A 1927 bestseller, film criticism, and Alice McDermott

Somewhere in my recent readings of blogs and X posts (formerly known as Tweets), I came across love expressed for British author Rosamond Lehmann (1901-1990) and her first novel Dusty Answer. The book, published in 1927, became a bestseller. Lehmann went on to write several more novels. In my Virago Press edition of Dusty Answer, her biography says she “remains one of the most distinguished novelists of the twentieth century.”

Dusty Answer is the story of Judith Earle, the only daughter of an academic father and socialite mother. She’s educated privately at the family’s riverside home in the Thames Valley, so it’s a secluded life, except for the occasional arrival of the alluring Fyfe cousins next door: Mariella, Julian, Charlie, Roddy, and Martin. The book opens with Judith discovering they are soon to arrive again. She’s 18, and come the fall she’ll depart for college in Cambridge. The beginning pages flash back to childhood years of tea times and games with the cousins by the river, and once a time of ice skating. But now, Charlie has died in World War I, and Mariella is returning as his widow with a baby. Again, as in childhood, Judith falls into the thrall of the cousins, when “nothing memorable was said or done, yet all seemed significant.”

During her college years, Judith becomes deeply attached to an emotionally complex fellow student, Jennifer. The cousins, however, are never far from her thoughts: here and there she meets up with them. Meanwhile, she has fallen in love with the enigmatic and insensitive one, Roddy, which drives the story into scenes of the most “extraordinary emotional reality” that Lehmann exceeds at throughout the novel. Author Jonathan Coe writes the introduction to the book, and it’s his opinion and words that I’m agreeing with regarding the extraordinary emotional reality. He also says the book “will consume you entirely,” and for me, that was true. The writing is gorgeous. Jonathan Coe, by the way, is the author of many excellent novels. The Rotter’s Club is a longtime favorite of mine.

A review of this book in London’s Times Literary Supplement ran with the title and subtitle “Stick to routine: The rich inner life of an unremarkable film buff.” (Brian releases in the U.S. next week.) The review then goes on to describe the story as “gently mesmerizing” as it follows the life of a solitary man from his thirties in the 1980s to after retirement. His work and personal routines don’t vary. He is without friends or family. Not much happens dramatically, according to the review. Then this, from the book’s description:

A visit one day to the British Film Institute brings film into his life, and Brian introduces a new element to his routine: nightly visits to the cinema on London’s South Bank. …Brian gains access to a rich cultural landscape outside his own experience, but also achieves his first real moments of belonging, accepted by a curious bunch of amateur film buffs, the small informal group of BFI regulars.

I’m not a film buff, but I like the sound of this sensitive, introspective soul finding his way through life with simple means and predictability as his guide, something the TLS review says seems to be “a necessary and efficient way of coping with problematic memories.” And even though I’m not knowledgeable about films, I’m curious about this part in the book’s description:

Brian is also a tangential work of film criticism, one that is not removed from its subject matter, but rather explores with great feeling how art gives meaning to and enriches our lives.

Brian is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, whose books are paperback originals with a French flap (a cover fold). Fitzcarraldo fiction can be identified by the brilliant blue color of the book cover, white for nonfiction.

Alice McDermott’s new novel takes place primarily in Saigon 1963. Two wives take center stage: Tricia, a shy, self-conscious newlywed whose husband is recruited by U.S. Navy intelligence to work on the Saigon Electric Power Project; and shrewd, enterprising Charlene, a corporate wife with three children married to an oil engineer also working on the Saigon project. Not long after arriving, Tricia finds herself under Charlene’s persuasive wing, getting drawn into charity work for the Vietnamese that requires moxie and manipulation. The effort exposes Tricia to a sense of gutsy freedom her Catholic upbringing lacked and stretches her far outside the comfort zone.

The Vietnam story ends with Tricia and her husband returning to the United States on the doorstep of the Kennedy assassination. Next, the story leaps forward sixty years, in western Maryland, where Charlene’s daughter sees a Barbie doll on a shelf in the home of a neighbor who’s an aging Vietnam veteran. She recognizes Barbie’s Vietnamese outfit as the one Tricia and her mother created to raise money for the charity work. The daughter corresponds with the widowed Tricia, and their looking back to Vietnam 1963 constructs the narrative.

This is a departure for McDermott, who typically writes about middle-class Irish-American families in Brooklyn and other New York City environs. Nevertheless, Absolution is still signature McDermott, with her literary talent creating a compassionate, dramatic plot out of ordinary circumstances. As much as I enjoyed Absolution, however, I don’t see it as McDermott’s strongest work. Likely her fans will enjoy it, as I did, but if you’re new to reading McDermott, I’d recommend starting with The Ninth Hour or Charming Billy.