FICTION: FAMILY DYSFUNCTION
The Lake of Dreams By Kim Edwards, $26.95.
Reviewed by Wendy Smith
In her best-selling first novel, “The Memory Keeper’s Daughter,” Kim Edwards traced the consequences of a father’s decision to spirit away a newborn with Down’s syndrome and falsely report her as dead. Family secrets and lies are also the subjects of Edwards’ new book, which follows a young woman as she tracks the life of a forebear expunged from her family’s history.
Lucy Jarrett comes home to an upstate New York village called the Lake of Dreams after years working overseas. A decade ago, she left the town following her father’s death in a mysterious boating accident, blaming herself for refusing to go fishing with him that night. She’s been traveling ever since, “from college to grad school, from good jobs to better ones and through a whole series of romances, leaving all that grief behind.”
Forcibly slowed by a spell of unemployment in Japan, she’s having troubling dreams about home, and her boyfriend Yoshi gently suggests that she needs to pay a visit.
It’s a strong setup, given added punch by the tensions Lucy describes when she arrives. Her father’s estranged brother, Art, plans to develop land formerly occupied by a military depot, while a group that includes her high-school sweetheart wants it protected as a wetlands area.
Then Lucy discovers a stack of old papers in a room that’s been closed off since her father died. They include fliers from the early 20th-century feminist movement and an angry note from 1925, signed only with the initial R, that refers to a 14-year-old girl, Iris, being sent away from home. Several convenient coincidences later, Lucy knows that her great-grandfather had a sister named Rose who had a daughter named Iris. “There was some sort of scandal,” Lucy’s uncle recalls.
Lucy is a well-drawn character, but her motives are not always convincing. When she claims that the discovery of her suppressed family history “raised questions about my past, which I’d always imagined to be written in stone,” that supposed certainty doesn’t jibe with the unanswered questions surrounding her father’s death.
The more serious problem here is that Edwards crams too much material into a narrative that creaks from the strain. A plethora of revelations unfolds over a scant two weeks. The mysterious story of Iris and Rose is told largely through the implausible device of unsent letters, and their tale is linked to more recent family conflicts in contrived ways. A will hidden in a wall, a missing person located in the phone book and a middle-of- the-night confession — these are signs of an author so intent on getting to a predetermined destination that she forgets to make sure her readers are willing to follow.
NONFICTION: PHILOSOPHY
Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will By David Foster Wallace. Edited by Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert, $19.95.
Reviewed by Justin Moyer
Not every college student gets senioritis. Case in point: About a decade after he failed to become a professional tennis player and a decade before he published his novel “Infinite Jest,” the late, great David Foster Wallace, then a 23-year-old English-philosophy double major at Amherst, took on the subject of fatalism in an undergraduate thesis. “The fatalist thinks of himself and his role in the world in a curious sort of metaphysical way,” Wallace wrote in “Richard Taylor’s ‘Fatalism’ and the Semantics of Physical Modality,” now published for the first time with explanatory notes in the thoughtfully edited “Fate, Time and Language.” “Everything that does and will happen must happen, and … persons as agents can do nothing but go with the flow.”
The particulars of Wallace’s argument will elude lay readers unfamiliar with philosophy’s “contingent future-tensed propositions” and “law of the excluded middle.” Still, fiction lovers with even a minimal knowledge of Aristotle and Wittgenstein will understand that the core proposition of fatalism — we have no say in what we do — haunted Wallace’s writing. “There was a palpable strain for Wallace between engagement with the world, in all its overwhelming fullness, and withdrawal to one’s head, in all its loneliness,” writes James Ryerson in his introduction. “The world was too much, the mind alone too little.” For an author who devoted thousands of pages to dramatizing that crisis before he killed himself at 46, what could have been a dry intellectual exercise becomes an unexpectedly affecting obituary.
FICTION: HISTORIC
Clara and Mr. Tiffany By Susan Vreeland, $26.
Reviewed by Eugenia Zukerman
The beauty and opalescence of authentic Tiffany lamps have charmed people for more than a century. Until recently, it was believed that these creations were solely the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany, but in 2005, a group of art historians discovered that, in fact, the designer was a woman: Clara Driscoll. This revelation shook the art world and inspired the best-selling author Susan Vreeland to imagine the life and times of Mrs. Driscoll.
“In 1893 the name of Louis Comfort Tiffany will be on the lips of millions!” Louis brags to Clara in Vreeland’s novel. He’s a short man with a lisp and an Oedipal desire to outdo his father, the renowned jeweler. Wildly talented, deeply driven and self-indulgent, Louis is a leader of many contradictions — allowing Clara to expand her department of “Tiffany Girls,” while refusing to hire married women; encouraging Clara’s artistic creativity, while forbidding his own daughters a college education.
Set in New York City at the tumultuous turn of the 20th century, “Clara and Mr. Tiffany” is about art and commerce, love and duty. Peopled with characters both imagined and historic, it is also a study of New York’s ultra-rich and desperate poor, its entitled men and its disenfranchised women. And it is the story of one extraordinary woman’s passion and determination. As the book opens, Clara’s husband has died, leaving her without any money; she rents a room in a boardinghouse and returns to Tiffany Studios, where she had been a valued employee before her marriage.
When she comes up with an idea for making lampshades of leaded glass, Tiffany’s enthusiasm thrills her, until she realizes that he has appropriated her invention as his own. And yet, despite feeling betrayed, Clara will later say of her boss: “I adored him. He and I were artistic lovers, passionate without a touch of the flesh. He made me thrive.”
The book brims with fascinating information about Tiffany’s glassmaking and about New York as its gilded age gives way to a more progressive era. Clara stands at the story’s center as a woman ahead of her time, a female artist who mentors others and demands equality. When, because of jealousy, the men of the Glaziers and Glass Cutters Union threaten a strike unless Tiffany shuts down the women’s department, Clara leads her “girls” into the fray with Susan B. Anthony’s words: “Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.”
Vreeland’s ability to make this complex historical novel as luminous as a Tiffany lamp is nothing less than remarkable.
(Wendy Smith writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.) (Justin Moyer writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.) Eugenia Zukerman writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.
