by Sheri Holman
  Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000
  ISBN 0871137534
  291 pages, $24

Set in Sunderland, England in 1831, The Dress Lodger is the unusual tale of Gustine, a fifteen-year-old prostitute who rents a fancy blue gown from her landlord/pimp in order to attract a higher-class and therefore higher-paying clientele. To protect his precious investment, the landlord Whilkey employs the Eye, a one-eyed yet sharp-sighted old woman, to follow Gustine and the dress among the back alleys where these supposedly higher-class clients lead her for furtive couplings.

If this premise weren't intriguing enough, Gustine is strangely interested in the occasional corpses she stumbles across in the seedier parts of Sunderland. In her enterprising way, she has made a deal with a Dr. Henry Chiver to lead him to any stray bodies she finds. In return, she hopes he will find a way to help her baby boy, a healthy little infant except for the fact that he was born with his heart on the outside of his chest cavity.

What makes The Dress Lodger special is its superb characterization; even the lesser characters have carefully described motivations and thought processes. The novel easily transitions between passages describing Pink, Whilkey’s six-year-old daughter, to passages following the old crone shadowing Gustine. Pink is responsible for watching Gustine’s fragile baby while Gustine works as a potter’s assistant by day, and her very believable six-year-old thoughts show that of course she doesn’t actually understand the scope of this responsibility. On the other hand, the Eye’s thoughts, as she scuttles along after Gustine, indicate that the old woman understands all too well how the superstitious Sunderland inhabitants view her deformity. Gustine, Whilkey, and Audrey, Henry’s naïve do-gooder fiancée, are equally well-rendered.

Amid this rich characterization, Henry’s highly contradictory but believable nature represents the pinnacle. He despises his own actions, but knows that medical students trained solely from texts will not be as able to save lives as those with first-hand knowledge of human anatomy. In addition, Henry is trying to escape the black cloud that has hung over his professional reputation ever since he fled the Burke and Hare scandal in Edinburgh. Real history has it that Burke and Hare, realizing the profit to be made by supplying much-needed corpses to the medical profession, took to grave-robbing and outright murder in order to procure enough bodies before they were eventually caught and brought to justice. The fictional Henry, while not actively aware of these crimes as they were being committed, berates himself by acknowledging that only denial kept him from questioning too closely the origins of the cadavers he dissected in his surgical anatomy classes.

In the larger context, the entire medical profession is despised by Sunderland’s poor, who, as represented by Whilkey, believe that the looming cholera plague has literally been imported by the government to keep the masses down. They are so fearful of doctors that they will not seek medical attention until they are already at death’s door. Consequently, they usually die, thus perpetuating the cycle of mistrust. While we are perturbed by Henry’s actions at times, we cannot help but sympathize with him when he utters, "And Lord, if Thou art merciful, go easier on the Earth's future doctors."

Henry exhibits further contradictions in his personal dealings with Gustine. When meeting with her to discuss her baby's fate, he does not rendezvous with her in a back alley befitting a prostitute of her standing, but instead drives her and the baby for an almost genteel picnic in the country, indicating that he considers Gustine a person rather than a means to an end. Yet during that same meeting, he curtly and unfeelingly dismisses Gustine's reluctance to hand her baby over to him, excited as he is by the prospect of being able to conduct research untouched by the death that has always haunted him. In the baby, Henry sees not a human child but rather a means to salvage his medical reputation and his self-image. Throughout this back-and-forth, Holman skillfully leads us to a point where Henry has the opportunity to redeem himself in our eyes once and for all, and whether or not he does so is one of the most suspenseful aspects of the plot.

Initially, Holman’s narrative technique takes some getting used to – at times, the unidentified narrator directly addresses the reader and various characters, and even the parts of the story told in the traditional third person use the present tense rather than the more common past tense. Ultimately, though, these narrative deviations seem well-suited to the story’s events, which are made even stranger by a Vonnegut-like emphasis on coincidental contacts between the various characters. Additionally, the novel's thick atmosphere brings to mind Patrick Süskind's Perfume, one of a very few contemporary German novels to be translated into English and published widely in the United States. In both Perfume and The Dress Lodger, the reader simultaneously experiences fascination and revulsion, hope and dread. There is a sense that the plot is moving towards an inevitable tragic conclusion, but also a hope that something can be salvaged in the end. This is a difficult balance for a writer to achieve, but as with Henry’s internal battle with himself, Holman sustains it to the very end.