I’LL BE RIGHT HERE, by Amy Bloom
Amy Bloom’s new novel emits the opposite of main-character energy. A German word might be needed to describe its contrast to a bildungsroman. Guppenporträt?
Germany, though, is an enemy in “I’ll Be Right Here,” which while not historical fiction in the traditional, door-stopping sense — its many threads are tied up in exactly 200 pages — does use the Second World War as backdrop.
Gazala and Samir are orphaned Algerian youths, a girl and her adopted brother, four years older, trying to survive in occupied Paris. He works in a bakery, and she, being in possession of “good hands,” is conscripted to massage (innocently) its tired old owner.
For a time, the siblings meet and mingle with real-life figures. Gazala begins a job tending to, and living with, Colette — “Famous Writer, Anti-Semite, Beloved Friend,” a chapter title proclaims — even sharing a room with her Jewish husband, Maurice, as he hides from the Third Reich.
She also meets Suzanne Belperron, the jewelry designer who made pieces for the Duchess of Windsor (stylish but notorious for her chumminess with Nazis), and swipes one of her brooches. Belperron is trying to save her own Jewish business partner and lover, Bernard Herz, from certain death, having torn up and eaten the handwritten pages of their business directory during his arrest.
As if in compensation for this grim act, and the general deprivations of war, “I’ll Be Right Here” is replete with delicious food, or thoughts of it, on practically every page, like the memory of a chicken made in 1939 with rosemary, lemon and 24 cloves of garlic. By my count this is the third Bloom book to feature fruit on the cover, suggesting sweetness, juiciness and, obliquely, sex. There is even a character named Honey, lest you forgot that life, despite its many trials, is sweet.
Gazala seduces and stabs a few German soldiers with Colette’s “best bread knife,” the war ends and her employer arranges passage for her to America, where she is introduced to Anne and Alma Cohen, sisters her age with a cat called Doo-Wop, and to a sudden world of plenitude.
Soon the number of garlic cloves in the chicken will rise to 40. (A five-star recipe on the New York Times Cooking app, by the way.) And the number of characters, introduced in piecemeal narration, will multiply to the point that it’s hard to map them. This is a small and tightly stuffed cupboard.
The action goes back and forth in time, from 1930 to 2015. Not that there’s so much action. Big events, like the war ending, happen in less than a sentence, while small events, like getting up in the morning as an old person — “that moment, between bed and bathroom, the pivotal moment. The crux move, an old rock-climber said; the reveal, the old actor said” — receive considerable and tender explication.
It’s in such small, wryly observed indignities that one feels most sure in Bloom county. So much recent domestic fiction has been about women individuating, leaving, calling the whole thing off. This one gathers everyone in the garden for shandies.
The author’s return to fiction comes after a best-selling memoir, “In Love,” about traveling to Switzerland for the assisted suicide of her second husband, Brian Ameche, who had Alzheimer’s disease. This “death book,” as an admiring friend nicknamed it, incited compassion and dark humor.
Though “I’ll Be Right Here” opens with Gazala on her deathbed, it is definitely a life book. After stopping in Algeria, Samir, too, will eventually make it to a department store in Poughkeepsie, and he and Gazala will become lovers and homemakers. (Remember, he was adopted.) Anne will eventually leave her husband, Richard, for his sister. That’s Honey.
This generation will produce a brood, or perhaps confusion would be a better group noun for this large and unconventional family, who nickname their forebears The Greats. There are throuples, polyamory and brief cameos from a trans male cousin and a “nonbinary hot ticket of a boyfriend.” In a novel with a lot of interior decoration and conversation, of everything and the farmhouse kitchen sink, they are but potted plants.
’Tis the season of the “beach read,” a phrase that incites warm feelings in some and makes others want to run straight into the ocean with rocks in their pockets. Even including so many types of people, “I’ll Be Right Here” will not be for everyone. Then again, it won’t weigh down the terry tote.
I’LL BE RIGHT HERE | By Amy Bloom | Random House | 200 pp. | $28
Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010.
The post A Multigenerational Historical Novel. And Only 200 Pages. appeared first on New York Times.
