Enchanted Prose

America’s fur trappers and early Western explorers (Territories west of St. Louis, from the Great Plains to the Pacific Northwest, 1826 -1829): Passions run hot about America’s West, but imagine being captivated by fur trappers, early 19^th-century explorers. You will be after reading Into the Savage Country. These so-called mountain men, hunted, preserved, traded, and blazed our “magnificent country. Fertile and beautiful and savage and the whole world thirsting after it.”

Told through the personal narrative of William Wyeth, looking back on three glorious, reckless years when he left St. Louis at age 22 to join a fur trapping brigade that headed 1500 miles up the Missouri River, a “soul-crushing” journey reminiscent of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Those famous explorers were backed by a President; Wyeth’s companions had only the backings of themselves, stirred by an “unquenchable desire for accomplishment, for recognition, for glory.” Muscular storytelling, as good as it gets.

Taking us inside his yearnings, motivations, and fears, Wyeth’s memories are of the “world’s great heart beating inside me.” Fresh and action-packed because his account comes from a diary he kept at the time using a quill pen, written in “parchment notebooks with velum covers.” Since the real mountain men kept journals, fictional Wyeth’s tales feel authentic.

Lest you assume trapping beavers in the years before they quickly became depleted, or hunting buffalo along rivers, sagebrush, and mountains before the days of cowboys is not the romanticized Western you’re nostalgic for, I invite you to hold the handsome book, with its majestic Mountain Landscape with Indians painting on the cover, and finger thicker pages than most. Its sturdiness portends the adventurers you’re about to meet. Many are legendary explorers who display the same unwritten code of honor Hollywood captured: fairness, justice, courage, survival, patriotism.

You’ll also like the author’s conciseness given the incredible volume of resources on early American fur trading: journals, letters, biographies, research. There’s even a Museum of the Mountain Man, which publishes the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade Journal to “further the knowledge base and discussion of the Rocky Mountain fur trade era.” Precisely what Burke’s novel does for us.

Structured in chapters that read like installments – The Voyage Out, The Settlement, The Far West – the reader is drawn into a time nearly two centuries ago when men were willing to sacrifice their lives for excitement, riches, or to prove something.

The prose flows. Wyeth’s self-deprecating voice is full of youthful restlessness and longing, for beautiful western mountains and a woman he falls for by page four. He feels “at the cusp of a great mystery, infinite, overwhelming, and bewildering.” Indeed, as Wyeth tells us in the opening paragraph, America is at the cusp of a new frontier:

“I was twenty-two years old and feverish with the exploits of Smith and Ashley. I followed their accounts in the Gazette and the Intelligencer and calculated their returns and dreamed of their expeditions. The fur trade was warring and commerce and exploration, and above all else in my mind, it was adventure.”

Wyeth’s trapping lands are the most pristine west of Missouri. These mountain men opened up Western territories, defined by the Treaty of 1818, which left huge swaths of gorgeous country open. Sought after by the British and of course Americans, these lands were also inhabited by Canadians, French, Spanish traders and many Native American nations: Crow, Sioux, Blackfoot, Gros Venture, Mandan. Wyeth’s adventures span what’s today the States of Montana, North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oregon, Wyoming. Gigantic wilderness where those “gigantic, lumbering beasts” – buffalo – once roamed.

An eye-opening Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit soon-to-close showcases the striking art of the nomadic Great Plains Indian hunters. One reason its garnered rave reviews is their sophisticated artistry was not well-known. On display are painted buffalo hide robes, fur-lined leggings, feathered peace pipes, like the wardrobe and ornamentation visualized in the novel. It too delivers an eye-opener: to a “glorious life that flamed up for a time in the Western mountains.” While there were also “darker moments” – hardships, violence, isolation – Wyeth chooses to downplay these.

He also doesn’t want to bog us down with too many “particulars of the trade.” So I’ll take his lead and not even attempt to describe the “art of fur trading,” except to say you do get a great sense of the particulars from the fur trader’s language: booseway, calumet, castoreum, pommel, cudgel, pemmican, willow trap, hivernant, palavering.

