Reviews

The Fall of Rome by Martha Southgate

lucyb's review

4.0

This book is beautifully lyrical, profoundly sad without being sentimental, and hopeful without being blindly optimistic. Southgate's evocation of rough Brooklyn streets and the unreal beauties of autumn at a Connecticut boarding school has an eerie perfection, each detail delicately balanced. One of the most remarkable things about the book, to me, is how such a slim novel manages to address several big issues without becoming unwieldy. Gaps in generational understanding are dealt with, as parent-child and pupil-teacher relationships are described from multiple perspectives. The book's principle characters all come up with different answers to the questions of how we make the personal political, of how social realities affect individual choices, and (not least) what class and race mean in the US at the turn of the twenty-first century. Despite the ambitiousness of this project, Southgate's writing never feels forced or pretentious. Also, I feel Southgate's quiet, warm portrayal of friendships between women deserves a mention, so rare is it to have such attention given to such relationships. I have a weakness for boarding school fiction as a genre, but this book transcends that. It would make a great addition to the reading list of any book club, but especially book clubs interested in intersectional feminism.