1) "Funny Girl" by Nick Hornby
Art and life are intertwined in a novel about TV sitcoms set during the cultural sea change of the 1960s.
Hornby's (Juliet, Naked, 2009, etc.) most ambitious novel to date extends his passion for pop culture and empathy for flawed characters in to the world of television comedy. From her girlhood days in working-class Blackpool, Barbara Parker idolizes Lucille Ball and dreams of emulating her. Yet such a career seems impossible to a young woman whose closest brush with upward mobility comes when she wins a local beauty contest—then quickly abdicates her crown, realizing it would tie her closer to home rather than provide a ticket out. She realizes she has to go to London, a city where she has no connections or realistic prospects and where she discovers “that she wasn’t as lovely as she had been in Blackpool; or, rather, her beauty was much less remarkable here." There's one thing that makes her stand out from the other lovely girls, though: "She was pretty sure...that none of [them] wanted to make people laugh.” Through a series of chance encounters that seem like destiny, she does achieve her dreams, getting cast on a popular BBC comedy and even meeting Lucy, who “looked old, though, in the way that a ghost looks old.” It’s the supporting characters who really enrich this novel—the producer/director whose devotion to his star is more than professional; the gay writers who are initially semicloseted and whose paths will diverge; the male star whom this newcomer—now dubbed Sophie Straw—quickly eclipses. Hornby makes the reader care for his characters as much as he does and retains a light touch with the deeper social implications, as women, gays, popular entertainment and the culture in general experience social upheaval.
Years later, Sophie is getting ready to star in a play that's intended to revive her career. “The play is much better than I thought it was going to be," she thinks. "It’s funny, and sad—like life.” And like this novel.
2) "The Tutor" by Andrea Chapin
William Shakespeare: poet and playa.
Orphaned as a child and widowed as a young woman, Katharine de L’Isle has rejected every attempt to secure her another husband. She’s happy enough on her uncle’s estate, largely because she has free access to his library. But life is precarious for Catholic aristocrats in Elizabeth’s England, and the de L’Isle household is thrown into disarray when Sir Edward is forced to flee the country. Katharine’s peaceful existence is further unsettled by the arrival of a new schoolmaster. This William Shakespeare clearly knows no Greek, nor much Latin—and neither does he know his place. Katharine finds the man’s flirtations both infuriating and exhilarating, and thus, first-time novelist Chapin sets the stage for a smart and charming work of historical fiction. Using blank spaces in Shakespeare’s biography and the facts of his oeuvre, Chapin makes her heroine co-creator of “Venus and Adonis.” Katharine and Will enjoy some truly delightful banter, as well as some intensely sensual moments, but this Shakespeare is, ultimately, a sort of emotional vampire. He requires adoration, and he uses women—many women—as raw material for his art. This is an audacious move, but Chapin makes it real, and the scenes in which Katharine defends Will to her doubting lady friends will ring true to any woman who has ever uttered the words, “You just don’t understand him!” There’s some mystery business involving a murdered priest that Chapin seems to forget about until she wraps it up in a few sentences at the end, but that was never the most interesting thing about this novel anyway, so readers are unlikely to care.
An elegant entertainment and an impressive debut.
3) "Of Irish Blood" by Mary Pat Kelly
An Irish-American from Chicago, fleeing an abusive relationship, moves to Paris on the eve of World War I.
