Drawn from the lives of Scottish writer and poet, Robert Louis Stevenson, and his unconventional American-born wife, Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne Stevenson (1875 to 1914):  I don’t know the last time I read such an immensely satisfying, well-crafted, sweeping saga and learned so much – about the 26^th most translated author of all time (according to UNESCO’s Index Translationum) and his devoted wife.  This is a novel you settle into.

From the opening pages of a transatlantic journey from America to Europe, you recognize you’re in the hands of a highly-skilled author.  The prose splendidly sweeps you along on a journey around the globe based on the lives of a famous literary figure and a wife you probably never heard of.  According to USA Today (see “Novel Ideas: The Women Behind the Famous Men,” February 13, 2013), Nancy Horan’s 2007 debut novel, Loving Frank, “launched” a new sub-genre in historical fiction, one that makes “history more empathetic, revealing the inside scoop, the almost gossipy side.”

Although this is a hefty book, weighing in at just under 500 pages, Horan has structured it in 90 short chapters, so the reading is brisk, interesting, and inspirational.

Under the Wide and Starry Sky – a lyrical title you learn of its significance on page 159 – is beautifully written, uplifting, and ambitious the way much of Robert Louis Stevenson’s life was.  He had an impressive zest for life and a prolific output, especially considering much of it was spent confined to a bed, due to chronic lung diseases, often nursed back to health by Fanny and her sacrifices.

At a young age, Louis discovered his passion for travel and writing.  He believed:

“If you want to find out who you really are, then go travel … Every chance encounter, every change of landscape in the journey, offered itself up to his pen … to pour all that he witnessed through his soul and onto paper.”

That he was able to travel as much as he did was miraculous since he skirted death many times, his lungs hemorrhaging.  Through it all, Louis feverishly and ferociously dreamt up colorful tales, a “collector of characters,” writing at an unimaginable pace: 30,000 words in three days!   Louis and Fanny lived in many places around the world, including  Skerryvore, Scotland and Bournemouth, England but the climate drove them away to healthier locales: Davos, Switzerland; Saranac, New York; Hyères, on the French Riviera; and the South Sea Islands, especially Samoa, where Louis was his healthiest and “experienced a kind of heaven: He was the water, the birds, the sweet-smelling air.”

For Louis, it was love at first sight for Fanny when 26 and she ten years older.  Hers was a love that grew over time until “he was the most alive person she’d ever met,” despite his delicate physical nature and ability to thrive in solitude, whereas Fanny was robust and had to stay very busy.

We’re introduced to Fanny as the 34-year-old mother of three – Belle, Sammy, and the youngest, Hervey – fleeing her cheating husband in California using “one of the few respectable ways a woman can leave a rotten husband” at that time: studying art in Europe.  Initially she tried Antwerp, then stayed in Grez-sur-Loing, France, where she befriends Louis’ charming cousin and later meets Louis, and then they both went to Paris.

In Paris, Louis discovers a place where a “man could devote his life to his art – and be taken seriously.”  Indeed, he was obsessively serious about the craft of writing, infatuated with the beauty of prose.  Besides painting, Fanny also enjoyed writing but endured great distress at being taken seriously.  She served as Louis’ most insightful and candid advisor, which he both welcomed and balked at, one source of their tensions.

And there were many.  Horan takes us through their highs and their lows – the relentless medical crises and financial stresses, especially before Louis’ work was published and his fame became established.  Literary success crept up on Stevenson slowly.  There’s also a family tragedy, estrangements, and blow-ups over Louis’ many male companions, whom Fanny resented for jeopardizing his fragile health over and over again, and, at one point, wondered if their closeness was homosexual in nature.

Many other characters people this fascinating book.  Most are Louis friends and business associates, one being Henley, his publisher and literary agent in London; a handful become valued confidants of Fanny’s as well, such as the writer Henry James, whose “wickedly funny tongue brightened the house every time he entered it.”  Fanny had a close relationship with Louis’ parents, Maggie and Thomas Stevenson, and his former girlfriend, Fanny Sitwell. The Pacific Island years brought new relationships with chiefs and natives, as Louis became deeply concerned about island politics and the impact of foreign governments (U.S., Britain, Germany) on the islands’ culture and way of life (which he wrote about in A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa, 1892).