Instead, here’s particulars about a few of the characters:

WYETH: Charms us with his boyish shyness and honesty (“puffed up with self-importance”). Aware he’s different from his farming brothers, he craves “vast, wild spaces.” He fears he’s no match for these “real outdoorsmen, mountain men,” but you’ll see he proves his mettle time and time again: battling hostile tribes, a moose, a grizzly bear, and displaying exceptional horsemanship when the stakes are so high the weight of Western boundary-making seemed to rest on his shoulders. His instant infatuation with Alene Chevalier endures throughout, from their first meeting in St. Louis and then later, fortuitously, when he’s a trader with the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. She’s “French with a quarter native blood that showed in her hair and eyes” … all very proper and European in her manners … she trod that middle ground between warmth and propriety.” He courts her as best he can, but she’s a widow in a long mourning who also understands the trapper’s life is exciting for the men but not for the women left behind.

FERRIS: Wyeth admits misjudging Ferris, who joined the brigade at 19. The son of a physician, he seems “small and frail and boneless as a doll,” but his gentleness turns out to be virtuous good-naturedness and a natural confidence in the wilds. What endears us to him is his immense curiosity in everything around him, sketching and painting the scenes Wyeth recorded. They make an interesting pair, and become friends. Named the “White Indian,” for his genuine desire to understand the customs, adornments, and traits of Native Americans, so refreshing given our painful history of negative stereotyping. Burke introduces two famous native chieftains – Long Hair of the Mountain Crow and Red Elk of the Blackfoot – who despite their “excessive pride” are willing to negotiate and seek help. Ferris is likely to also be a real historical figure. Burke acknowledges some that inspired him, but we’re left to imagine who Ferris might be. John Mix Stanley painted the cover, but my guess is Ferris is fashioned from fur trader and painter Alfred Jacob Miller, who sketched and painted hundreds of scenes of Native Americans, mountain men, and grand landscapes. One he’s celebrated for is of Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains, depicted in the novel.

HENRY LAYTON: He’s a charismatic, energetic, boastful womanizing con man from St. Louis who knows nothing about fur trading, but knows how to put together a fine brigade. Led by Jedediah Smith, a real mountain man who like Wyeth set out at 22 to trap beaver under General Ashley, and to this day enjoys a following for having explored more untapped wilderness than any other (www.jedediahsmithsociety.org). Layton has an inconsistent personality of spirited highs and irritating lows. You, like Wyeth, will come to admire his dauntlessness for defending our territories against the British, and just about anything else that stands in the way of making the fortunes he boisterously promised his men.

Who remembers these fur trading explorers from history class? The best of historical fiction is a history light bulb. Entertaining, enlightening – and memorable.

Lorraine

French Realism: Édouard Manet and his “modèle de profession,” Victorine Louise Meurent (Paris, 1862): The first clue you get that Maureen Gibbon’s 19^th-century historical novel about the French painter, Édouard Manet, and his muse, Victorine Louise Meurent – he 30, she 17 – is going to be risky and provocative is that of his more than 400 paintings, the one selected for the cover is Olympia.  The full painting is a nude, one that caused such a stir critics did see red when exhibited at the Salon of Paris in 1865, two years after Manet finished it, after the novel ends.

Manet’s nude is considered the most famous of that century.  It may not be the painting non-art historians like myself are most familiar with (or most enamored with).  Those are his impressionistic masterpieces of later years – boating, beach, café, railway scenes – that evoke a “dewy-eyed” loveliness, which the avant-garde Olympia is not.  But Gibbon’s goal is to pen something original, like Manet’s passion to “paint something entirely new.”

She does so with spare prose that creates an aura catching Manet’s shadowy, mysterious, erotic world, which means her novel isn’t soaked in details, nor the totality of the artist’s career.  Instead, it’s a window into Manet’s art when he created a sensual painting that shocked the Parisian art scene, giving us glimpses into the inspiration of his early years, pioneering the French realist art movement.

Here we see Manet’s devotion to art that is honest and realistic not romanticized, the prevailing preferences of the time.  The same can be said of the author, who wants us to see the darker side of the City of Lights.  The novel is best appreciated like a great piece of art in a museum: by looking and seeing, understanding all by ourselves, with just enough details to intrigue.

