Back when I was a mushroom getting my MFA, there was a woman in my workshop who dazzled. She wasn’t taller than everyone, she only seemed that way. I have had the great privilege of working with Jean Zimmerman as her editor first, now as her agent, and always her friend. Her dazzling historical novel, SAVAGE GIRL, has just been published by Viking to great early acclaim.
CONTEST: Who is your favorite bad guy (in literature) and why? I’ll ask Jean to judge the answers and top three answers will win a copy of Savage Girl.
New York Times Sunday Book Review
The Wolf of Fifth Avenue
Sooner or later, a historical crime novel is bound to drag you down some dark alley and into the nastiest, most lawless precincts of the period. Jean Zimmerman followed this tradition in her first novel, “The Orphanmaster,” a descent into the hellish criminal haunts of 17th-century New Amsterdam. In SAVAGE GIRL (Viking, $27.95), this canny author puts all that aside and turns to the Gilded Age for a sweeping narrative, set within the cloistered ranks of high society in 19th-century Manhattan, that raises touchy questions about what it means to be civilized.
Even in this exclusive world, the Delegate family is more privileged than most. The paterfamilias, Friedrich-August-Heinrich (also known as Freddy), has taken his family and a retinue of servants on his private, sumptuously appointed 12-car railroad train to Virginia City, Nev., to visit the silver mine that’s boosting his already considerable fortune. But when the Delegates depart from this brawling Wild West boom town, they have an additional passenger, a beautiful, feral young woman from a land that’s “savage, wild, forsaken by God and man” — who’s said to have been raised by wolves. Found at a sideshow, she’ll be the ideal experimental subject, Freddy thinks, for the nature-or-nurture debate roiling his intellectual set.
Using Freddy’s intelligent but decidedly peculiar son Hugo as narrator adds another layer of suspense to the story. A student of anatomy at Harvard, this young man has an unhealthy fondness for knives and a vivid imagination when it comes to Bronwyn, as the “Savij Girl” comes to be known. But who’s to say where imagination leaves off and obsession takes over, once the family is back in its Fifth Avenue mansion and the “Pygmalion”-like process of civilizing Bronwyn (who keeps her own set of razor-like steel claws and creeps out of the house to visit the wild animals at the zoo) begins in earnest.
The wondrous sights Zimmerman rolls out for us — a picnic on the banks of the Great Salt Lake, a stopover at the “fabulous, glorious” Palmer House hotel in Chicago and visits to mansions up and down the East Coast — are all the more piquant when Bronwyn’s admirers begin turning up, cut to ribbons, at almost every whistle stop. If this is civilization, bring on the wolves.
‘My Fair Lady’ Meets ‘Psycho’: PW Talks with Jean Zimmerman
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A feral child unsettles Gilded Age New York City in Jean Zimmerman’s Savage Girl.
How did the book come to be?
I’d always wanted to write about a wolf girl—that is, one afflicted with the genetic condition known as hypertrichosis, which causes a person to resemble an animal, with fur growing all over his or her body. Many children with the condition were exhibited in American sideshows in an earlier period. Related in my mind was the phenomenon of so-called feral children, a girl or a boy purported to be raised by wolves (or by bears, or big cats, or goats, or, in one reported case, by rats). I ultimately crashed these two ideas together in Savage Girl.
What did the murder plot add?
A random killing here and there really focuses a narrative. We don’t know who is committing the murders in Savage Girl, but indications point to Bronwyn—and with good reason. The historical record shows that feral children were prone to violent outbursts.
You often write about the status of women. Was there something in particular about the women of the Gilded Age that intrigued you?
I found the debutante to be a fascinating creature and the coming out process one that was as constricting as it was lovely. Here were the grand dames of society, banding together when a girl reached the age of 18 or so, helping to usher her into a new social status. There was some power in the process for women. The learning curve was steep. There were new gowns and dance lessons, teas, ritualized social visits, and grand balls. The fashions were extraordinary. Yet debuting was filled with the strictest rules and obligations, and if you failed, there was the threat of punishment—remaining a spinster. I wanted to search beneath the opaque surface of the debuting process to find deeper meanings. That meant talking about both corsets and bloomers.
