Title "I Was Amelia Earhart"
By Jane Mendelsohn
Random House, 1996
Review
Soon after Amelia Earhart, the pioneering pilot and feminist icon, disappeared without a trace over the Pacific Ocean on July 2, 1937, there were swarms of intricate theories about what really happened to Earhart, despite the fact that Oliver Stone hadn't even been born yet. Most likely she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, died when their plane, running out of fuel and off course, plunged into the ocean. But maybe her friend Franklin D. Roosevelt had asked her to fly over the nearby Japanese-controlled Marshall Islands to do some spying, and she was captured and shot. Maybe she reached home safely but assumed a new identity. Or maybe she and Noonan survived on a little Pacific island, as Jane Mendelsohn imagines in her first novel I Was Amelia Earhart.
Mendelsohn provides some evocative moments (a heat wave, a storm) but no suspenseful or revelatory ones. I wouldn't recommend taking this solemn, self-absorbed book with you to a desert island.
Ultimately this novel is about Amelia. It's a character-driven realistic fantasy. It's real enough to feel like an appropriate ending for Amelia, yet it's fantastic enough to make me marvel and imagine myself in her shoes.
In her first novel, Jane Mendelsohn imagines what might have happened, crafting an hypnotic fictional memoir. The Amelia Earhart presented here is fiercely independent and unconventional, a heroine who is sympathetic without being the least bit sentimental. Earhart muses on her childhood, her marriage to G.P. Putnam, her love of flying, on herself, examining her own motives and desires with a somehow passionate dispassion, a satisfied calm belying a great deal of potential energy.Before the round-the-world flight attempt begins, Earhart frankly describes her relationship with her navigator, Fred Noonan, with whom she will shortly be marooned. When the flight goes wrong and Earhart disappears from the historical record, it is with this man she must survive. Time, isolation, and the basic struggle to survive bring about an inevitable-seeming love between Earhart and Noonan. When they believe that their crashed Electra has been spotted by a plane, they prepare the Electra for one final flight. Not knowing whether the plane that appears to have spotted them is Japanese or American, they make the decision to hold on to the life that they, and fate, have made for themselves.
Planes used to be vehicles for dreaming.
And in Jane Mendelsohn's short novel, they still are. The elusive dream here is happiness, something that Mendelsohn's fictional Earhart cannot find in her life. Not her husband, not her celebrity, not even the flying itself can bring her happiness. But what if she did not die but rather crash landed on a small island? And found this elusive happiness with her navigator, Noonan? That is the conceit of the second half of the book, as Earhart's disappearance comes to seem more and more willful, both in the madness of the original plan/flight and in the blissed out peace of island living.
Summary
The book begins before the flight, and it does set the stage well. Some of the details will be familiar to those who know something about Amelia
Reading level : adult
Rating : 3 stars