This sequel to Kelly’s Galway Bay (2009) is exhaustively researched, but much of that research is shoehorned onto the page; too often, otherwise-engaging characters become docents spouting informational tracts about all things Irish. In 1903, after battling her way from the switchboard to a career as a fashion designer for Montgomery Ward, narrator Nora Kelly (based on the author’s great-aunt) falls prey to the blandishments of Tim McShane, a charismatic gambler years her senior who initiates her sexually and relegates her to the role of occasional mistress while he squires vaudeville star Dolly McKee publicly. Eight years later, Nora, weary of the arrangement, tries to get free. But McShane, an affable but harmless blowhard in the opening chapters (how else could the independent-minded Nora have fallen for him?), appears to have undergone a not entirely convincing Jekyll and Hyde transformation: He tries to strangle Nora. Aided by Dolly, whom McShane also abuses, Nora escapes to Paris, where she earns a living copying designs for a couturier who serves the near-wealthy and leading tours of Paris for ladies who come to shop. Along the way, she encounters Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, Henri Matisse, Helen Keller, Coco Chanel and countless other icons. She also falls in love with Peter, a shy, austere professor at the Irish college of Paris, which also is an outpost of the Irish independence movement. Although Nora demonstrates the requisite degree of pluck—at one point she launders funds for the Irish rebellion—she never seems to mature nor gain much insight into the political, amorous and cultural tumult swirling around her. Even as she witnesses the onset of the Great War, serves as a nurse and is privy to an astounding quarrel between Yeats and his muse, Maud Gonne, over his famous poem “Easter, 1916,” Nora remains a cipher.
In a novel so awed by the great and near-great, ordinary human characters are outgunned.
4) "Wild Wood" by Posie Graeme-Evans
Revisiting the interconnected-mysteries-separated-by-centuries setup that worked so well in The Island House (2012, etc.), Graeme-Evans sends an Australian adoptee searching for her birth mother to a castle on the England-Scotland border.
In 1321, Hundredfield is held by the Dieudonné family, arrogant descendants of the Norman invaders who are feared and hated by the Saxon peasantry. Godefroi, the current lord, has done little to improve matters by marrying the mysterious Lady Flore, said to be a sorceress, while keeping as her servant a local girl, Margaretta, who has borne his son. How can Jesse, in the hospital after being hit by a motorcycle on a June day in 1981 shortly after arriving in London from Sydney, know Hundredfield well enough to draw it with her left hand, even though she’s right-handed and can’t draw? It might seem a ridiculous coincidence to have Jesse’s doctor, Rory Brandon, recognize the castle because his mother worked for the owners—whose daughter happens to be Alicia, the cafe waitress who helped Jesse after the accident. But there are no coincidences in Graeme-Evans’ satisfyingly spooky tale, which turns on a pre-Christian cult of the mother goddess whose female acolyte, the Lady of the Forest, arrives in the woods near Hundredfield over the centuries in times of need and bears a daughter. Flore is one such otherworldly visitor, Margaretta reveals when the lady’s body vanishes after giving birth about halfway through the book—a red flag that will tell alert readers where the story is heading. This doesn’t seriously mar the tension Graeme-Evans builds as the 14th- and 20th-century stories alternate while moving toward violent climaxes followed by loving renewal in both. Unlike The Island House, the modern characters are not as compelling as their ancestors—yes, Jesse proves to have roots in the borderlands as well—but the expert unfolding of a complicated plot mostly compensates.
More gripping entertainment from a seasoned professional.
5) "Church of Marvels" by Leslie Parry
In Parry’s colorful debut novel, seedy corners of late 19th-century New York come alive—and no one is exactly who they seem to be.
Odile and Isabelle Church are mourning Coney Island’s famous Church of Marvels, a theater and sideshow act that has recently burned to the ground with their mother inside. Both girls had been performers, but after the fire, Isabelle disappears into shadowy Manhattan. When Odile receives an alarming letter from her sister, she plunges into the city, determined to save her and bring her home. Along the way she encounters Sylvan the Dogboy, a bare-knuckle boxer who has recently discovered an abandoned baby in a privy; Mrs. Bloodworth, who helps pregnant girls arrange adoptions under the table; and a group of children at the underground gambling parlor the Frog and Toe who know more about her sister’s fate than she does. At the same time that Odile’s search unfolds, the book also follows Alphie, who has woken up at the Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell Island and must try to remember the circumstances that led her to be committed to that place of abuse and humiliation. Parry’s writing is smooth and descriptive, and she imbues these misfit characters and shabby, sometimes horrifying settings with energy and depth. But the search that drives the story loses steam about halfway through the book; by cutting back and forth between several different narratives, Parry makes it harder for the reader to connect with these flawed, injured characters until there's a great revelation that brings all the stories together. This surprise revitalizes the novel but also makes its shortcomings more apparent.