So, despite the short chapters – sometimes only a one-page impressionistic paragraph, like the artist sketching – this is not a breezy read.  The prose is nuanced, echoing Paris when the lights are gray-blue.  We sense what it might have felt like to have been Victorine, who tries so hard to grasp Manet’s “not-simple” paintings, because we’re compelled to understand what the author wants us to see.  Gibbon acknowledges she’s thought about Olympia for ten years, so her vision and impressions interest us almost as much as Manet’s or his model’s.  (“I am trying hard to understand what it all means to him because I know that it does mean something.”)

There’s a sadness that permeates Victorine’s voice – our narrator – and the evocative prose.  Apparently, not that much is known about the real-life young woman who posed for Olympia, allowing the author the freedom to speculate.  Artistic freedom – Manet’s, his muse’s, and the author’s – a worthy theme.

What the novel tells us about Victorine is that she’s a precocious 17-year-old working-class girl, a silver burnisher.  She relishes the tools of her trade, learned from her working-class parents: her father an engraver, her mother a seamstress. But it’s not until we’re more than halfway through that we’re even sure of her real name: Victorine Louis Meurent.

That’s because when the novel opens she’s called Louise by her intimate friend, Denise, not her lover, more like a sister.  They share a shabby room, even the same bed, toiling away at the same silver shop barely eking out enough money to live.  That shopworn look is what Manet spots on a street.  He makes advances to them both, teases about their names, a “ménage à trois” at first.  He’s sizing them up: Denise, the brunette, with “a kind of sweetness about her”; Louise, the emboldened redhead, craving much more out of life.

Louise/Victorine knows she’s “different from everyone else.”  Hers is a restless yearning to be noticed and touched – to be someone.  So she makes a crass sexual move to grab Manet’s sole attention.  Turns out she’s a far better match of the two to become his model: she enjoys drawing, colors, details, and, most importantly, is very willing to experiment.

Victorine has been sizing Manet up too.  Her intense desires “not to be ordinary” are matched by his intensity about realism in art (“there’s only beauty in what’s real”).  A poignant scene finds Manet rubbing away much of a canvas he disliked, which upsets Victorine because she doesn’t want to be “erased.”  Manet sensitively explains it’s not the memory of the woman he painted he removed, just brushstrokes and composition.  It’s a marvelous example of his softness.  Indeed, Manet is a sensitive man, not content to “paint people at the edges.”  And yet he’s veiled, hiding his face behind a bushy beard.  (“There is something fine-grained about his face in spite of the riotous beard and moustache.”)

Artist and model also share a fierce independent streak.  Manet has the luxury of being an independent artist.  He has money to pay Victorine, presumably coming from a well-to-do family, so he’s not enslaved to paint to please the aristocracy.  Instead, he painted what he saw.  Victorine may adore Denise, yet she risks striking out on her own for “whatever it is in me that wants and wants – it is as big as the sky and keeps going.”

By the time Victorine has grown comfortable posing nude for Manet, she’s taken the black ribbon necklace on the book’s cover and made it her own.  It’s a pivotal moment, seeming then to transition from being Manet’s model to his rebellious source of inspiration, his muse.  By now he’s calling her “Trine,” an affectionate name reflecting the sexuality of their artistic relationship.

Was their real-life artist/muse relationship as sexual/erotic as depicted? Not clear.  What appears certain is Victorine was Manet’s most favored model.  Did he love her?  Not clear either.  He cares for her, is concerned about her finances, is kindly and respectful in the privacy of his studio and publicly among his contemporaries, but Manet is an obscure man with another life.

Most certain is his ardor for his art: “That is the thing that I cannot get inside: what it must be like to love something – a thing – so much.”  Did he make love to her so she’d trust him completely? To capture Victorine’s essence, she must unabashedly be at ease, in her most personal, raw moments, especially if he is to paint the soulful expression in her eyes.  When Manet finally shows Victorine Olympia, she’s moved that there’s “nowhere to look in the painting except my eyes.”  She recognizes that expression: “I know what it feels like to look that way … When my grandmother died.  When my heart was broken.”  Victorine’s soul, then, is forever a part of Manet’s “groundbreaking” art.  Now she has what she’s desperately wanted: she’s unforgettable.