Louis regaled in reading out loud to his family his stories, so we get to see him creating his memorable characters, like Long John Silver, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  They are part of an enormous body of work for a short-lived life – Treasure  Island, Kidnapped, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Silverado Squatters, New Arabian Nights, The Merry Men, The Body Snatcher, A Child’s Garden of Verses, The Black Arrow, In the South Seas, and many other works of fiction, poetry, plays, essays, and travel writings.

Horan tells us that sometimes she used Robert Louis Stevenson’s own words in the novel’s dialogue, dreamed up the rest.  Unless we return to the wealth of original letters and documents she extensively researched, we cannot discern whether the wonderful prose belongs to Stevenson or Horan, so expertly woven together they are.  For our fictional entertainment, does it really matter?  Two uplifting examples:

Fanny may have experienced dark days, but Louis saw the world as a cup filled over: “I want to take this day, fold it up, and put it in my pocket so I can have it again and again.”  Similarly, he felt the purpose  of writing was to bring joyfulness:

“…writers should find out where the joy resides and give it a voice.  Every bright word or picture is a piece of pleasure set afloat.  The reader catches it and he goes on his way rejoicing.  It’s the business of art to send him that way as often as possible.  I have to believe that every heart that has beat strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world.”

Because Nancy Horan found inspiration in the lives of Robert Louis and Fanny Stevenson, she too has brightened our world.

Well worth the January  wait!  Lorraine

CREATING A NEW LIFE – Margot Frank died 1945, Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp/Margie Franklin re-born 1959, City of Brotherly Love:  Goosebumps!  That’s how stirred I felt when I reached page 322, the ending of this superb, haunting novel.  Narrated in a voice haunted by her past, it is written by an author herself “haunted” by the story of two sisters who perished during the Holocaust, Anne and Margot Frank.  Anne we famously know because of her found diary; Margot we barely know although she too wrote a diary, inexplicably lost.  “In creating Margie/Margot,” Cantor (explaining in an elaborative “Author’s Note,” the best I’ve encountered) “wanted to give back what was stolen from her [Margot], even if only in a fictional world.”  Cantor has certainly done that, memorably.

The power of this beautifully paced novel is not only in its heart-tugging story – that Anne Frank’s sister, Margot, somehow managed to escape the Nazis and assumes a new, non-Jewish identity as a legal secretary in Philadelphia – but in the way the prose exposes the hidden, ghost-like, terrified shell of Margie Franklin.  Like Margie, it is subdued, delicate, unadorned, yet it is deeply felt.  Margie/Margot’s story and the converging storylines are, of course, emotionally heavy and complicated.

Some images and phrases are repeatedly employed that help create the haunting effect.  The indisputable evidence of the horrors Margot endured as a young girl: the forever-inked, tattooed identification number Margie fervently and fearfully always hides, by wearing sweaters, regardless of the sweltering heat.  She is constantly wrapping herself up tightly in them whenever she’s frightened or reminded of her past, which is all the time and everywhere.  To convey how all-encompassing these painful reminders are Cantor has structured her novel not in separate chapters that weave back and forth between 1940’s Margot and 1959 Margie, as you might expect, but rather paragraph by paragraph, as memories naturally flood Margie.  That Cantor does this so clearly and so seamlessly is a testament to her fine writing skills.

Margie Franklin is a very lonely woman in her thirties, who feels “sometimes we breathe because we have to, not because we want to.”  She does have a lively friend at work, Shelby, and loving sponsors, Ilsa and Bertram, but even they do not know who she really is so her loneliness and fears are palpable:

“You cannot imagine what it is like to hide until you’ve done it yourself … You cannot understand the fear that courses through you … The fear of discovery, it is the kind of fear that makes your heart feel always full, pounding too fast.  It is the kind of fear that keeps your eyes pried wide open at night amid the dark and the snores of your parents, even if you haven’t slept in days.  And, it is a fear that does not go away, even now, even fifteen years removed, in a new city, with a new name, a new religion, a thick sweater.”

Margie is obsessed with memories of Peter van Pels, who was among those hidden by Miep Gies in an Annex with the Frank family in the Netherlands in 1942, when Dutch Jews were rounded up and transported to Nazi concentration camps.  Seventeen-year-old Margot and Peter made a survival pact to meet in the City of Brotherly Love, change their names (he to Pete Pels), assume non-Jewish lives, and marry.  Margie’s love and search for Peter preoccupies her throughout the novel, and gets very mixed up with her growing feelings for her Jewish boss, Joshua Rosenstein.

