This is what happened. I was working at my machine, with only a few minutes left before the end of the day, I remember so clearly I can still see it, that I had only two right sleeves remaining in my pile -- my sister Pauline, she did the left sleeves and I did the right sleeves and between us we could finish sometimes as many as twenty-four shirtwaists in an hour, three hundred shirtwaists on a good day, if the machines didn't break down and if the thread didn't break too often, and if nobody put a needle through her finger, which happened all the time and the biggest problem then was you didn't want to bleed on the goods but you didn't want to stop work so you took a piece of scrap and you wrapped your finger tight and you kept working -- my sister was a little faster than I was and sometimes her finished pile would be high because she did her sleeve first and then I would take from her pile to do the right sleeve but I have to say my seams were the ones always perfectly straight.
That's the voice of Esther Gottesfeld, remembering the day of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire, in which nearly 150 sweatshop workers were killed, most of them women and girls. (The fire is an actual historical event, but Esther and her story are fictional.) At the time of her death, Esther is 106, and she is the last living survivor of the fire. There are still mysteries surrounding her story, though, and small discrepancies in the versions of the story that Esther has told over the years. We get to read several of those versions -- trial testimony shortly after the fire, a reminiscence from fifty years later (the source of the above paragraph, which opens the book), contemporary interviews -- as Esther's story recurs throughout the novel.
Those contemporary interviews were done by feminist historian Ruth Zion in the year before Esther's death; Ruth later approaches Esther's granddaughter, Rebecca, and Rebecca's partner, George, in the hope that they may be able to answer some of Ruth's remaining questions.
Triangle shares some themes with Weber's previous novel, The Little Women (which I raved about here). If you're telling someone else's story, how do you balance your obligations to the subject of the story with your obligations to truth? And in Triangle, Weber complicates things by adding the factor of historical relevance and asking how that changes the balance of obligations.
For the most part, the characters are very sharply drawn. Esther comes through very vividly, especially since all we ever really hear from her is the one story, repeated over and over. I especially admired the way Esther's language changes over the years; you can hear the difference between the recent immigrant, still not very comfortable with English, and the Esther of 90 years later who's being interviewed by Ruth.
Rebecca and her partner, George, are a believable couple, and the secondary story of George's career as a composer is nicely handled. Weber almost always gets the musical terminology right, which doesn't often happen when novelists write about musicians, and her description of the premiere of George's Triangle Oratorio is a magnificent piece of writing, so perfectly capturing the thrill of a live performance that you feel as if you've heard the music yourself.
The character of Ruth is the novel's greatest weakness. She's a stiff, unlikable cliche of the humorless feminist academic, a woman who says the words "Ha ha ha" instead of actually laughing, and she's the only character in the book who doesn't feel like a real person.
As for the mystery of what really happened to Esther and her sister on the day of the fire, the answer is telegraphed too early and too obviously, which lessens the drama of the final chapter; those revelations should land with far more impact than they do, because we've long since seen them coming.
Despite those flaws, though, the writing is lovely and the story compelling. Triangle doesn't reach the level of The Little Women, but it's a fine piece of work.
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