Numerous sprinklings of references evoke the era – names of Parisian streets in the 1860s, French phrases, Manet’s artist and writer friends.  At times I wished for an appendix, maps, dictionary, but the truth is that precision isn’t necessary since the novel is about sensing moods and artistry, which it achieves.

Still, once read, I googled Manet’s friends, as some names were familiar, others not: Félix-Jacques Antoine Moulin was a photographer whose photos Manet uses to see the “effect of shadow and light;” Henri Fantin-Latour was a portraitist and painter of flowers; Charles Baudelaire, a poet; Honoré Daumier, cartoonist and painter; Louis-Émile-Edmond Duranty, author; Zacharie Astruc, sculptor and painter; Tonin, turns out is An-tonin Proust, boyhood friend and journalist; Tony Robert-Fleury, another French painter; and Alfred Stevens, a kindly, romantic Belgian painter.

Just as Manet pushes Victorine to observe her reactions, the author pushes us.  Like the famous artist and his muse, she’s “bold enough to tell the truth.”

Lorraine

Heroism – Saving lives, then saving yourself (Colorado wilderness, Northern California college, Boston, Massachusetts neighborhoods; present-day):

Girl Underwater makes you wish you had nothing else to do in your day but binge read. The way it unfolds, and the taut prose, are riveting.  Artfully, Claire Kells delivers a message about true courage and the raw instinct for survival that is as much about hope and trust as monumental catastrophe and despair.  At under 300 pages, it’s stirring writing for any author, let alone one’s debut.

The novel’s timing is eerily uncanny given the rash of horrific plane crashes of late.  I’m not giving anything away here since by page 8 the air tragedy has already been set in motion.  Later we learn 204 innocents perished, someplace in/by a Colorado Rocky mountain lake, “the kind of wilderness no one comes to visit, the kind of lake no one ever swims in.”  Yet, there are a few survivors and two are elite swimmers.

Colin Shea and Avery Delacorte are swim teammates at a Northern California college, flying home on Thanksgiving break, which means the wilderness lake is frigid.  But it’s strewn with the wreckage of the plane, pieces of fuselage and contents that might help them survive. That taunting, haunting lake and their exceptional swimming skills and endurance are there for a purpose.

It’s with that same purposefulness, more like fate, that as soon as Colin boards the airplane he changed his seat to sit beside Avery.  They weren’t close friends, but that simple act belies the dramatic changes their relationship will undergo in the face of life-and-death decisions. (“The façade he used to navigate our stilted interactions has been stripped away.”)  Colin’s proximity to Avery is an incredulous stroke of good fortune, which is not lost on Avery who witnesses his acute sensitivities to her needs and to those of the people surrounding them over his own – his split-second reactions, selflessness, bravery, and calmness – which kick into high gear before others seem to realize what’s happening.  We’re told there’s “nothing embellished” about Colin (he has a “strange sense of groundedness”).  His is a tender way of getting straight to the point that’s honest and strong, much like the author’s prose.  She does not waste words, so the ones she’s chosen have a sureness and eloquence that is point-blank.

Avery, rather than Colin, is the right choice for narrator because she has insecurities whereas he possesses a “smooth, languid magnificence that so few creatures can claim.”  Her recounting moves back and forth in time in chapters that immerse us in dramatic scenes of their fight to stay alive; their histories; and the aftermath, centered on Avery’s coming-to-terms with being one of the lone survivors.  Life for her is now conceived of as Before and After: before the crash and afterwards.  Before sheds light on who Avery and Colin were when disaster struck, to render this survival story – theirs and the three young, trusting boys they heroically saved – believable.

Swimming – Avery’s and Colin’s athleticism and discipline – are key to the novel’s premise.  Colin, a junior, is even “better than Michael Phelps” in the pool, with his “rippling cords of muscles in his forearms and shoulders.  His jaw is locked, his expression neutral.  It’s no wonder he dominates so completely in the pool.”  He transfers that power, energy, laser focus in the crucial moments of crisis and for days after.  His “massive, warm, life-saving hands” perform like a well-oiled machine, “carrying loads that would pose a challenge to three or four men put together.”  Equally important is that he’s someone who “doesn’t just keep his cool, he creates it,” with “teasing smiles that could thaw a glacier.”  His profound sense of “hope without making empty promises,” beyond that which the rest of us would deem rational, is a gift for Avery, the three boys, and us.  All these marvelous traits are provocatively enhanced by his sweet shyness, “fierce loyalty,” and eyes that are “dark, tempestuous, gray-blue, intense.”  In short, Colin possesses a charismatic, complex, almost indescribable combination of the right stuff.