Descriptions of eyes are also deftly repeated, presumably because eyes mirror one’s soul.  Margie finds she cannot hide from a Holocaust survivor who immediately recognizes their shared, emptied look.  Margie thinks about her sister’s “sunken eyes,” Peter’s “blue eyes, the color of the ocean,” but it is Joshua’s “gray-green” eyes we’re told most often about it.  They evoke the softness and empathy of a man who cares about anti-Semitism, but as an American Jew cannot possibly understand what persecuted European Jews endured and lost.

Setting this novel in 1959 is brilliant.  It provides the perfect backdrop for tormenting Margie/Margot, since this is when the movie, The Diary of Anne Frank, is playing at theatres everywhere, endlessly.  Margie’s circle may be small but it seems everyone in her world has seen it, talks about it, thinks they know the true story.  But this is only a glamorized Hollywood version of the truth, and maybe not even that.

The ’50s was also a time when anti-Semitic acts were committed in Philadelphia.  These provide another torturous storyline: Joshua wants to litigate a class action suit against a wealthy businessman engaging in anti-Semitic business practices towards his Jewish factory workers, and asks Margie to help.  This ignites profound internal emotions, including the fact that she must do this secretively – more hiding – because Joshua’s father, Ezra, a partner in the law firm is adamantly opposed to the idea.  He “seems to think greatness and money are the same thing, but you know what I think greatness is?” Joshua asks and then answers: “Finding something that terrifies you and then doing it anyway.”

Lately, there have been a number of popular novels fictionalizing the lives of historic people.  Some delineate fiction from truth; others leave you wondering.  Cantor goes to great lengths to separate fact from invention, another feature of this stunning novel readers should greatly appreciate.

Please share your thoughts about this book, Lorraine

HIGHLAND HOSPITAL – 1937 to 1948, Asheville, North Carolina:    Kaleidoscope.  It’s a skillful, descriptive word Evalina Toussaint, the narrator of this skillful and highly-descriptive novel often uses to tell us about the many-colored, changing characters she encounters over ten years as a “guest” at a mental hospital.  Highland Hospital is where “the most effective and humane treatments for mental illness to be found in America at that time” were practiced.  Music, Art, and Horticulture therapies abounded, as well as electroshock and insulin treatments.  Kaleidoscopic implies out-of-this world – and Highland is removed from the outside world, tucked in the “quilt-like landscape” of the Great Smoky Mountains.  It also connotes mysterious – and Guests on Earth has a mysterious quality to it, starting off with an article that really appeared in a North Carolina newspaper reporting on a mysterious fire at Highland on March 11, 1948, killing nine.  There is mystery surrounding a famous guest, Zelda Fitzgerald, “regal and secret as an iris.”  Even Evalina’s diagnosis is a bit of a mystery.  But there is no mystery about the quality of the narrator’s Southern female voice: it is clear, poetic, dignified, and resilient – the reason I think you’ll love this poignant story.

Highland is Evalina’s home, a place she loves and feels loved.  She is treated well.  She sees people “getting better:” “It’s a funny thing but you can actually see improved mental health in the eyes, the face, the very gait, and bearing.”  She tells us that:

“For years I have intended to write my own impressions of Mrs. Zelda Fitzgerald from the time I first encountered her when I was but a child myself at the Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1937, and then a decade later during the several months leading up to the mysterious tragedy of 1948.”

But Zelda is just one of a multitude of kaleidoscopic “chums,” residents, and professionals peopling this book, “broadening” and “determining” Evalina’s life.  Her chums include brilliant Robert Liebnitz; Jinx, who knows no “social cues” and is “only passing through – a phenomenon, like a comet;” Ella Jean, whose family has deep Appalachian roots and dialect and a distinct culture, lovingly told; Pan, who has no hesitation with words when he plays the guitar, someone Evalina is powerfully drawn to; “Freddy” (Dr. Sledge) from one of “those big square orderly states” (Indiana); and beautiful Dixie, a “blooming rose,” whose friendship makes the book soar.  She looks like Scarlett O’Hara.  She has a “wonderful life,” wealthy, two children and a husband who “loved her to distraction,” yet she too returns to Highland.

