Welcome to another installment of If My Book, the Monkeybicycle feature in which authors shed light on their recently released books by comparing them to weird things. This week Joyce Hinnefeld writes about her new novel, The Dime Museum, out now from Unbridled Books.
If The Dime Museum were a New York City subway line it would be the N train, coursing through three boroughs, through all that history and culture and life, from above ground at Coney Island then down below the bowels of Brooklyn, under the East River and lower Manhattan and midtown, coming up for air at the Manhattan Bridge to cross the East River again into Queens, to that backward view of Manhattan atop the Queensboro Plaza station, then the open-air ride through the little houses and Greek tavernas of Astoria. Almost as if all the noise and bother of Manhattan didn’t exist, just a view to the rear on your way home, on your way to the streets of the outer boroughs. To a history and a life you might have forgotten about in the midst of all the peril of growing up, getting and spending, traipsing around Manhattan and trying to make sense of your adult life.
If The Dime Museum were a work from the Barnes Foundation, the art collection that figures prominently in the book, it would be Chaim Soutine’s Woman Seated in Armchair (Femme accoudée au fauteuil), from 1919. This woman, with her big, distorted hands, sitting pensively in her armchair, could be Maude, the character closest to my heart, the woman who longs to be a poet and to be able to love the woman she loves but must, instead, become a lonely secretary. The Woman Seated in an Armchair has a cryptic, unreadable face, described by the museum curator as “a mask of contemplation”; Maude is certainly contemplative, but she’s also a retired vaudevillian, and the stovepipe hat that the painting’s Woman wears belongs on a vaudeville stage. No one can know what this woman is thinking, or the kind of life she’s lived, the losses she’s suffered. She is masked like Maude, Maude the performer, living the life required of a woman of her place and time, her background and class, instead of the life she longed for and actually had, briefly, for a golden moment when she performed in a Chicago dime museum.
If The Dime Museum were a parking lot in Philadelphia it would be one of the ones that surprises you—hidden behind low buildings, free, with a sign that says you can park for only a maximum of five days or something like that—in Germantown, in Mount Airy. In neighborhoods where you want to be now, but neighborhoods that still have the imprint of the past, like a parking lot where you can park your car for free for five days. A relic, an unheard of freedom, something, perhaps from a simpler time. But let’s be honest: we all know it was never that simple for most people. To start with, you have to have a working car that can get you to Philadelphia.
If The Dime Museum were a Pennsylvania river it would be the Lehigh, starting out in the Pocono Mountains in some lush green land with faint industrial scars, scars that grow deeper and more noticeable as it passes through the coal region and into Allentown, then over to the no longer functioning steel stacks in Bethlehem, past swimming hole inlets and homeless encampments, back into one more little patch of green until it reaches Easton and joins up with the bigger Delaware River, on the way to Philadelphia. Meandering like that, seeming not to make much sense. Until, at the end, it arrives in the city and then Delaware Bay and finally the mighty Atlantic, where it makes the kind of vast, unnamable sense that oceans make.
If The Dime Museum were a plant in my yard it would be an ostrich fern. Every year in the spring I think the ferns are gone, I’ve killed them, my laissez-faire approach to our yard and garden has done them in at last. Then suddenly, one day, there they are: the tight fists called fiddleheads that, in the blink of an eye, will open into the wide fronds of ferns, like the kind in Laura Leggett Barnes’s Fern Dell on the grounds of the old Barnes Museum. Coming back, returning, persevering, hanging on—however careless or distracted or mournful their supposed caretaker might be.
If The Dime Museum were a song by The Smiths it would be “Ask,” because the main lesson the book’s characters need to learn (as do most characters in literature and, also, all of us) is relatively simple: If it’s not love then it’s the bomb that will bring us together.
JOYCE HINNEFELD is the author of the short story collections Tell Me Everything (winner of the 1997 Bread Loaf Bakeless Prize in Fiction) and The Beauty of Their Youth (2020), the novels In Hovering Flight (2008) and Stranger Here Below (2010), and of other short stories and essays. Her new novel, THE DIME MUSEUM: A Novel in Stories, is out in August 2025 from Unbridled Books. She is an Emerita Professor of English at Moravian University in Bethlehem, PA, director of the Moravian Writers’ Conference, and a Program Facilitator with Shining Light, an organization that provides reentry-based programming for incarcerated people throughout the U.S. Find her online at joycehinnefeld.com