So does Avery, but she doesn’t think so. Despite her talents, strengths, and natural beauty (hair like “fairy dust” and “spectral green eyes”), she walks around feeling “borderline” – wanting to be “normal meant more to me than being me.”  Avery is passionate about distance swimming, the 1500 (“the “closest thing swimming has to a mile.  A mile to find a rhythm, to become one with the water”), but the coach recruited her for middle distance so she’ll “go where I’m needed.”  Her father, a no-nonsense physician, drilled her in fending for herself.  One lesson he taught her is that “people die because they panic,” a skill she, and we, get to see up close really matters.  Amidst incredible perils, her father’s wisdom buoys her: “I want to cry but my father would have forbidden it.”

The airplane crash scenes are action-packed.  But it’s the psychological action of this tiny band of clinging-to-life survivors, and Avery’s emotional voice that grips us.

Avery and Colin both grew up in Boston, but different worlds: Colin from proud, working class Dorchester, and Avery, upscale Brookline.  Of Avery’s three brothers, it’s Edward, a professional baseball player earning $6.4 million who surfaces because he wants to give all that up after his sister’s accident.  Hooray for a character who reminds us that “money isn’t everything.”  Colin’s father is a roofer, so Colin knows something about building protective structures.  As the oldest of three younger sisters and a dear Mom, the role of protector comes second-nature.

The prose is evocative whether describing the strokes and lure of swimming (the college natatorium is a “transparent cathedral”); the relaxed California culture of “hugs and first names” versus the reserved “handshakes and Mr. and Mrs. of Boston;” and the torment of Avery’s recovery process in dealing with survivor’s guilt, the intrusiveness of the media, nightmares, and paralyzing new fears.

One disquietude we can relate to is Avery’s conflicted affections and allegiance.  When she stepped onto that fateful plane her heart was attached to a happy-go-lucky boyfriend, Kahale, Hawaiian, “Lee to mainlanders,” who we see genuinely loves her.  But after you’ve been through what Avery and Colin have endured – events depicted and others we can only imagine – Avery is rightfully torn about her feelings toward Colin.  After: she feels “I’ve known him all my life.”

You’d think the relationship angst of “interpreting the afterglow of tragic events as the real thing” would be easy compared to surviving a plane crash lost thousands of feet above civilization, but it’s not.  Avery’s inner struggles are like the advice given to beginner swimmers: “there comes a moment of sudden, breathtaking awe – the moment they learn to trust it.  Not just the water but themselves.” Avery must learn to trust herself.

There are real-life Colins and Averys out there, private heroes whose heroism comes from someplace deep within their souls.  Since they’re not seeking attention and glory, we need a novelist like Claire Kells to make them real for us, inspiring us to dig deeper than we thought possible.

Lorraine

Discovering/Re-discovering what’s precious in life (New Jersey, present-day): What is it about Marisa de los Santos’ novels that have so much heart?

The Precious One is the author’s fourth novel; I read her first three, pre-blogging: Love Walked In, Belong to Me and Falling Together, my favorite because the scenes set in the Philippines, where her father is from, pulsed genuinely.  Still, the details of those earlier tales are fuzzy, except for a lingering warmth that these stories of love, friendship, and family touched me.  So now I get a chance to examine and share why The Precious One, with the same signature themes, once again emotionally resonates with so much heart.

We connect because the characters feel real and distinct – good, bad, confused, obscure.  Some remind us of people we’re lucky to have in our lives, or wish we did; others we hope we’ll never come across, although sadly, we know of them.  Structured in chapters alternating between two female voices, one young, one older, we get inside their heads.  Others are important too, for they are mixed up in their lives for good and for bad, and they too feel familiar, well-realized.  Some you’ll like, love, admire, root for, and smile at their delightful sense of humor; others, only two actually, you’ll dislike, intensely.  A collection of characters perceived singularly because the prose and dialogue are sensitive, sharp, and nimble, conveying emotions ranging from good-natured/good-humored/tender to muddled to frightened to sarcastic/mean-spirited, depending on the character.

