THE DIME MUSEUM

A novel-in-stories that culminates during the Covid-19 pandemic follows a Big Pharma family over the course of several generations, with an emphasis on how social repression and unchecked privilege can both thwart lives.

The famously divergent paths of poets Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens—the former dedicated to structure and surface during a lifetime of mental instability, the latter an almost prim attorney whose work explored human subjectivity—here illuminate the unspoken stories attached to the monied Dietrich clan from Philadelphia. Beginning with a love story between two sideshow performers in Chicago and ending with an individual’s recognition of loss, Hinnefeld’s linked collection reflects how little we know about our own family histories, or ourselves, particularly when faced with societal crisis. Characters meet Pound and Stevens, whose actions and relationships weave in and out of decades; for example, when one character winds up in Venice in 2019, he notes that right-wing young Italian men call themselves “CasaPound” due to their belief in the poet’s reactionary beliefs. Meanwhile, Stevens, historically also a racist, shows up as the voice of overly genteel ideas about women’s behavior and appearances, perhaps most strongly in “Winged Siren Seizing an Adolescent,” about a young wife and mother named Tess who lives in Lisbon. That story is also a great example of how the separate pieces of a novel like this exist as stand-alones while also connecting to the characters, chronology, and concerns of the whole; a Missoni dress that Tess gifts to her former nanny reminds readers of change. Speaking of change: That titular coin, at first signaled by the “dime shows” in which English-born Maude appears, has a little-known tie to Stevens—really to Mrs. Wallace Stevens—and signals the all-too-American tension between self-determination and national mythologizing that falls apart completely in the book’s second half, “Philadelphia, April 2020.” In these four stories about the global pandemic, we see how quickly anyone’s dreams and comforts can be eliminated by disaster. Somehow the coda, “Those Who Can,” provides the perfect moment of resolution.

An expert example of a complicated form that will reward even more on subsequent readings.