The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg by Louis Bromfield

I bought The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928) by Louis Bromfield back in 2011, after reading Rachel’s review of his novel Mrs Parkington. I do also own that novel, but had yet to read anything by Bromfield. Both would have qualified for Project Names, but the reason I picked up Annie Spragg was (a) because the title was so intriguing and (b) because I read a review that said it was like reading an Alfred Hitchcock film.

Well. Hmm.

This might be the worst structured novel I’ve ever read. Or cleverly experimental in a way that I really don’t understand. And yet it was sufficiently well written – in its constituent pieces – that I still liked it. All very confusing.

The novel opens with Mr Winnery, who is living in a small town in Italy and slowly, laboriously writing a long book about miracles. He believes there is always a rationale explanation for them, and that is the gist of his book – but it has taken him years, and he doesn’t imagine he’ll ever finish it. Instead, like almost all of the English-speaking society he moves in in Italy, he has stayed in this exile because he can’t afford to leave. The one wealthy woman is the doyenne of the society, Mrs Weatherby, and she has a matriarchly abusive relationship with her companion – who loathes her but cannot leave. Throw in some Roman Catholic colour – nuns, priest – and you have the contemporary set up. Annie Spragg is not part of this set, but she is known to them – an odd, sad older woman.

But when Annie Spragg dies, the nun attending her deathbed finds that stigmata have appeared on her. Her palms and feet bear the scars of nails; her side the sign of having been cut. A miracle has happened – she has the same scars as the resurrected Christ.

I think this is a fascinating set up for a novel, and I was enjoying reading about the group of ex-pats in Italy. There was enough tension for an interesting and moving novel. But instead…

For approximately the next two hundred pages, Bromfield gives us detailed, scattered portraits of other people. We do see a bit of Annie Spragg’s childhood – one of many daughters of the leader of a religious cult. I find this sort of painstaking flashback a little irritating, but worse was when he goes off into detail about characters we’ve not met yet. Often these would end with some tangential connection to the present day events, sometimes impacting them. Occasionally they’d only link to a whole other chapter of back story that would then link to the present – which we didn’t see, we just had to remember it existed.

It’s a patchwork of stories that all feel like they should have been notes he made, to work out a history in his head. But they are compiled in such a disjointed way that we have to wade through many pages that have no emotional connection for the reader, because we don’t have a clue who he’s talking about. Or we get a chapter of back story that could equally well have been achieved with a couple of sentences of context.

It’s frustrating, because his writing is excellent. He manages to get moments of dark humour and observational humour into the scenes, and is incisive about human behaviour. I was really enjoying the beginning – and, indeed, I really enjoyed the end, when we were back in the present. (And all is… sort of explained?) In each chunk, once he’d finally established where we were and what was going on, I enjoyed a lot. But it was all so maddeningly arranged.

Perhaps people had more patience in the 20s, or perhaps this was all a formal experiment in storytelling. It didn’t really pay off for me, not least because I had to wait so long before the characters I was interested turned up again. BUT – because the page-by-page writing was so good, I’m quite likely to give him another go sometime. And Mrs Parkington is still on the shelf.