Allow me, then, to introduce them, and the storyline:

NARRATORS: Taisy Cleary, 35, and Willow Cleary, 16.  Yes, they’re sisters, half-sisters, who’ve never really met (only one dreadful Christmas, when Willow was an infant), until now.  Taisy you’ll want to hug and have in your corner from the get-go; Willow grows on you.  By the time we meet their stony-hearted father, Wilson, you’re already primed to dislike him.  Our animosity doesn’t soften much, although some of his grandiose behaviors become explainable although never condonable.  He’ll vex you, as unknowable people can.  More about Wilson below.

TAISY: lovely, self-deprecating, funny, wistful, brokenhearted, lovesick, dogged, and achingly candid when she’s around the only man she’s truly loved, Ben, someone she hasn’t seen in seventeen years.  A ghostwriter and editor, she berates herself for agreeing to spend two weeks at Wilson’s house – she’s been summoned after he’s had a serious heart attack – since he cut off all ties after her parents divorced. She, and we, very soon learn that Wilson isn’t looking to make amends; he has something different in mind.

WILLOW, a “beautiful misfit”: overprotected, melodramatic, “old soul” intelligence, jealous, caustic, lonely, and up until now homeschooled.  Wilson’s health crisis has thrust his precious daughter into a “soul-killing place” – a private high school – 21st century life she can’t possibly know how to survive in having been shielded from the outside world. Wilson’s overprotectiveness is obsessive, bordering on abusive: she’s never watched television or movies; been allowed to read anything past the 19^th century (she adores literature; the author’s doctorate in English Literature shines through as Middlemarch, especially, is dissected for a class project); own a cellphone; have sleepovers; eat candy, you name it.  She’s been brought up to think she’s above all that.  Brainwashed to believe untruths about Taisy, she presents as impenetrable: “she spits venom at me [Taisy] with her eyes, but there’s something about her that sort of tugs at my heart.” Willow carries the burden of an irrational sense of responsibility for her father’s well-being and for her gentle, artist mother’s.  “If I could not take care of the people in this house, I was a brute,” which is why her fragility, evoked by her wispy name is apt.  The reader will see how terribly vulnerable she is.

MARCUS: is not the failure his father purports him to be.  He’s a financial trader, wealth Wilson hypocritically mocks despite being a millionaire.  Marcus is endearingly devoted to Taisy (he’s “home to me, the safest place I’ve ever been”), so we immediately take a liking to him and accept his “red-hot” anger toward Wilson.

WILSON, a “breathtaking jerk”: Taisy and Marcus can’t bring themselves to call him father.  Can you blame them?  He’s Taisy’s “hidden, broken part,” but she’s carved a good life down South.  Wilson’s request is that she write his memoir, not the full story, the unknown parts, but his “intellectual journey, my scholarship, my teaching.  The life story of a mind.”  Consistently, annoyingly pompous!

BEN: Willow’s high school romance.  Lovable, easygoing, attached to his great Dad, terrific sense of humor, with a laugh that was Taisy’s “own private meteor shower.”  You can probably pinpoint the cause of their disrupted bliss.  When Taisy learns Ben has returned home to New Jersey, not far from her father’s house, near her childhood home, we see to what delectable lengths she’s willing to go through to try to win him back.

TAISY’S MOM: A “tireless-lawyer-with-a-heart of gold job.” While she doesn’t say that much, she’s prescient about Taisy’s emotions and actions, which is all we need to know about her maternal instincts and unconditional love.

WILLOW’S MOM: Caro is a glassblower for whom “the most amazing things take shape inside her mind, beautiful things that exist nowhere in the world, and then she makes them exist.  How many people can you say that about?”  Over time, she turns into an ideal sounding board for Taisy, relieved to be staying at the pool house, a separate arrangement she adapts to easily.

