It Girl
Pataki offers a detailed explanation about why and how she altered the names, and more importantly, the climactic outcome of the famous “Crime of the Century” – the murder of the architect Stanford White, in 1906, by Harry Thaw, the husband of actress Evelyn Nesbit, the model for the “Gibson Girl” cartoons of the American Gilded Age. The explanation is needed because the real story reads like sensational fiction; little wonder it dominated the American imagination for so long. But Pataki wants to offer Nesbit a chance to be reimagined not as the passive idol of men’s imaginations, but as a woman entering the modern era with strong ideas about her own work and value.
Pataki (barely) renames her characters: Evelyn becomes Evelyn Talbot, Stanford White becomes Stanley Pierce, and Harry Thaw becomes Hal Thorne, while most of the other details of Nesbit’s early life are preserved closely. As she narrates her own story (which Nesbit also did in two autobiographies), Evelyn offers a plausible portrait of an intelligent woman who makes a living as an artist’s model and then a Broadway chorus girl, working hard to perfect her physical gifts while suffering first the stares and then the assaults of wealthy, powerful men.
Evelyn is frustratingly easily distracted by beautiful clothes and delicious food (described in great detail throughout the novel) and offers far too much of herself to uncaring men in exchange for them, but Pataki manages to keep the reader intrigued by Evelyn’s slow awakening to reality and the enduring value of female friendship in a male-dominated world. Fans of Downton Abbey and The Gilded Age will enjoy another dip into that world of moneyed elegance, but the fairy-tale plot that Pataki contrives for Evelyn may disappoint readers who want more developed characters.
