Shadow of the Titanic: The Extraordinary Stories of Those Who Survived

There’s just no rowing away from the 1912 shipwreck’s tragic backwash in this melodramatic biographical sketchbook. Journalist Wilson (Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith) surveys Titanic survivors’ after-stories and chalks up everything he can—suicides, accidental deaths, public disgraces, divorces, remarriages, frigid failures to marry, feelings of angst, embracings of life—to the disaster’s legacy. He sometimes visits steerage but focuses on flamboyant first-class passengers like White Star Lines chairman Bruce Ismay, who was pilloried for not going down with the ship; an Astor widow who pursued a scandalous, violent relationship with a much-younger Italian boxer; and unsinkable fashionista Lady Duff Gordon, who shrugged off allegations that she voted against returning in the lifeboat to rescue floundering victims. The author unconvincingly manufactures Freudian complexes for his subjects to psychoanalytically link their every subsequent dysfunction and misfortune to the fatal iceberg. (“The guilt that came with surviving the Titanic…lay heavy upon her heart until finally it could stand it no longer,” he theorizes when movie star-survivor Dorothy Gibson succumbs to high blood pressure and coronary failure thirty-two years after the sinking.) Wilson gives a gripping account of the shipwreck proper, but the long denouement feels like a trumped-up soap opera. Agent: Clare Alexander. (Mar. 6)