TRILLIUM: Taisy’s sparkling, pull-no-punches best friend (an “ineffable iridescent effervescence that I would call Trillium-inosity”).  Famous for an international bestselling guidebook of Life RULES! which is the same catchy turquoise color as the novel’s cover.  Her “5^th life rule”: “Every woman must have one friend for whom a lunch-and-shopping trip is always the solution, no matter what the problem might be.” Taisy’s freelance writing career got started as her ghostwriter, but leave it to Taisy to graciously give all the credit to Trillium: “What made her story special was Trillium herself: the cadence of her throaty voice, her leaping mind, the way she’d throw words out like handfuls of confetti one minute, and select them, one by careful one, the next.”

MR. INSLEY: Willow’s English teacher. Their teacher/student relationship develops over school lunches, then he teaches Willow to drive. He speaks as though he were living in the 19^th century (“the obsessions of the bourgeoisie!”), and is impassioned by the Victorian Pre-Raphaelites.

BEN’S DAD: A “slightly goofy joy,” whom Taisy tells us she’s “probably touched him more than I’d touched my own father in my entire lifetime”.  It fits that he works at glowing botanical gardens.

LUKA BAILEY-SONG: Offered to be Willow’s English partner when no one else wanted to be. “Ridiculously good-looking,” with a poetic name that echoes his kindness, like Ben’s.

When the ever-hopeful Taisy relents to her father’s command, we assume something-is-going-to-happen to their estranged relationship will form the heart of the novel.  Those tensions and other darkness do lurk, but it’s  Taisy and Willow discovering each other, and Taisy and Ben re-discovering each other, and Willow and Luka’s finding each other that overshadows.  While we can’t fix all those who need fixing, right all the wrongs, we’re glad to have met a few of the precious ones who make us feel good.

Lorraine

A fashion designer who endures and still captivates (France, also Italy, England, Spain, Hollywood; 1895-1954): Artists and their passions attract me, but I hadn’t expected this biographical novel to be as grand in scope, history, and mystery.

The scope: spans Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s complicated life from the pivotal time she was orphaned at 12 until her dramatic comeback nearing 60 (she died at 87, still working). The history: enlightens the tremendous impact the Depression, WWI, and WWII had on this accidental hat designer’s meteoric rise that revolutionized European and American (especially) couture, emphasizing the enterprise “is not folly.” Since both are meticulously detailed, it’s noteworthy that Christopher Gortner has left the mystery haunting her legacy for the reader to resolve. Acknowledging that more than any of his six other historical novels about powerful, controversial women, MADEMOISELLE CHANEL “was truly a labor of love,” one concludes he intended to leave the mystery up in the air, which of course is his prerogative! Lest we forget, this is a work of (historical) fiction.

Easy to forget because everything feels real. For one thing, so many characters are famous historical figures. Coco Chanel’s persona – fiercely independent, a creative genius consumed by work, headstrong, all driven by her fervent desire “to be someone” – ring loud and clear. Authentic and powerful, it’s the realization of a “dream come true,” says Gortner, who has been fascinated with the legendary fashion designer since his teens, schooled at San Francisco’s Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, followed by twelve years in the industry.

Are we to assume, then, that he also intended to present a very different perspective on the mystery? Was the famous designer – whose iconic name is automatically associated with the scent of N° 5 (and should be linked to the classic “little black dress” and chic cloche hats, all finely described) – also a Nazi spy?

Despite two recent biographies claiming she was – Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History (Rhonda K. Garelick, 2014) and Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War (Hal Vaughan, 2011), supported just last year by a French intelligence agency’s release of declassified documents, I came away believing Gortner’s opposing viewpoint, albeit fictionalized: that Coco detested the anti-Semitism expressed by her lovers (at least two); was horrified by Hitler’s aggression; and engaged in behaviors that could alternatively be explained if given compelling details otherwise. Gortner casts these secretive events as complex circumstances that might have happened.

Note: the mystery question doesn’t arise until the last 100 or so pages of a packed 400+ page-turner. I raise it at the onset to encourage close attention throughout Gortner’s skillful storytelling, particularly dialogue – relayed in Coco’s voice – and to measures she took that back up his contradictory position. In light of the apparent opposing evidence, it’s impressive how convincing the novel is.