“Zimmerman’s dark comedy of manners is an obvious homage to Edith Wharton, a rip-roaring murder mystery more Robert Louis Stevenson than Conan Doyle and a wonderfully detailed portrait of the political, economic and philosophical issues driving post–Civil War America.” –KIRKUS
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Betsy Lerner 
Gotta go with Christian Grey. I only made it a few chapters through the first book, but really? Libido aside, does this woman have no self-respect? Not that there’s anything wrong with good sex, but I’d have kicked him in the balls pretty early on.
I’ve read books that I couldn’t put down and when I finished realized I couldn’t sleep. I’ve read about serial killers and murderers, but the most frightening character, the one that has stuck with me, is Humbert Humbert. To have a pedophile who elaborates on his thoughts to such an extent that at times I forgot his crime, forgot what he was, and what he was doing, terrified me. It still terrifies me.
Raskolnikov would be second, a man who believes himself to be extraordinary, a sociopath who kills with no regret. He is horrible, but still he doesn’t hold a candle to Humbert Humbert for the way he hid in plain sight, without believing he was doing anything wrong, anything unusual, and to be so convincing…
So true on Humbert. And add the exquisite writing: you can almost believe evil isn’t always bad.That you’re in the wrong for judging.
Chigurgh in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men because he’s a cold hearted, enigmatic killing machine with a perverse rationale who ultimately makes perfect sense.
Judas Iscariot, a tragic villain if there ever was one, unwitting flunky of God and patsy to the highest power, who did his dirty work, by some reckonings, in the wee hours of this very day, nearly two thousand years ago.
(btw, my wife and I stayed at the “fabulous, glorious” Palmer House when we came to Chicago to get married three years ago — three years ago tomorrow, in fact, was the cold and drizzly morning when, in a basement courtroom, to each other we plighted our enduring troths.)
Congrats Mr and Mrs Tet. Ha…and they said it wouldn’t last.
Soft spoken and mesmerizing, a man of dark dreams. He walked among us, made us laugh and fed us wonder, Hannibal Lecter.
Considering his immense platform, here’s a question for you Betsy, would you ‘agent’ his cookbook?
Who is your favorite bad guy (in literature) and why?
When I went to look at my books to figure this question out, my eyes went to one novel in particular, and after that, I knew I had my answer. None of the other books gave me that same sense of “oh shit, what’s going to happen next.” My choice is not a bad guy, but a bad woman. Annie Wilkes from Stephen King’s MISERY. Why? She’s such an average seeming woman, I mean, even her name is average. Annie Wilkes. Living out there on her farm like she was, practical, efficient, with a naive way of judging right and wrong, you don’t really know Annie Wilkes until King allows her true psychotic nature to start peeking out. Trained as a nurse, what she does to novelist, Paul Sheldon is diabolical because she does it with this matter of fact, bustling, busy, busy busy, must get it done, demeanor. The hobbling chapter was so cringe worthy, I had to stop reading. The suspense throughout, epic.
(I almost picked another Stephen King book – CUJO. The dog would have been my bad guy, except through no choice of his, he became a killer. Annie Wilkes on the other hand? Yikes)
The killer who hung Harriet’s brother from the tree in Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend. That was nasty.
Also, the monster who killed the little girl in The Lovely Bones.
Karla the Soviet spymaster of the le Carre Smiley novels.
A sinister character whom we come to know through his influence and actions rather than his on-page presence is a masterful stroke invoking the reader’s imagination more than the author’s for the antagonist. All of our own worst image machinations come forward making the antagonist material and real.
There is little as sinister to a reader as their own imagined evil.
Honest Iago, for being so clever and weaselly and for using words as the only and ultimate weapon, then discarding the weapon altogether when his crimes were discovered. I really hate a bad guy who demands that much respect.
Father Gaunt in The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry. He took such pleasure in bringing about Roseanne’s downfall. Truly an evil man. And smug about it too, which is almost worse.
Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt from George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda comes first to mind. Presenting first as decent and even charming, he soon reveals himself as a vicious, calculating, self-centered individual — the crazy-making abuser who destroys others emotionally and psychologically while leaving no physical scars.
In this age of fetishizing vampires, Dracula. Vampires, truly, are evil. The fact they’re hot simply makes them all the more dangerous.