Besides Zelda, there are two other important fictionalized characters in Evalina’s world, also drawn from real life: Dr. Robert S. Carroll, the psychiatrist who established Dr. Carroll’s Sanitarium, which became Highland in 1912 and for decades was owned by Duke University’s Neuropsychiatry Department; and Grace Potter Carroll, Dr. Carroll’s wife, a world-famous concert pianist who nurtures Evalina’s piano playing – therapeutic and a rare constant in Evalina’s unusual life.  Of Grace, Evalina says:

“I adored her musky perfume, her dark red lipstick, the longish dresses and high heels she wore regardless of the elements.  I loved it all – the diamond-paned windows that threw the light in rainbow prisms around the room, the sternly beautiful lines of the elegant notes marching across the staves, the rustle as we turned the pages.”

I picked up an advanced reader copy of Guests on Earth at BookExpo America in May, purely by chance.  I don’t recall any special author signing event, to attract attention to this fine work of literary fiction.  I’d love to ask Lee Smith how many “long years” the novel took?  The Acknowledgments and Note on Sources sections reveal an exhaustive list of resources, and the most touching piece of information of all: how Lee Smith’s personal history is connected to this story.  Save that revelation for the end, where it appears, for it will intensify the impact of this emotional novel.

Enjoy Reading, Lorraine

FORGING A MASTERPIECE – BOSTON, PRESENT-DAY:  The Art Forger is masterful.  Told in smart prose, it was inspired by the true events of the theft of thirteen masterpieces from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston on March 18, 1990.  The novel opens with a fictionalized Boston Globe account of the world’s largest unrecovered art heist, valued today at $500 million.  Fact and fiction blend thrillingly: after the book’s publication, on the 23^rd anniversary of the theft, in 2013, the FBI announced they knew who stole the artworks, but they have not been found. The $5 million reward offered in Shapiro’s fabricated Globe article is actually being offered today!

The Art Forger is complex and fascinating fiction that matches Isabella Gardner, a complex and fascinating woman.  She is the only woman in history to have established an art museum in her name.  In the 1890s, she traveled to Paris and Italy to acquire 2,500 artworks for her museum.  Only one of the museum’s paintings, an Edward Degas, is the subject here – “After the Bath,” supposedly part of Degas’ bathing series.  But, it too is fiction:  “Bath I” does not exist.

Claire Roth is the art forger of “Bath II.”  She’s a struggling, workaholic artist living in her studio in a factory building in Boston’s South End.  She’s a recognized expert on Edward Degas, and copies artworks legitimately for Reproductions.com. Claire knows how to date and authenticate old paintings.  She conducts tests for “craquelure, oxidation, soft stretchers, brittle linen fibers, rusted nails, dust.”  For all her talents, she is a “pariah” in the art world because of a liaison with a former art professor, Isaac, a second interesting storyline revealed in retrospective chapters entitled, “Three Years Earlier.”

The novel is a mini art course.  The prose is crisp and so detailed in describing the reproduction process that I wondered if Shapiro is an artist herself.  According to her informative website on creative writing (she teaches it at Northeastern University in Boston, which explains her intimate knowledge of the city), she’s taken art courses and has been intrigued with the Gardner theft for nearly twenty years.  The reader is the beneficiary of the longevity of her research and thinking.  But you do not have to be an art lover to appreciate this book – just a reader who appreciates creativity.

Sprinkled throughout are beautifully composed and imagined letters from “Belle” to her beloved niece and closest friend, Amelia.  This correspondence provides glimpses into Bostonian mores at the turn of the century, and important clues surrounding “Bath I.”

Claire Roth is a very likable protagonist, also important because we cannot help but root for her.  She gets deeply mixed up with Aiden Markel, a famous gallery owner, who offers her a proposition she cannot refuse: forge an original Degas, part of the stolen Gardner cache, in exchange for a showing of her “Window Series,” realistic Bostonian “windows from the outside in and the inside out.”

Claire’s passion for Degas is palpable:

“I cut my teeth on Degas as a kid in museum classes.  And now, one of his original works, touched by the great man himself, right in my very own studio, only a couple of feet away … My heart races.  I’m going to have the good fortune of living with a work by Degas, touching it, breathing it, studying its every last detail, ferreting out the master’s secrets … I can hardly breathe.”

