The Curators is complex, brilliant, and original. It is eminently worth any reader’s time. It’s also difficult to summarize, and even more difficult to analyze in any succinct way. For the purposes of this review, it’s probably most useful to start with the historical event the book is about: the trial and lynching of Leo Frank in 1910s Atlanta.

The initial events of the case happened in April 1913, when thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan worked at the National Pencil Company in Atlanta, Georgia. Leo Frank was her manager there. One morning, a night watchman found her body in the factory basement, and Frank was the last person to admit to seeing Phagan alive. The case became a flashpoint for many reasons: because Frank was Jewish, because Phagan was a white Protestant teenager (and therefore a symbol of white purity and victimization), and because the key witness in the case against Frank was Jim Conley, a Black janitor. It was highly unusual for a Black person’s testimony to be taken seriously in a Southern court, and so it’s particularly notable that the prosecution relied on Conley’s testimony. Many experts now think that Conley, not Frank, was probably the murderer, and even at the time, Conley’s story was notably inconsistent. But people were incensed, and Frank’s Jewishness was no small factor.

Mary Phagan became a symbol of white Christian innocence and purity, and Leo Frank a symbol of the evil enemy. During the trial, people mobbed the courthouse in hope of a guilty verdict. It took three weeks, but Leo Frank eventually was pronounced guilty, and was sentenced to hang. A New York Tribune article said that “Solicitor Hugh Dorsey, who conducted the prosecution, was lifted to the shoulders of several men and carried more than a hundred feet through the shouting throng.”

But Frank appealed, and appealed again, in a process that would stretch out for two years. Finally, the governor of Georgia investigated the case. The governor decided Frank was innocent, and commuted his sentence to life in prison, under the assumption that his innocence would eventually be fully proven.  Once news of the commutation got out, a group of people kidnapped Frank from the prison and lynched him. The case directly led not only to the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the South, but also to the foundation of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). (For a useful overview of the case, see the New Georgia Encyclopedia.)

The Curators begins during Frank’s trial. The trial is covered daily in the newspaper, and it captures the attention of all Atlanta. It especially captures the attention of five teenage girls, who call themselves “the Felicitous Five.” (NB: they’re fictional characters, original to the novel.) They’re infatuated with Leo, and they begin to collect as much Leo-related material as they can. Newspaper clippings and photos are an important part of their collection—their archive, really—but they also imagine places he might have been, preferences he might express, and what it would be like to be with him.

The Felicitous Five, like Leo, are Jewish. (Leo attended their synagogue, another special connection.) They become fascinated with Leo, and collect every piece of information they can about him in order to one day create a Leo Museum.

In the two years and four months that passed between Leo’s first appearance in the news and his lynching, we had learned his schooling (a fancy New York university) his dress (a club collar, always), his whereabouts (opera matinees on Sunday), and so many private things never printed in the paper: coffee black with brown sugar, Lucky Strikes, two gold-filled molars on the top left, an allergy to dogwood, a fondness for Nabisco wafers, dreams of us. (p. 12)

Along with curating the Leo Museum, the Five also prognosticate about his fate: Every small news item, even if it’s about the weather or the county fair, can be interpreted as a Leo-related omen. They draw up a set of rules: They are never to be without Leo (so they pin pictures of him to their clothes), they must meet every day to discuss Leo, and, most importantly, they must share all information they learn about Leo. Keeping secrets is a “serious offense.” The five of them are in this together, and their differences don’t matter in the face of the rules.

But from the novel’s beginning, one of the Felicitous Five stands out from the rest: Ana Wulff. Ana thinks and acts on her own, and she has a glorious, expansive imagination. In fact, her imagination is a large part of why Leo grows into the icon he is: Ana is the one to suggest many of the group’s most important rules and activities, and to define the group’s perspective. “She was the baby, but also the scribe and scientist […] clever and thorough” (p. 25).

Sometimes the narrative is from the point of view of a “we,” which is clearly the Felicitous Five—but minus Ana. Sometimes it’s a third person that knows much more about Ana than her friends possibly could. Either way, Ana is always on her own, from the very start of the book. Ana is one of the Felicitous Five, but she’s also a separate entity, with her own name, operating differently from them, and even independently from them. And this is a problem for the other four girls. Something about Ana is particularly intense, particularly real. The other girls always seem a little bit aware of how Ana differs from them; they’re both intimidated by it and keen to knock her down to their size. (This is marked ethnically, too—Ana is the only one of the girls whose family is from Russia.)