Beautifully written, Parry’s imaginative novel is most successful when exploring the limitations and complexities of gender and sexuality during its historical period.
6) "The Marriage of Opposites" by Alice Hoffman
A ghost wife, a stolen child, wandering eyes, hidden ledgers—and more—bind the 19th-century Jewish community on a paradisiacal island in the West Indies.
To this marvelous mise-en-scène, Hoffman (The Museum of Extraordinary Things, 2014, etc.) adds a historical character: Rachel Manzana Pomié, the Creole mother of impressionist painter Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro. Descended from Spanish and Portuguese Jews who “knew when to depart even when it meant leaving worldly goods behind,” Hoffman’s Rachel nurses a grudge as bitter as the fruit of the apple tree her grandparents toted to the Antilles when they fled France: that her mother, Mme. Pomié, favors the nephew she adopted as a baby over her own child. “Girls were not worth very much in her eyes, especially a disobedient girl.” With her friend Jestine—the mixed-blood child of the family cook—Rachel keeps a lookout for turtle girls (mermaids with shells) and, aping the French fabulist Charles Perrault, chats up the market women for “small miracles common only in our country” to tell when she finally gets to Paris. “My mother didn’t like this sort of talk; people of our faith didn’t believe in past lives or spirits.” Faith leaves Rachel as well when her father arranges a match to a business associate twice her age, who dies, trapping her on the island with seven children; she’s shunned by her synagogue when she falls into bed with a young relative of her late husband who arrives from Paris to settle the books: “The good man and the enchantress. Some people said I was made of molasses; one bite and you couldn’t get enough.” Wearing “haint blue” to chase ghosts won’t bring back the luck she gave away to her old friend Jestine when she needed it. But her youngest, Jacobo, whose sketches and open manner charm even tight-lipped members of the synagogue’s sisterhood, just might.
Lilting prose, beautifully meted out folklore and historical references, and Hoffman’s deep conviction in her characters (especially those “willing to do anything for love”) make reading this “contes du temps passé” a total pleasure.
7) "Driving the King" by Ravi Howard
A historical novel places Nat King Cole, as seen through the eyes of an ill-starred friend, at the epicenter of mid-20th-century America’s racial transformation.
In April 1956, Cole, at the crest of his widespread, cross-cultural renown as a pop vocalist, was assaulted by white supremacists while performing at the Birmingham State Theater in his native Alabama. Six months later, he became the first African-American to headline his own TV variety series, just as the epochal bus boycott led by Martin Luther King Jr. was about to enter its second year. Howard, whose previous novel, Like Trees, Walking (2007), was inspired by a real-life lynching, conflates these events into a novel of reimagined history in which the attack on Cole is pushed a decade back to Montgomery just after World War II. An ex-GI and childhood friend of Cole’s named Nathanial Weary thrusts himself between a pipe-wielding racist and the singer's head. Weary is charged with inciting a riot and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Upon his release, he's hired by Cole—who’s never forgotten his friend’s sacrifice—as his bodyguard and driver in Hollywood. Within this revisionist framework, Howard seeks to recount through Weary’s voice the harsh truths of postwar Jim Crow as it comes under direct siege in the 1950s. That narrative voice—tough, shrewd, barely containing the hurt from public and private injustices—is the novel's finest attribute. And yet, readers may lose their moorings within the novel’s time-shifting tactics. Not that there’s anything wrong with shifting facts in fiction for the sake of larger truths; some great Western films have come from such tactics. But you’re never altogether sure at the start of each chapter whether you’re in the '40s or the '50s. Such uncertainty contributes to a gauzy, almost dreamlike aura that makes the characters, even the stoic Weary, elusive, almost spectral figures. This is especially frustrating with the novel’s depiction of Cole, who is conceived with much charm, some quirky nervous tics and not much else.
Maybe Nat King Cole will always be something of a hallowed enigma among the great American musical icons. But one would think even a delicately woven novel that dares to reconfigure historical events might have taken more risks with its characterizations.
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