Five Weeks in the Country
by Francine Prose
Two famous writers: one desperate for any sort of kindred connection, the other desperate to escape his wife and nine children. Put them all in a mansion in rural England and wait for the neurotic implosion. That’s what Prose does in FIVE WEEKS IN THE COUNTRY (Harper, 287 pp., $30), with irresistibly tragicomic results. Inspired by the real-life visit of Hans Christian Andersen to Charles and Catherine Dickens in the spring of 1857, Prose’s novel uses the tension-filled siege between guest and host to probe the demise of the Dickens marriage.
Cleverly approaching her subject from different perspectives, Prose starts off with the group voice of the Dickens children: “It is always painful, losing a parent’s love, but it was worse when your father was the most beloved father in England.” Then we shift to an omniscient view of Dickens, chafing at his responsibilities and succumbing to a delusional infatuation with the actress Ellen Ternan, young enough to be his daughter yet bearing an uncanny resemblance to his adored sister-in-law, long dead but never forgotten.
Finally picking up the narrative is Andersen, a lonely bachelor who has been feeling “less welcome” among those who fund his itinerant life in Denmark. As he struggles to reconcile Dickens’s avuncular public persona with the tyrant fomenting private misery, Andersen realizes that his own peculiarities are part of the problem: “Once again, I was Hans, the awkward isolated boy. The eccentric guest, the burden, the sacrificial lamb … reduced to a household pest.” And yet he stays on, reluctant to shed “the dream of belonging to a family,” even a family as wretched as this one.
Portrait of an Unknown Woman
by Camille de Peretti
In PORTRAIT OF AN UNKNOWN WOMAN (Europa, 256 pp., paperback, $19), de Peretti invents an explanation for the mystery that surrounds a well-known painting by Gustav Klimt. Created in Vienna in 1910, bought by an anonymous collector and reworked a few years later, it was stolen in 1997, only to be discovered more than 20 years later, in excellent condition, deposited in a garbage bag outside an Italian art museum. Its subject has never been identified.
Translated from the French by Hildegarde Serle, the novel maintains suspense by moving back and forth in time between a varied cast of characters. What links an immigrant shoeshine boy in New York with an aging sex worker in Houston and a teenage maid with extracurricular duties in an upper-class Viennese household? As their stories draw together, the focus shifts to a wealthy industrialist and his illegitimate daughter. But it will take a diligent Austrian detective to finally uncover the violent secret that sent the painting off on its clandestine travels.
The Foursome
by Christina Baker Kline
Kline has set herself a formidable task in THE FOURSOME (Mariner, 367 pp., $30), in which she attempts to move beyond “the singular strangeness” of the marriage that bound her distant cousins, Sarah and Adelaide Yates, to the conjoined Siamese twins Chang and Eng, who barnstormed across 19th-century America and Europe but made their home in the foothills of North Carolina. Her success can be attributed to her choice of narrator: the initially reluctant, always questioning Sarah, whose guilt-ridden relationship with the impetuous Adelaide will lead each woman to be tied to a “shadow husband” for over 30 years. Perhaps inevitably, they become “more than sisters, less than friends.”
Kline doesn’t shy away from the awkward logistics of Sarah’s extraordinary domestic arrangement, but what’s remarkable is her ability to downplay its sensational aspect in favor of its emotional complexity. In addition to their personal tensions, Sarah explains that the twins’ “place in society was tenuous, secured only by their willingness to embrace the habits of Southern gentry.” And as the Civil War threatens to upend those habits, Sarah becomes increasingly aware of the hypocrisy required to sustain them. “Freedom’s a funny thing,” her abolitionist aunt remarks. “Most people only want it for themselves.”
A Perfect Hand
by Ayelet Waldman
The marriage plot in Waldman’s A PERFECT HAND (Knopf, 287 pp., $28) is devised not by ambitious parents or scheming lovers. Instead, it’s concocted by Alice, a lady’s maid, and Charlie, a viscount’s valet, who meet below stairs at a country-house weekend and conspire to further their own liaison by arranging one between their employers.
There are several complicating, albeit amusing, factors. Lady Jemima devotes most of her time to social rivalries and wardrobe changes. Her feet emit “an overpowering odor,” despite Alice’s best efforts. Lord Wynstowe avoids going outdoors. He is afraid of horses. (“And dogs. And mice. And badgers, though to my knowledge he’s never seen one.”) He’s also obsessed with physiognomic research, delightedly measuring other people’s noses. Worse still: Lady Jemima has dismissed Lord Wynstowe as “unpleasant and cowardly.” She only has eyes for Thomas Smythe-Roberts, a charming rake who keeps a mistress and is quietly piling up gambling debts.
This being Victorian England, Alice and Charlie’s machinations must take into account certain social niceties and be enacted in their exceedingly rare free time. But these members of the servant class prove remarkably inventive. So inventive, in fact, that they may wind up with a resolution not quite in line with their plans.
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