Much of the book is about how the girls treat each other and interpret the intensely racialized environment they live in. And Ana’s interpretation is unique. She has no real understanding of what it means to be Black,. but she uses her powerful imagination to make sense of things, to tie things together with reason as best as she can, to try to find reason and truth even when it’s impossible because she lacks the guidance and maturity to do so.

At a crucial turning point in the story, Ana heads by herself to Darktown, the Black neighborhood of Atlanta, in search of a voodoo practitioner named Miss Zelie who can help her resolve a dare with the other girls. The person Ana knows best is Black: her family’s servant, Isaac, who helped raise her, and who made up stories about Miss Zelie in the first place. But she has no idea how to behave, or how her presence might endanger the people she’s talking to. She believes earnestly in magic, and is wary of it, so she treats the people around her as if they are flat characters from a folktale.

When Ana eventually does find Miss Zelie’s sister, for instance, she names the woman “The Night Witch” in her mind, after the “Night Witch” who’s referenced in the (real) murder notes found next to Mary Phagan’s body. Ana needles her for information and magic. Miss Zelie’s sister finally relents and gives her a tin of Nabisco cookies. Ana, earnest and enveloped in her own imagination, doesn’t doubt her for a moment, but she insists that the magic has to be powerful enough to save Leo. The Night Witch says, “Oh, I heard you. […] These are special magic Nabiscos. I did a witching on them just last night, so they’re fresh as can be” (p. 87). We can hear the tone of sarcasm and exhaustion, but Ana cannot. Ana grabs the Witch’s wrist and demands more information. A moment later, a cop emerges to beat and arrest Miss Zelie for grabbing Ana’s wrist. We can see the reversal that’s happened here, but Ana cannot. Only at the end of the novel, when Ana’s made many more mistakes, does she understand the harm she’s caused, and how many things in the world are inverted like this. The rest of the Felicitous Five seem never to get there at all.

In the next chapter, Leo Frank is lynched. The Felicitous Five are among the crowd that goes to see his body. Soon afterwards, they attempt to create a Leo golem using Leo-related newspaper clippings and the Night Witch’s cookies—and they succeed. Sort of: The Leo golem emerges as a vaguely man-shaped mass of dirt with blue flowers for eyes. But because Ana used her Night Witch magic (maybe), and because she gives the golem language lessons in her attic, the golem becomes hers most of all. And the Felicitous Five get quite angry about that.

The Curators is fascinating, perplexing, and difficult. This summary only covers about half of the book, and in much less detail than I’d have liked. It’s impossible to try to resolve this story into a single thread. But that’s part of what the book is about: trying to pull an enormous jumble of stuff together into meaning. Even if unification isn’t possible, and even if the most important answers can’t be found, the novel holds out the possibility that maybe some sort of meaning is still possible.

The girls do this with Leo, but they also do it with each other. They try to unify themselves most literally in their “spider game,” which they play a few times throughout the book. In the spider game, the girls lie down on the floor in a circle (heads in the center and feet sticking out), and braid their hair together so they can’t tell whose hair and limbs belong to whom. They’re together as one unit, sort of; but it seems like they’re also experiencing mixing and ambiguity, perhaps more than the experience of all coming together as one discrete being. Even so, they’re bound by ritual and a sort of intimate care, which is unification of a sort.

But they can’t stay this way forever. “We unwound our hair with great patience and the stored gentleness we withheld in our daily lives. But always, there were pieces so bound up and fused together they had to be cut free with a knife” (p. 47.) Once you mix all these pieces together (body parts, words and ideas, dirt), once you get lost, you can’t get entirely un-lost. Something has changed. They clean each other up afterwards and become “new” (p. 47), but they also remain tangled. That is, they can’t fully escape the tangle they made. In The Curators, everything is slippery. Other people determine who you are and what you do and what you mean, even when you don’t agree or want them to. The people, places, things, and ideas you get close to change you, and you change them, too. Severing yourself from those people (etc.) can be violent. It can be violent, too, to say that people are wrong about you, to say they haven’t affected you, to say that your perceptions of each other are wrong, either as particular people or as members of categories.

And, of course, this comes back to the book’s political statements. What do people assume about Black people? About Jewish people? About teenage girls? About white Christian men?

Late in the book, in a fit of jealously, the rest of the Felicitous Five try to tie Ana up. Ana accidentally throws her lamp and starts a fire. The rest of the girls manage to escape by themselves. But it’s the golem who rescues Ana, along with Ana’s mother, by carrying them out of the house.