That doesn’t mean you have to like many things about the real Coco Chanel, but you’ll understand why she felt and did what she did, whether fictional or true. For the most part, hers was a steely heart, hardened such that “everyone seemed to forget that my heart was not made out of stone.” But we empathize, for at a tender age that heart was “ravaged” by her father, when her mother died and he determined he couldn’t parent Coco and her four siblings because his job entailed extensive travel. Anguished, Coco was farmed out to an orphanage, then lived at a convent with her cousin, Adrienne. These may have been stark, restrictive years but she was well-cared for and this is when her sewing skills were nurtured and noticed, gifts she learned from her seamstress mother.

Sometimes, too, Coco felt deeply: a “volcanic passion” for the only man she truly loved, the wealthy Arthur “Boy” Chapel. Once successful, she was notoriously generous in saving struggling artists such as the Russian ballet choreographer Sergei Diaghilev; and she cared greatly, fanatically, for her nephew André.

Surely we don’t have to love Coco personally to admire her marvelous sense of taste that originated simple yet elegant creations; hunger for reading; spirit of “freedom of self-expression and attire” that propelled her to free women from the constraints of corsets (a “rib-expanding release”) and uncomfortable, impractical, ostentatious outfits by using innovative soft fabrics like jersey, suede, and felt; penchant for natural creamy colors, also seen in her interior decorating, most spectacularly in an estimated $50 million piece of property hugging the French Riviera, once her peaceful villa named La Pausa; openness to ideas like studying astronomy to inspire a collection of moon, solar, star-shaped jewels; and democratic vision to offer women clothing that “bridged the exclusive and the commonplace.”

No doubt Coco Chanel was an extremely complicated woman. Harper’s Magazine may have called her “the quintessence of restraint in an unrestrained world,” but her friends were avante-garde – Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí. Her life was marked by extravagant love affairs with wildly rich men she befriended but didn’t really love, an emotion she worried she had little of, letting them overindulge her living at their chateaus, even once leaving her beloved France to reside in a Downton Abbey-esque estate. Having experienced poverty, she never lost sight of the advantages of money, as these lovers were her benefactors – Étienne Balsan; Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich Ramonov; Hugh Richard Grosvenor, Second Duke of Westminster (“Bendor”), and “Boy.” They made her dreams come true: helped her open her first atelier in a Paris apartment, then move up to the glamorous Ritz hotel, and later venture to the French seaside town Deauville, renowned for horse breeding and racing. At the height of Coco’s career in the thirties she employed 2,000 people at three salons. A fantastical, fairy tale story.

The intensity of Coco’s ambitions and nature had its drawbacks. Numerous lovers, heirs to fortunes, but she never married. While she repeatedly declared she was already married – to her work – and didn’t want to be attached there were disappointments and great loneliness. She needed the intimacy of genuine friendships. There was the actress Émilienne d’Alençon, an early admirer, and the sympathetic Baroness Kitty Rothschild, but over the course of her lifetime her closest friend was an unlikely one because she was so overbearing and brutally honest: Misia Sert, once a pianist who made it her business to know everyone in Paris.

Coco’s pursuit of a perfect perfume sheds insight into her intuitive mindset. She wanted it to be:

“as expensive as possible, for that is the only way to assure its exclusivity. … “mimic nature not by exaggeration but rather by emphasizing the naturalness within it – it must distinguish and individualize, be unforgettable on every woman who wears it. Above all, it must last.”

To manufacture and distribute the quality and quantity of Coco’s perfumery vision, she relented into a contractual arrangement with the leading fragrance company in France at the time. It was a business decision she bemoaned for years and years, adding fuel to the allegations she was anti-Semitic because the founder, Pierre Wertheimer, was Jewish. Judge for yourself if her consternations and legal battles were ethnically based. Gortner makes the case they were not.

Most troubling was her scandalous affair with a German military officer named Spatz. The intrigue of their entanglement deepened: What was the full nature of her covert, convoluted role during the war that involved Winston Churchill? Churchill was the only person who called Coco ‘Mademoiselle Chanel.’ The significance of that name as the novel’s chosen title shouldn’t be discounted.

Still, Coco’s war efforts seemed part of her destiny. When her actress friend advises her that “the right person, at the right time, with the right approach, can exert more impact than we realize,” we see how clearly that applies to a legend today.

Lorraine