14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Isola' Review: Tale of a French Castaway
In a page-turner, things must by necessity go from bad to worse to unthinkable—and swiftly. The pages of Allegra Goodman's historical novel, 'Isola,' turn and turn beneath the readers' fingers, as if one were spinning through an old-fashioned Rolodex to search for a name.
The name that Ms. Goodman has plucked from the past is that of Marguerite de La Rocque de Roberval, a French noblewoman who, in the mid-16th century, was stranded on an island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, off the coast of modern-day Canada. Ms. Goodman's fictional treatment of Marguerite aims to breathe life into the dusty lungs of a mostly forgotten historical figure, who is given the words to tell her own story.
From the beginning, Marguerite's narrative is characterized by paradoxes: She is born into immense wealth yet controls none of it; she possesses spectacular privilege in the form of tutors and servants, but is forced to live at the whim of a villainous guardian. As she relates early in the novel, 'Men worked my fields, but I knew nothing of them. The steward collected tenants' rents and brought these to my guardian. . . . as I entered the hall, my guardian waited with an air of ownership, greeting me as though I was the guest.'
Ms. Goodman's earlier novels include 'Kaaterskill Falls' (1998), which followed a community of Jewish families in upstate New York in the 1970s, and 'Intuition' (2006), set amid a controversy in a cancer-research laboratory. Her 2023 novel, 'Sam,' is a coming-of-age story that unfolds in present-day Massachusetts. With 'Isola,' Ms. Goodman attempts something different: a work of historical fiction that takes place in a world profoundly distant from our own.