Mr. Fink (a father of one of the Five), and the Fiddler (a ne’er do-well reporter and gossip), both see this happen. The two of them have a horrible conversation that unspools in more and more hysterical directions as it goes. They decide that the dark-skinned unclothed figure who carried the Wulffs out of their house must have been Isaac, their Black servant—that somehow he lecherously entered the house and carried them out in an act of indecency. Isaac is forced to go “on the lam”—that is, into hiding—for the crime of being simultaneously Black and associated with the wrong house.

So the golem’s act of heroism is warped into the act of a malicious Black phantom: Isaac, who told Ana magic stories in the first place, has to go the run to avoid an angry mob. It’s sort of a warped version of the Leo Frank case: A Black man is blamed for a crime that doesn’t exist, when really a Jewish creature did something heroic. (In the Leo Frank case, a Jewish man is blamed for a crime that a Black man likely committed.) But this isn’t a perfect opposite, and it doesn’t produce any easy answers. Most of the book’s conundrums are like that.

The Curators refuses to answer many of its own questions. It’s a baggy book; it pulls together many disparate ideas and gestures towards what their combinations might mean. On first reading, that was sometimes frustrating. This is especially true of the book’s end, where Ana climbs inside the golem. From inside, she says she’s found the Truths she’s been searching for, but she can barely communicate any of them. Then she asks the other four girls to tear the golem apart. When they do, Ana’s gone. The other four girls simply finish tearing the golem apart. I wanted to know what happens after Ana vanishes, and who the girls become, and what all of these events and feelings come to mean. Instead, we just have a final violence and a collection of suggestions and attempts at meaning, without confirmation.

But in a way, that seems to be the point. This book is an archive (in a number of different ways), and it doesn’t present a fully formed meaning to us. We have to make that for ourselves. Ana does, too, and so do the remaining members of the Felicitous Five who narrate the book. Rachel León’s excellent review in the Chicago Review of Books suggests that “The Curators is above all a meditation on devotion. To friends, to girlhood, to memory, to religion, to golems, to truth. Even, perhaps, to language and its power …” I think this is right, and I think that devotion drives the girls in this story to create their own meaning out of whatever it is they have available. They can’t get answers from the Leo-golem because that’s not what devotion doe; the Leo-golem saves Ana and her mother from the fire out of devotion; and devotion cannot make it capable of saying whether or not Leo Frank is innocent, or any of the other questions Ana desperately wants answered.

In an earlier section about school, Ana says:

In the real world, there was danger and adventure and who knows what else. In our school, there were only lines to fill in and there was only one answer for each line, which didn’t make any sense at all. If there was only one answer, and no other answers could be considered, then even if you replaced the answer with a black line or a blank space or an empty box, it was still there, wasn’t it? Even if it couldn’t be seen, it couldn’t possibly be anywhere but there, and nothing could go there but the one answer. What was the point in asking the question? (p. 51)

This contrarian imagination is what makes Ana the focus of the book, and it’s what makes her treat the Leo-golem differently and more personally. But even her imagination doesn’t stop her from making grave mistakes with the golem. The girls create the golem hoping that a specific answer already exists: They want the golem to tell them that Leo was innocent. The golem could never have done that, have been that; the girls couldn’t have made it that way. They used newspaper scraps and photos and their memories of the funeral and their stolen fake hanging rope and maybe-magical Nabisco wafers from Darktown, and the web of understanding that they’ve made together over time. They did so as a group. On top of that, they have Ana’s made-up magic, the magic of the “night witch,” which is a combination of Isaac’s Miss Zelie stories, Ana’s misadventure in Darktown, and Ana’s desperate tale-telling. The girls hope that magic— as Ana presents it— would fill the gaps, and turn what they had into Leo. But, as Mrs Wulff says at the very beginning of the book, “The golem is nothing his makers are not also” (p. 9).

The golem can’t be Leo, then; he was made by the girls. But there’s still truth inside the golem that Ana can’t even express. Maybe the point (in part) is that there’s some kind of difference between being something/existing as something in the world and understanding what that is: Even if you know that something exists and what it’s supposed to mean, you still may not know for certain what it does mean. It’s that gap which Ana means to fill, and it’s why she jumps into the golem and lets it swallow her.

There is much more to be said about The Curators: the nuances of its racial commentary; its exploration of rape culture and gender; its take on personal relationships and intimacy; its depiction of parental trauma; the true nature of the Leo-golem and what’s inside of him; how all of these things intersect. I hope many people read and talk and think about The Curators. The amount of thought and attention put into it has created a novel which deserves our thought and attention back.