The prose is ardent and immensely enjoyable (except for about 2% obscenities, but they are appropriately placed to express the injustices Claire has endured and endures).  The writing lets us inside the mindset of both the “insanity of the artist” and the “insanity of the collector”:

“It’s the rush of knowing you have it, that it’s yours, and no one else can ever see it … It’s like an addiction.  No, it is an addiction, one serious collectors can’t and probably don’t want to control.  We’re not talking regular people here.”

Sleepless, driven Claire manages to also volunteer at a prison teaching art to incarcerated male juveniles. Even there, she encounters obstacles.  This third storyline adds depth to Claire’s character. As a reader, you will care what happens to her.  We want a just outcome. You’ve got to read the book to find out!

Years ago, I was a psychology student at Northeastern U. who had wanted to be a journalist.  Oh how I would have loved to take a creative writing class taught by Professor Shapiro!

Happy Reading, Lorraine

(This is the first novel whose prose I’ve fallen in love with since my last posting 11 books ago!   I’ve been treated to some fine storytelling, even page-turners, but my reading heart and enthusiasm for blogging is not plot-driven.  Always, I’m searching for beautiful prose that lifts you up – words and sentences crafted with warmth and precision and inventiveness and simplicity that touch you in ways others just don’t.  At 306 pages, “Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures” is not a particularly lengthy hardback, but it took me longer than usual to read, as I found myself re-reading sentences, savoring the sweet-flowing writing style, even when the story turns not-so-sweet.  This may be deemed Emma Straub’s debut novel, but it was preceded by three other manuscripts of varying genres, apparently all widely rejected. She was not dejected in the least, though, as she went on to earn an MFA (in Wisconsin, where Laura Lamont’s story begins) and then dreamed up this beautifully told story. [See more in the Sept/Oct 2012 “Poets & Writers” article, “Emma Straub’s Life in Letters.”]  Those earlier writings and honing of her literary talent have served her extraordinarily well, for I felt as though each and every word in “Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures” was composed with painstaking care.)

FIFTY YEARS IN THE LIFE OF A HOLLYWOOD MOVIE STAR (1929 to 1980): How can you not relish a fantasized story of a Hollywood movie star, inspired by a real starlet who graced the screen in the ’40s and ’50s (Jennifer Jones)?  Of course, this being Hollywood, there are heartaches and downfalls. Yet, the story is written with a light touch, a charm, a politeness – “there is no kindness that went unnoticed” – from the lovely female voice of Elsa Emerson, who becomes Laura Lamont, Hollywood movie star.  We first meet Elsa at age nine when she is living in rural Door County, Wisconsin, “the most beautiful place on earth.”  She’s a delightful blond presence at the Cherry County Playhouse, a theatre company her beloved father, John, founded, housed at a barn on the family’s property complete with a cabin for summertime actors.  This is where Elsa learns there is “power in pretend,” that applause is “the most beautiful song she had ever heard,” and that even if you are not “happy on the inside, the outside could be something else entirely.”  Elsa has two sisters, Hildy and Josephine, who never leave this happy place, but Elsa does, for a reason I won’t spoil for you.  She boards a bus to Los Angeles, and there meets good fortune in the form of a very powerful studio producer, Irving Green of The Gardner Brothers Studios, who dreams up Elsa’s new identity and devotes himself to helping her achieve stardom, appreciating that “Miss Wisconsin is all sweetness and light.”  The reader feels this too through the author’s embracing of sweet and light prose.

Laura Lamont’s/Elsa Emerson’s life is told over five decades. Throughout the years, she wonders who is real: Elsa, the “good Wisconsin girl,” or Laura, the movie star?  Hardly ever do the two feel to her as though they mesh as one.  The times of Hollywood happiness and richness span an adoring marriage and doting motherhood to three children, great loves in her life. Old Hollywood was rollicking in its heyday, when a few big, powerhouse movie studios ruled the motion picture industry as well as the lives of those it made famous.

There’s a glamorous period of diamonds and sequins and Rolls Royces and white stoles, but we’re also looking into a full life, with its share of sadness and heavy-hearted regrets. The chronological chapters are nicely structured, so the fifty years move along at a good pace.

Laura Lamont may have rarely returned to her Wisconsin roots, something she doesn’t quite understand or forgive herself for, yet it’s Elsa Emerson’s Midwestern determination that ends up showing the world she really is someone special.

Happy Reading, Lorraine