Believe You Me! — A Reader’s Guide

A Narrator Who Talks Back

The most striking feature of the excerpts is Mary's first-person voice, which is neither polished nor literary but aggressively conversational. She uses phrases like 'believe you me,' 'do you get me?,' and 'whatter yer think I am?'—markers of a speaker who expects to be challenged. Her grammar is deliberately nonstandard ('I wasn't going to make no statement'), and she frequently addresses the reader directly, as when she explains her mother's appetite: 'Ma certainly has my health well in hand and heart and its seldom we quarrel over any little thing, but she certainly has no class instinct.' This is not a neutral report; it is a performance of grievance and self-justification. The voice also carries a defensive pride in her earnings—'I earned every cent of it myself'—which recurs whenever her respectability is questioned. Putnam sustains this register across scenes, using it to signal Mary's social position: she is a working woman who has risen, but who remains acutely aware of the gap between her income and her 'class instinct.'

Mother-Daughter Sparring as Social Comedy

The excerpts devote considerable space to exchanges between Mary and her mother, a former circus trapeze artist. Their arguments are fast, specific, and laced with mutual accusation. When Mary criticizes her mother's weight, Ma retorts: 'Just because Jim is in France yet, and your moleskin dolman was a failure and you aint been occupied daily for a week or more … its no excuse for picking on me.' The mother's speech is as colloquial as the daughter's, but with its own rhythm—long, run-on sentences that pile up grievances. The comedy arises from the mismatch between Mary's aspirations to refinement (she worries about eating taffy from a paper box in her limousine) and her mother's unapologetic earthiness. The setting of the Ritz, where Ma consumes six vanilla eclairs while Mary nibbles a single 'tomato surprise,' becomes a stage for class performance. These scenes also reveal a pattern: Mary's attempts to manage her mother's behavior are consistently undercut by Ma's sharper memory of their shared past, including the hardships of raising children while performing on the trapeze.

Pace and the Pressure of Publicity

The opening scene's telephone call sets a tempo of interruption and demand. Roscoe the press agent insists on a statement; Mary resists; the negotiation is rendered in short, punctuated lines that convey the urgency of managing a public image. Putnam uses this pace to mirror the rhythms of vaudeville and the nascent celebrity culture of 1910s New York. Later, the narrative slows into the extended mother-daughter dialogue at the Ritz, where the subject shifts from publicity to personal history. This change in pace—from the staccato of the phone call to the sprawling, anecdotal quality of the restaurant scene—gives the reader breathing room while still advancing the comedy. The excerpts also include a moment of meta-commentary on pace itself: Mary notes that she and her mother were 'doing the next best thing to what we wanted instead of the thing itself,' a line that could describe the novel's own structure of deferred action. The story seems to be about a crisis (the breakup with Jim), but the narrative keeps circling back to everyday irritations and negotiations.

Readers should attend to the way Putnam uses Mary's voice not just for humor but for social positioning. The narrator's constant appeals to the reader—'do you get me?'—are not filler; they are bids for sympathy and understanding from an audience she assumes is skeptical. The novel's title, Believe You Me!, is itself a plea for credibility. The excerpts suggest that the comedy depends on the gap between what Mary says and what she reveals, and that the mother-daughter dynamic is as central as any plot about dancing or wartime New York.

Years handling Believe You Me!, I often catch Mary La Tour’s voice lingering—that scrappy, tender rhythm of a woman making do. It puts me in mind of another quiet companion, where rooms and country silences hold their own stubborn stories. Country Lodgings — Text and Context rests beside it well, sharing that same unvarnished way of seeing, a fondness for the plain truth of ordinary shelter.