Book Review: “The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts” by DeWitt Henry
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
DeWitt Henry’s The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts is one of those books that has flown under the radar. Initially published in 2001 by a small university press, it is now being reissued by Pierian Springs Press (a publisher I’ve never heard of, so they must be small fry), with the first print run set at a scant 5,000 copies. While this novel has won a small writing award, it’s one of those books you’ve probably never heard of that’s now getting a new lease on life. I can say that this work of kitchen-sink realist fiction is well worth reading and even going out of your way to look for. Though its setting is suggestively set in the late 1950s or the 1960s (it never says so outright), this is the story of a 36-year-old single working woman (the titular character) who lives and works in Philadelphia and who muscles her way into a successful life. To its detriment, there are a plethora of characters to keep straight. The book also does a fair bit of jumping around in time and space, so one must keep an eye glued to the page not to miss essential details; still, this is a compulsively readable novel that will keep your bum in your seat, flipping pages, wanting to know what happens next. For a work of literary fiction — the author is a founding editor of the lauded Ploughshares literary journal — that’s no small feat.
The book packs as much working-class, blue-collar slice-of-life into its short length of less than 300 pages as it can. (Thus, some latter-novel spoilers are inevitable in this paragraph.) It concerns a woman named Anna Maye Potts, who lives with her sister and their family, who have consequently moved into their parent’s home after their father passed away. Her sister wants Anna out of the house, especially since a new baby is coming. Anna winds up in a local YWCA (a place where the showers have human excrement on the floor). While she is a forewoman at a chocolate factory and seems to have enough means to live in her own home or apartment, she seemingly wants to lash out at her sister by moving to the dregs. The other half of the novel is about the man Anna eventually falls in love with, Louie, who is 20 years her senior and someone with a philandering streak. He is married to a woman who is dying, and with whom they share a young daughter who has mental and developmental disabilities (though what exactly the disability is is not explicitly said in the book — she’s simply attending a school for children with special needs). In any event, Anna and Louie grow closer, but is that a good thing? Or will Anna come out of her shell and become less sheltered and more relatable to others?
The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts is compelling because it vividly brings its characters to life. One of the intriguing things about it is that it treats the workplace as simply an extension of family time. Anna and her colleagues socially gossip and run around the chocolate warehouse “fooling around” with each other. Thus, it comes as a shock when the company’s owner decides to produce chocolates for another manufacturer, meaning that the whip gets cracked, and everyone must work more efficiently than ever before. In short, the whole culture changes; it should come as no huge surprise or spoiler to note that people who have been loyal to the company start to get let go as the book wears on. In a sense, I suppose there’s a Marxist reading that one could take of this novel — if only more of it was set in the workplace and didn’t follow these characters into their troubled home lives. To that point, Anna’s sister comes across as shrill and a little one-note, seemingly only wanting to give her kin the boot so she and her husband can decide to sell the place and live in the suburbs in a case of what appears to be white flight. Louie is also a bit similarly one-dimensional: he’s a player with a reputation in the workplace as being such, so it’s not clear what Anna sees in him.
However, the fact that these characters are generally unmalleable is likely the whole point. These are flawed individuals scheming their way forward in life, and perhaps the book is meant to reflect human nature. Given the book’s setting, the world is about to undergo a seismic shift, with hippies and anti-war protesters roaring to the fore. This book’s point may be to foreshadow the Me Decade that would happen half a generation later. Or maybe this is just a book to show how people do or don’t change. If they do, it might be for the better (personal ambition) or worse (selfishness), depending on one’s circumstances. Still, The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts is a hypnotic read. This book has hidden charms and features monologues of dialogue and sentence after sentence of painterly detail, which is unique and entirely poetically literary. You’ll want to sit with this novel and ponder what it is trying to say about mid-century American life. The results are richly rewarding and as decadent as a fine gourmet chocolate. This book lingers with the reader and makes them want to discover what happens to Anna and Louie after the novel concludes. Even though this is an almost 25-year-old novel that was published and then disappeared, it is even more critical that it is getting a second chance at literary life: it’s good enough to be something that should remain in print. So don’t be shy. Be sure to snap up a copy of this book. After all, only 5,000 copies of it are floating around, making it imperative that it finds a cult readership that will drive the success of a little-known publishing house I have never heard of.
DeWitt Henry’s The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts was published by Pierian Springs Press on June 15, 2024.
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