outpost away from the downtown Miami location of the paper, what will be the outcome of her complicated relationship with Paul, and will she ever write about the Queen of the Underworld?

If you believe that a good fiction writer should first and foremost tell a good story, than Ms. Godwin meets all the requirements. Secondly she has created a person all of us can identify with as practically everyone under the sun has had to live through the early days of being on his or her own for the very first time.