Mary Coin, by Marissa Silver

The second novel revolving around photography I’ve read recently (Eight girls taking pictures being the other).  Both also are fictionalized accounts of real people and events.  The frame tale of this story concerns Walker Dodge, who in the first pages is going to see his dying father in California, and in the final chapters, after his father’s death, discovers the possible connection between his family and one of the most well-known American photographs, “Migrant Mother,” taken by Dorothea Lange during the Great Depression.  The center of the book is its title character, “Mary Coin,” based on Florence Owens Thompson, the real subject of the photograph, and “Vera Dare,” the author’s imagined Dorothea Lange. In fact, a minor criticism of the book is that I got so caught up in their story, that when the action shifted back to near-present time almost 200 pages later, I briefly couldn’t remember who “Walker Dodge” was.  Obviously Mary Coin had a very difficult life as an Okie struggling to raise six children as a migrant worker in California.  But Vera Dodge’s was no walk in the park either.  The intersection of their lives produces the iconic photograph.  The description of the lives migrants lived (and I suspect still live in some areas) involve the reader in their struggles.  And the philosophical meaning photographs,  such as “Migrant Mother," is “an alchemy of fact and invention that produces something recognizable as the truth.  But it is not the truth.”  Neither is this book, but it could have been.  Recommended.  323 pp.