THE FOURSOME

Not making this up: Famous conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker were married to Sarah and Adelaide Yates, a pair of sisters in the Civil War–era South, where they produced 21 children between them.

The original, eponymous Siamese twins—they were from Siam (now Thailand) before their mother sold them to the circus—have inspired many works of fiction and nonfiction, but Kline’s eighth novel may be the first written by one of their distant relatives. In her hands, it becomes a riveting and insightful story that is as much about sisterhood and the Civil War as about the prurient details of the marital arrangements. Clearly aware that one of the biggest imaginative challenges is depicting the way these four people maintained their dignity under the challenging circumstances—Chang and Eng were joined by a band of flesh at their abdomen, and separation would have killed both of them—Kline’s choice to focus on the experience of one of the sisters, Sallie, succeeds beautifully. The marriage was not her idea. Her sister, Addie, and Chang were the infatuated couple and she and Eng were the ride-alongs, but Sallie’s options were limited by a scandal in her teens. Kline manages to shift our attention from the awkward mechanics to deeper, more interesting issues: the fact that two men who had themselves lived as property now made their living as slaveholders, the increasingly opposed views of the sisters on that matter, and other tensions among the foursome as they raised an annually growing family of infants and children in close quarters. As much as Chang and Eng quarrel, Addie and Sallie don’t do much better—diametrically opposed approaches to child-rearing lead to a dramatic change in their living arrangements. Once war breaks out, Kline hits her stride, compellingly and convincingly depicting the Southern experience as bravado shaded slowly, then utterly, into devastating loss.

A profound and moving treatment of what could have been a tabloid topic.