Meredith Jaeger explores women's struggles in two eras of San Francisco

Meredith Jaeger's fourth novel, “The Incorrigibles,” offers her best interpretation of California's past. The author is a California native with a penchant for immersive period depictions of some of the state's most attractive cities: San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Los Angeles. Her most recent work of historical fiction takes us across two timelines to show the developing San Francisco of the 1890s and the same city transforming in the 1970s.

The dual stories that follow Annie and Judy as they find love, then find themselves deceived, evoke their time periods without being obsessive. Jaeger's previous novels insisted too much on details. As a historian, I understand the impulse to outright demonstrate that you did the research including everything. Instead of the cataloged lists of details of her debut, “The Incorrigibles” has the deft touch of a more mature writer who knows what she knows and knows how much readers need to see. Jaeger's style has become a passionate voice that starts the story and never stops to breathe.

The novel begins with a woman trying not to cry. Jaeger's work is populated by miserable women and (mostly) villainous men. Her heroines are beautiful, innocent girls trapped in desperate circumstances and miserable lives. They endure bullies, murderers, and inconsiderate idiots until they suddenly ascend to a happy ending, sometimes seemingly with the wave of a magic wand. If it's a bit like the Disneyfication of historical fiction, that's fine. People like Disney. People like happy endings. That the good women will emerge victorious and the bad men will get what is coming to them is guaranteed in a Meredith Jaeger novel.

Perhaps that's why his novels are often described as easy beach reads, which I think is unfair. Her books have always frankly explored deception, infidelity, abuse and murder. Thematically, his historical fiction is dark, more along the lines of detective fiction than courtly historical novels. Each of his characters is a victim of some kind of problem. In Jaeger's previous work, extreme violence occurred between scenes. But in “The Incorrigibles” the violence is in our faces. Among many serious crimes, Annie and Judy come into direct contact with police brutality, witnessing or enduring violence at the hands of uniformed officers.

Much of Annie's 1890s story takes place inside the cells of San Quentin State Prison. The inhumanity inherent in locking people away and referring to them only as numbers, not names, is powerful. Annie and her fellow inmates endure being groped by guards, an opportunistic journalist, and the systemic abuse that convicts suffer that continues long after her release. Annie witnesses the rape of two women, and this violence occurs in front of us, described clearly. We are forced to sit with it for pages instead of looking away.

In the 1970s, Judy investigates Annie's life after seeing her mugshot. At the same time, she's trying to save the South of Market neighborhood from a city government that cares little about the people who already live there. The bravery of various marginalized communities confronting faceless bureaucracies is done sympathetically, though Judy enters “white savior” territory.

Watch as a peaceful protest turns into a violent riot when the police arrive, only to turn and run while older people of color are injured.

The tension between what Judy works for and what we know was from South of Market (now SOMA) is just one of the many ways Jaeger plays with futility and inevitability. Judy and Annie fight for their lives and their communities, but the boxes society tries to put them in (immigrants, poor, women, wives, divorced, convicted) have strong walls. While the men who harm them have options, women are swept along by the tides of fate, desperate to reach a safe shore.

The double standard for men and women is never clearer, and the connection to the present is stronger, than when a female convict is denied forgiveness or commutation of her sentence, while others, including a convicted rapist who are not has shown no remorse, they are granted freedom. The only woman on the list was convicted of a non-violent crime, yet she was flatly denied a commutation of her sentence. Because? In a country where only 8% of sexual offenders If you'll ever see the inside of a cell, your question seems sickeningly relevant.

The novel does not directly answer that “why,” but the answer is the entirety of the story. Time and again female characters are saved by fate, luck, coincidences, the universe, call it what you want. Inside and outside San Quentin, the women in Jaeger's novel save each other when they can and rely on providence (sometimes with the loud sound of a Gatling gun) when they can't. Justice and equality are routinely denied to them by men who “know better,” and eventually the only solution is for both women to liberate their destinies.

Is that girl turned on? I guess if stories of female agency and empowerment can be reduced that much. But if so, it's thoughtful chick lit that asks us to consider how similar today's California is to “distant history.”

Valorie Castellanos Clarkwriter and historian from Los Angeles, he is the author of “Rebel Figures: Twenty Stories of Rebels, Lawbreakers, and Revolutionaries You've (Probably) Never Heard of.”