Fever tells a fictionalized story of Mary Mallon, better known as Typhoid Mary for being identified as one of the first carriers of typhoid fever. I’m a little wary of most historical fiction, but I was interested enough to learn more of her story (even fictionalized) that I picked it up. It really is a fascinating story – Mary worked as a cook for several years for several families and eventually the health department identified her as the cause for concurrent typhoid outbreaks at her places of employment. Even though Mary herself was not sick, doctors had just begun to realize that healthy people could be carriers of disease and quarantined Mary for further study. Other true parts of the story include Mary successfully suing for her release, being told she could never cook for anyone again, and then cooking again anyway.
Since many details of Mary’s life unrelated to typhoid fever are unknown, Keane had a lot of wiggle room to intersperse fiction. I was a little annoyed that she felt the need to include a love story, especially since the great love of Mary’s life is a total schmuck. German immigrant Alfred is an alcoholic unable to hold down a steady job who realizes that he’s lazy and yet does nothing to change that. His only redeemable qualities are his affable personality, supposedly lovable nature, and his later dependence on opioids that keep him subdued. It was mostly frustrating because Mary is written as such a strong and assertive woman who threatened a doctor with a carving fork (true story), but she turns into a nagging, worrying pseudo-wife whenever Alfred is around.
Unfortunately, Fever also has a bad case of middle-of-the-book blues. The story primarily focuses on Mary’s life after infecting several families when she was identified and unwillingly quarantined, and there is a bit of a lull where Mary has nothing to do for awhile on the island except clean her bungalow and pine after a guy who doesn’t write her letters. The author seems to get a sense of this boredom, often skipping ahead several months or even a year or two in order to get to the more interesting parts of her story. There are later lulls too where Keane seems to realize that there is a big gap of time between Mary’s release in 1910 and her re-quarantining in 1915, and she does not seem to know how to fill the time.
Keane did do a great job of humanizing Mary Mallon. It would be very easy for Typhoid Mary to come off as willfully ignorant or stupid (how could she not have realized that death followed her around?) or even downright malicious (she went back to cooking after she was told that it would spread disease!). Instead, Keane rightfully reminds the reader of the time period. Death was commonplace; children and adults alike would get a cough one day and die the next, the wells could be dirty, workplaces were often dangerous. In addition, she shows Mary’s struggle to understand what the doctors tell her when it seems so counterintuitive that she can make people sick when she herself has not been sick and only a portion of the people she cooked for died. Even returning to cooking seemed like a sympathetic choice; working as a laundress made less money, was more unstable, and the doctors had told Mary that cooking was safe as long as the food was always heated above a certain temperature.
Overall, I’m glad to learn more about Typhoid Mary, but I might have been better off with a biography or wider portrait of typhoid fever.
