For an author conjuring fiction from historical fact, perhaps the biggest challenge is this: how to sustain suspense when the reader already knows how the story will end? Mary Beth Keane solves this problem ingeniously in Fever, a novel based on the life of Mary Mallon, more commonly known as Typhoid Mary, or the first known asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever. Mallon, born in 1869, spent nearly three decades of her 69 years in quarantine at the order of the New York Department of Health; her life before and between these episodes was hard, but not especially harder than that of other female immigrants of the period. But Keane makes up for this absence of events by narrowing both the narrative arc and the point of view; in doing so, she crafts an absorbing and beautifully written novel.

The bulk of the book is devoted to the most dramatic decade of Mallon’s life, from 1900 to 1910. During those years the Irish immigrant Mary, having climbed the ladder of domestic service from laundress to the relatively prestigious position of cook, is pursued and quarantined for the first time, for a period of three years, by board of health officials. Keane writes in the third person, but with a subtly handled partial omniscience into Mary’s thoughts and feelings. We feel the heroine’s determination to better herself. We experience her delight in her growing culinary skill.

In Keane’s telling, Mary is indeed a unique heroine, for herself as much as for the time in which she lived. Proudly unconventional in her ambitions as well as her lifestyle — she never married Alfred Brierhof, the man she lived with for much of her adult life — Mary disdains the immigrant’s customary need to fit in. And she believes that it is her perceived haughtiness, and not the disease she is suspected of carrying, that makes her a scapegoat when the members of families she has worked for begin to succumb to typhoid fever. 

George Soper, the doctor who came up with the theory of an asymptomatic carrier, is very much the villain in this telling. When he first comes for Mary, she notices “his perfectly tailored jacket, his ivory white fingernails, his two polished shoes … as if he floated above the mud and shit that made up the streets of New York City, and never walked through it like the rest of them.” The questions he asks her make no sense; all she hears is Soper telling her that she must never cook again for others, meaning that her life and livelihood as she has built them are now over. No wonder she threatens him to stab him with a fork if he doesn’t get out of her kitchen — to which he replies, in a classic bit of elitist cruelty, “It’s not your kitchen, Miss Mallon.” In moments such as these, I found myself rooting squarely for Mary. 

When she refuses, against Soper’s wishes, to have her gall bladder removed, Mary is taken to North Brother Island, where she lives first in the hospital there and then in a small private cottage built for her. The shiftless Alfred, a predictably poor champion, takes up with another woman while she is away. When a kind lawyer takes up her case and hopes to have her released, any freedom would come with the stipulation that she never cook for anyone but herself again. 

In such a finely wrought book, any awkwardness stands out. Keane’s writing strains when she turns to Alfred. Portrayed as an archetypal loser of a boyfriend — the kind of man who steals from a child’s piggy bank — Alfred seems too obviously worthless to be able to find his way into the obviously intelligent Mary’s heart not once, but twice. Keane tries to compensate for the facts by reminding the reader again and again of the length of their connection: he is the man Mary has loved “since she was seventeen,” and “for nearly twenty years.” She is “as familiar to him as his own reflection in the mirror.” For me at least, this was unconvincing. 

The ending of the book is more problematic. Instead of ending with a telling of Mary’s last years, Keane includes an epilogue, written by Mary herself at the request of her doctors. But this shift to the first person adds no surprises, as the reader has been privy to Mary’s thoughts and feelings throughout the book. Rather, it allows a sentimentality that Keane for the most part studiously contains. The epilogue is brief, less than four pages; still, I finished the book wishing that some fine editor had told Keane she didn’t need it.   

Rose Solari is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, Difficult Weather and Orpheus in the Park, the one-act play, Looking for Guenevere and the novel, A Secret Woman. She has lectured and taught writing workshops at many institutions, including the University of Maryland, St. John’s College, Annapolis, and The Centre for Creative Writing, Kellogg College, University of Oxford. Her awards include the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize, the Columbia Book Award, and an EMMA award for excellence in journalism.

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