An Urgent Meditation on Devotion in Maggie Nye's "The Curators"

Rachel León

June 19

Maggie Nye's debut novel, The Curators, came onto my radar when I interviewed her editor, Marisa Siegel. I admittedly don't read much historical fiction, so it's one I may've passed over had it not been for its publication on Northwestern University Press's Curbstone Books imprint—socially engaged work of any genre is my jam.

I know past events inform our present, and I believe in the importance of learning history, but I shy from historical fiction because—sometimes, at least—it lacks urgency. And I love work that, in the words of my friend Nora Decter, feels like an emergency. The Curators, set over one hundred years ago, does.

Part of the enticing urgent quality comes from the narration: a spellbinding first person plural. The novel is told by a group of teenage Jewish girls determined to keep the memory of Leo Frank alive—curating, hoping to someday start a museum housing things about him only the girls knew, and they resolve to build a golem in his image. The opening paragraph not only establishes this bewitching collective voice and sets the tone, it offers needed context and an eerie hint of what's to come:

We used to sit for hours in our clubhouse with our ears to each other's stomachs, listening to how loud our hunger could grow, until we convinced ourselves there were monsters inside us. This was in the very beginning, before anything had really happened. Before we had Mary Phagan and her murder, before we had Leo Frank and the brutal business of his fame, before we had brutal business of our own. We had only us and our huge hunger. In the end, the worst part was how it never stopped, not really. We used to call ourselves the Felicitous Five. We don't go by that name anymore.

The novel is all the more unsettling because Leo Frank and Mary Phagan aren't made up: the events involving them indeed happened. Chapters begin either with actual Atlanta Constitution newspaper clippings or fictional diary entries. The Leo Frank trial lasted for two years and he was ultimately lynched—but in 1986 the state of Georgia posthumously pardoned him. The novel concludes with a note about Nye's research, in which she states she's uninterested in true crime sleuthing. And that disinterest is one of the novel's strengths: while it's based on historical events, this novel is unconcerned with the true crime aspect—it's very much a literary novel, one careful and poetic in its use of language and inventive in its story, veering into magical realism, despite being built from true events. And, getting back to the novel's urgency, what makes it so, as any strong historical fiction does, is it makes the reader—or, at least, this reader—reflect on our current moment in history. Here, I thought about how, over a century later, this country's criminal justice system remains so broken. How much violence still exists, the ever-present danger some people continue to face for merely being who they are.

But I almost hesitate to mention that aspect because while it's present, The Curators is above all a meditation on devotion. To friends, to girlhood, to memory, to religion, to golems, to truth. Even, perhaps, to language and its power—Nye's use of first person plural gives a nod to the power of collective. And that isn't always a good thing. A collective going along with prejudice, injustice, or—I'll offer my own nod to current events here: genocide—is extremely dangerous. And the time period depicted in The Curators is pre-Holocaust, a devastating example of how destructive going along with a majority can be. Because what Nye's novel does with both language and story—one girl does ultimately stray from the group—made me consider the role we each play in altering history. We need not be passive. We shouldn't be, for don't we have a responsibility to one another? To protect others' humanity and very lives?

Am I reading too much into this novel? So many of these thoughts came later upon reflection, but ultimately I find that historical fiction's strength comes not only from the moment it presents but also from offering the reader two realities to compare: then and now. Are you better off than four years ago?, politicians often ask. Here is the novel's unspoken question: are we a kinder, more just society than we were a century ago? The answer is a resounding no, we're certainly not.

That's what makes The Curators feel so urgent to me. It's much more than a tale of obsession and Jewish girlhood. More too than a genre bending and blending novel, though its use of magical realism does aid in creating an eerie quality, accompanying its grace on the line level. This novel is quite unlike anything I've read: transportive, lyrical, inventive, and socially engaged. The Curators is proof of the innovative work Curbstone Books is publishing, and marks Maggie Nye as an exciting new voice in fiction.