The Commoner
by John Burnham Schwartz
(Nan A. Talese / Doubleday)
In 1959, the Crown Prince of Japan broke with centuries of tradition by taking a commoner as his wife. Schwartz’s novel imagines the perspective of the bride, who gives up “the jumbled, striving, visceral world” for a life of airless ritual. Surrounded by viper-tongued ladies-in-waiting appointed by her disapproving mother-in-law and excoriated for such crimes as walking ahead of her husband and breastfeeding her newborn son, she literally loses her voice. Decades later, she is helpless to prevent her son’s wife, also a commoner, from “an endless reproductive Olympics” and a public life in which “nothing of consequence would ever be said.” Schwartz delivers his tale in unadorned prose, to suit the interiority of his subject—and perhaps to imitate the pared-down elegance of such Japanese writers as Kawabata and Tanizaki—but at times this restraint edges into banality.
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