BookBrowse Reviews The Dime Museum by Joyce Hinnefeld

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These intricately linked short stories dramatize the return of fascism in 21st century Europe and the United States.

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In Joyce Hinnefeld's The Dime Museum, a pharmaceutical family's early-20th-century fortune carries into the present day and funds Charlie Milford's post-college travels around Europe as Covid approaches. Before Annie married into the Milford family in the 1920s, she played the "fat lady" in a dime museum (a "freak show"), a popular vaudeville act from the period, and was partnered to a woman named Maude Davies, a male impersonator with the performance persona "Irish Mick" or "The Bogus Man." From Maude onwards, the book spotlights those ostracized by society, the latter-day "freaks": the queer, poor, or addicted; the immigrants and non-citizens. Mostly set in Philadelphia from 2019 to 2021, but also featuring some European and historical settings, these linked stories contrast privilege and exclusion and draw attention to societal inequalities during the return of fascism.

In the opening story, "L'Acqua Alta," Charlie works in a bookshop in Venice and has a free place to stay through his mother's boyfriend. It's 2019 and Charlie is five years out of college, where he majored in English and was on the basketball team. Everything in life has come easily for him, unlike for his ex-girlfriend, Minerva Perez, a nurse and second-generation immigrant from the Dominican Republic. Despite the differences in their upbringings, they were both raised by single mothers and bonded over a love of poetry. While in Italy, blond-haired, blue-eyed Charlie keeps being confused for a white supremacist member of "CasaPound," the Italian neofascist movement named for Ezra Pound, an American poet famous for supporting Mussolini during WWII (see Beyond the Book). At a concert, Charlie meets Stefan, a right-wing Czech violin player, and they spar over immigration—an issue personal to Charlie because of Min.

These stories are linked through their recurring characters. The sole historical story, "The Dime Museum," recalls Maude and Annie's vaudeville past and revisits them as elderly women in 1965, when Tom, Maude's surrogate grandson, is preparing to enlist in the army. In later stories, Tom is an alcoholic veteran helping Charlie's mother with gardening and being tended by Min in a VA hospital. Another of Charlie's ex-girlfriends, Olivia, is featured in a story set in Lisbon in March 2020; Olivia is also the nanny for a couple from Philadelphia who bonded over a shared interest in Albert Barnes, a pharmaceutical chemist who amassed a large art collection and made it accessible to the poor.

Ezra Pound is another element that connects the book's nine stories and represents the rising tide of 21st-century fascism. Pound gives Maude a place to stay when she has nowhere else to go during a snowstorm in Indiana in 1908; Annie's daughter sends Pound a poem she's written, asking for feedback; Charlie reads Pound's poetry; Min's college professor researches Pound's mistress, Olga Rudge, whose house Charlie often passes in Venice.

Hinnefeld's writing is strong and her stories are melancholy: suicide or suicidal ideation is a theme in several of them, and many of the characters' relationships and ventures are failed. ("No believable story ends well. None but the most insipid ones do," Charlie's mother says.) I wondered if this short book takes on too many issues—not only the resurgence of fascism but also climate change (there is frequent flooding in Venice) and the response to Covid-19, which made the setting of most stories feel dated to me, as I felt that Hinnefeld wasn't saying anything new that illuminated that era. But her central connecting metaphor, the dime museum, is a clever one—it is an actual setting but also suggests the central dichotomy between the establishment and societal outcasts. The links between the stories are subtle but robust, and its thematic cautionary note is timely and important.

This review first ran in the September 10, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.