THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 23, 1996 TAG: 9606210717
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY DIANE SCHARPER
LENGTH: 73 lines
I WAS AMELIA EARHART
A Novel
JANE MENDELSOHN
Alfred A. Knopf. 146 pp. $18.
Jane Mendelsohn has written her first novel, I Was Amelia Earhart, on the premise that everyone loves a mystery, especially when that mystery concerns a beautiful woman. If that woman is a pioneer who exudes sex appeal, and if she happens to be the first woman to cross the Atlantic by airplane, the mystery is so much the better.
As the novel opens, readers are inside Amelia Earhart's mind as she observes the sky from her pilot's seat: ``The sky is flesh. The great blue belly arches up above the water and bends down behind the line of the horizon. It's a sight that has exhausted its magnificence for me over the years, but now I seem to be seeing it for the first time.''
A graduate of Yale University, Mendelsohn has a poet's love for words and an artist's eye for detail. Her writing is suggestive of books by Antoine de St. Exupery and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. I Was Amelia Earhart is part poem, part biography, part memoir and part fiction. The plot is deliberately ambiguous. The story occurs as Earhart has just escaped from her island prison, or is dying, or is in heaven.
The narrative is told in alternating passages of first person and third person, which furthers the book's poetic quality but also make it somewhat gimmicky. The shift to the third person does not add anything to the immediacy created by the first person.
That immediacy can be seen in an incident from Earhart's childhood. Her father had taken her to the Iowa State Fair, where, biographers have it, she saw her first airplane and was first bitten by the flying bug. Mendelsohn writes it this way: ``But when the ride (roller coaster) picked up speed and I could feel the wind against my face - I saw my mother and my sister in a blur of light, balanced on a strand of my hair - I knew it was myself and not the world that moved, and this cataclysm of perspective changed my life.''
This style was partly inspired by Last Flight, Earhart's own dispatches for a syndicated column that were later embellished and published as a book by her writer husband, George Putnam. Those dispatches fanned many theories concerning the whereabouts of Earhart and her navigator, Frederick Noonan, after they disappeared in July 1937 during their much publicized flight around the world.
Mere minutes before her disappearance, Earhart had radioed that she was low on fuel, and so some theorize that the Lockheed Electra ran out of gas and crashed into the Pacific. Others thought she had made an emergency landing on Nikumaroro, an uninhabited Pacific atoll, 350 miles from Howland island, the plane's destination.
Mendelsohn ascribes to the low-fuel theory and places Earhart and Noonan on an uninhabited Pacific atoll similar to Nikumaroro. Here Earhart and Noonan eat fish and berries while collecting rain water and drinking coconut milk. Here they also learn that love is the meaning of life.
Earhart, who was born in 1897 in Atchison, Kansas, was a verbally gifted, multitalented woman who led many lives. She was at one time or another a premed student, nurse's aide, telephone operator, truck driver, social worker, lecturer, writer, editor and airplane pilot.
She became interested in flying while working as a nurse in a Toronto military hospital during World War I. Hearing the wounded pilots talk, she was fascinated by their accounts of flying and became hooked. How ironic that she has hooked generations of readers and writers - Mendelsohn among them - not by her life and talents but on the mystery of her disappearance. MEMO: Diane Scharper is a poet who teaches memoir writing at Towson
State University in Maryland. ``Radiant,'' her second collection of
poems, was recently published by Cathedral Foundation Press. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
The real Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Pacific Ocean in 1937. by CNB