In 1949, when Danielle Steel was just a toddler, Theodor Adorno declared that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
It took her awhile, but Steel has proved Adorno’s point. Not that there’s anything poetic about her new Holocaust novel, “Only the Brave,” but using the Final Solution as the setting for a sentimental melodrama is profoundly unseemly. It’s not good for the Jews. It’s not good for anybody.
But the publicity machine grinds on.
Half a century ago, Steel published her first book, “Going Home,” and over the decades she’s become one of the best-selling novelists in the world, with more than a billion copies in print. Perhaps no other writer is so widely read and so rarely reviewed. It’s a confirmed blind spot in our critical landscape: Unlike music, movie and TV reviewers, book reviewers pride themselves on avoiding what most people are consuming. Sometimes, I feel guilty about this. At the moment, I feel grateful.
By my count, “Only the Brave” is Steel’s 152nd novel, but her publicist tells me, “It is closer to her 170th.” Apparently, the actual number can only be guessed at, in the same way the total mass of dark matter in the universe is estimated by how it bends light. With some certainty, though, we can determine that “Only the Brave” is one of seven titles Steel plans to release this year, which means she writes a book more often than most people clean their fridge.
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In the months leading up to this week’s publication, Steel’s publicist reached out repeatedly to insist that I not mention that the author is a 76-year-old romance novelist. As always, we’re never ashamed of the right things.
“Only the Brave” opens in Berlin in 1937 with one of the book’s typically perplexing observations: “Even at eighteen,” Steel writes, “Sophia Alexander knew that things in Germany had changed in the past four years since the Nazis had come to power.” Yes, nothing gets by our Sophia. Somehow, after Adolf Hitler established himself as a dictator, passed the Nuremberg Laws and remilitarized the Rhineland, this savvy young woman has managed to pick up a change in the air. That weird consummation of obviousness and obliviousness quickly becomes the novel’s prevailing tone.
Sophia is a shy, “dark-haired beauty with huge green eyes, and always looked serious.” Her younger sister, Theresa, is a pretty flirt with “little awareness that her natural sexiness was an aphrodisiac to the men who wanted her.” These two schöne Mädchen live with their wealthy father, the most important surgeon in Berlin, who runs his own private hospital. Although Dr. Alexander treats high-ranking Nazis, he treats Jews, too. “Medicine was all that interested him,” Steel writes. “He lived in a rarefied, isolated world.”
Don’t worry if you initially miss these details — or others; they’ll be repeated again and again. I experienced déjà vu so often while reading “Only the Brave” that I worried I was losing my mind and then began to hope so. Typical example: On Page 110, Steel writes, “Hitler’s generals, led by Göring, were preparing the Final Solution, to eradicate all Jews from the face of the earth.” On the facing page, we’re told, “The Führer and his generals were obsessed with this plan, called ‘the Final Solution,’ to obliterate all Jews from the planet.” This is the kind of book you can read while watching TV. Or operating heavy equipment.
In fact, Steel seems determined never to leave anyone behind. We learn from this historical novel that Hitler was a bad man and that the Holocaust was a disaster. Families disappear, people are murdered, and prisoners are brutally beaten, but the selection of details about the Shoah sometimes feels constrained within a narrow range of genteel taste. In Ravensbrück, for instance, “bunks were in short supply, latrines and toilet facilities were inadequate” — so, like, two stars on Airbnb. Prisoners “were given boots of any random size, whether they fit or not, boots that had been worn by others who might have died in them,” which makes the camp sound worse than a bowling alley. And even the most well-known historical horrors must contend with Steel’s oddly banal tone. An early chapter begins by reporting that in Krakow and Warsaw, “it was the Nazis’ hope to wipe out over a million Jews.” That, Steel explains, is “an incredible number of men, women, and children to annihilate” — a helpful appraisal for readers new to morality or math.
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But despite all this suffering, the real focus is brave Sophia, a selfless woman compelled by her Christian faith. While her flighty sister marries a wealthy man and pursues a life of pleasantries and parties, Sophia works as a nurse in her father’s hospital and aspires to become a nun — which was, reportedly, once Steel’s dream, too. When the Nazis insist that Dr. Alexander turn his hospital into a euthanasia center for undesirables, Sophia redoubles her efforts to save doomed patients and begins spiriting Jews out of Germany.
Obviously, there’s no end of dramatic possibilities with this material. The deadly predicament faced by Dr. Alexander recalls the shocking transformation in Cecil Philip Taylor’s indelible play “Good.” And the heroism of people who risked their lives to save Jews from the Holocaust has inspired deeply moving works of fiction and nonfiction. But Steel paints all of her protagonists in such bright primary colors that there can be no shades of moral anguish or suspense. These aren’t characters so much as Weebles: They wobble, but they don’t fall down. Dr. Alexander never considers acquiescing to the Nazis’ demands. His elder daughter, the nursing nun, is “devoted to the human race as a whole, and willing to sacrifice herself for what she believed. She was a strong, brave woman.”
Sophia never abandons her devotion to God, even when tempted by the adulation of adoring men. First, there’s Claus — “tall, blond, and handsome” — who recruits her to the work of smuggling Jews across the border. Then there’s Hans. “He was tall, blond, and would have been movie-star handsome if he hadn’t been a Nazi.” Steel spends a number of pages trying to spin this encounter into a cute Beatrice-and-Benedick romance, but in the end, “no matter how nice he seemed, he was a Nazi officer at a concentration camp. She hadn’t lost sight of that, no matter how handsome he was.” Sorry, Hans, but genocide is one of Sophia’s turnoffs!
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And finally, there’s the American Army captain Theodore Blake, “a young, very handsome man” with “short blond hair.” Will he be able to tear Sophia away from the convent and give her the life every woman truly desires?
Only the brave readers will find out.
Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post. He is the book critic for “CBS Sunday Morning.”
Only the Brave
By Danielle Steel
Delacorte. 272 pp. $29
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