In early 2001, David Ebershoff released a short, beautiful book
called The Danish Girl. The novel, set in the 1920s and ’30s, is
about a painter named Einar Wegener who, with the tentative blessing of
his wife, Greta, becomes the first man to successfully undergo a
sex-change operation. The writing is a revelation from the very
first page, as Einar, relaxing with Greta in their Copenhagen
apartment, paints a roiling black sea:
The neighbor below was a sailor, a man with a bullet-shaped head who
cursed his wife. When Einar painted the gray curl of each wave, he
imagined the sailor drowning, a desperate hand raised, his potato-vodka
voice still calling his wife a port whore. It was how Einar knew just
how dark to mix his paints: gray enough to swallow a man like that, to
fold over like batter his sinking growl.
In just that half paragraph, the work that Ebershoff does is
tremendous: establishing Einar’s all-consuming interior doubts,
his confusion about gender and marriage, and his worldview. It’s ornate
and sorrowful, just as one would imagine Einar’s paintings to be. It’s
Ebershoff’s portraiture of Einar and Greta’s marriage—a
partnership in every sense of the word, and a true friendship, as they
both transform in new and unexpected ways—that makes The
Danish Girl truly exceptional. Most readers don’t understand until
the end of the novel that the story of the Wegeners is based on real
life; Einar was the first successful MTF transsexual in the world,
and Greta willingly sacrificed her marital status out of love for her
husband.
Ebershoff’s newest novel, The 19th Wife, takes on a much more
famous historical target than the Wegeners: The titular wife is Ann
Eliza Young, the exiled bride of Brigham Young, and the novel is a
sweeping history of Mormon polygamy, a kind of fictional
counterpart to Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven.
Where The Danish Girl had a miniaturist’s ardor for
precision, Wife throbs with ambition. It’s a pastiche of
fictional documents: autobiographies, theses culled from the
confidential files of Brigham Young University, and an epistolary
creed. There’s a murder mystery, a love story, and a pioneer
narrative.
There are similarities between the two: The fascinating thing about
Wife is that, as Danish Girl was not really about gender
identity, Wife is not about Mormonism. Instead, it’s about our
faith, in our husbands and wives, in our gods, in our governments and
learning institutions, and in the strangers all around us. The two
books couldn’t be more different, but at their core they’re the
same: They’re about the human heart, and what it can withstand, and
what it cannot. 
David Ebershoff reads Tues Sept 9, Third Place Books, 7 pm,
free.