In ‘Margreete’s Harbor,’ midcentury America’s social upheavals reach coastal Maine
Major social and political movements of the 1950s and ’60s steer Eleanor Morse’s minutely observed multigenerational family saga.
By Nell Beram
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“Margreete’s Harbor” begins in 1955, with a kitchen fire in coastal Maine. When the novel ends, in 1968, the United States is on fire: with protests against the Vietnam War, with women’s calls for liberation, with racist vitriol and violence and efforts to extinguish them. Across the 13 years spanning these conflagrations, the family at the center of Peaks Islander Eleanor Morse’s rather exquisite fourth novel finds that, even in the far reaches of Maine, it can be hard to hear grace notes above the roar of social turmoil.