The Cliffs: New Novel from J. Courtney Sullivan

 

 

 

The Cliffs (2024)

By J. Courtney Sullivan

Alfred A. Knopf, 384 pages.

★★★

 

Novelists and editors routinely remind readers that the work before our eyes is a work of fiction in which locations, situations, and people are imaginary. But if you know southern Maine you will recognize in a nanosecond that the place J. Courtney Sullivan calls Awadapquit  is Ogunquit with a small splatter of York thrown in. (Sullivan credits a history of Ogunquit in her afterward.)

 

The Cliffs is Sullivan's sprawling tale of secrets, lies, self-deception, tragedy, and redemption in a small coastal village. (Ogunquit has 1,500 residents.) Although most of the story takes place in 2005 and again in 2015-17, the roots of recent trauma grew from seedlings planted in the Colonial era. The modern day protagonist is Jane Flanagan, who grew up in Maine, couldn't wait to escape, went away to college, and landed at Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library. Jane loves archives and her boss Melissa values Jane. Melissa even introduces Jane to David, a wounded divorcee who eventually marries her. If only Jane didn't love booze more than she loves her work or her husband!

 

Various circumstances, including her mother's death, lead Jane back to Awadapquit, where her sister Holly still resides. Holly is Jane's opposite–content to be a blue-collar  gal, non-intellectual, and a collector close to the edge of becoming a hoarder. She is as comfortable with chaos as Jane is obsessed with being fastidious and pragmatic. Jane plans to go back to the city as soon as she and Holly sort through their mother’s effects and sell the house that belonged to her beloved grandmother before her mother moved in. Jane is, however, glad to be near her closest friend Allison who runs an Awadapquit inn with her husband Chris. With two children as well as high-season visitors, Allison is also at home with chaos.

 

As you might imagine, any novel whose protagonist wants to leave ASAP is a setup for circumstances that don't allow that to happen. It is these that both drive and occasionally bog down Sullivan's novel. Among the complications are Paul and Genevieve. They are the kind of people that long-time coastal residents love to hate. They are filthy rich, haughty, high questionable taste, and are unaware of local customs, but they dump lots of money into the local economy. That too is a mixed blessing; it brings opportunity but also leads to soaring home prices. They purchase a rundown but once-grand property on a promontory with a spectacular ocean view. It just happens to be a purplish Victorian where Jane and Ellison used to hang out in high school when it was a boarded up wreck. It is said that it once belonged to a seafaring man responsible for white settlement in Awadapquit.

 

In architectural theories of Mies van der Rohe, “less is more.” I'm not a fan of austere modern architecture and like a bit of flash and gingerbread, but some readers are likely to find The Cliffs overstuffed. It is to Sullivan's credit that she expertly connects most of the dots, but allow me to be unorthodox in this review and bullet-point some of the ingredients that go into her novel.

 

·      Several generations of Genevieve-like insensitivity to those with diminished resources

·      The Wabanaki peoples who settled long before the English

·      A mysterious cemetery with a stone burying a single initial

·      Real and metaphorical ghosts

·      A modern medium

·      The Shakers

·      The U.S. Civil War

·      Spiritualism

·      A lake that isn't a lake

 

All of this is in addition to alcoholism, various tales of marital strain, a crooked antiquities dealer, unexpected children, job loss, the internal truth behind romantic exteriors, dementia patients, reinvention, and taking small steps to correct inherited harm. The Cliffs is, at heart, a deep dive into shifting from arrogance to humility and from fast-track living to dialed back contentment.

 

Again, though, The Cliffs takes a circuitous route to get there. I liked the novel, but I also wondered if Sullivan could have pared her novel to arrive by the main road rather than so many unpaved ones. It would not surprise me if some readers get lost and never arrive at the destination. Less isn’t more, but more can be too much.

 

Rob Weir

 

France: The Halves Don't Fit

 

 

 

France (2021)

Directed by Bruno Dumont

ARP Sélection, 134 minutes, Unrated

In French with subtitles

★★

 

France is French, but the title references its main character France de Meurs (Léa Seydoux), a TV “journalist.” I put journalist inside quote marks for a reason. If you’ve seen network news lately you know that anchors as often celebrities rather than serious reporters.

 

France de Meurs is a huge celebrity idol. She’s knock-me-over gorgeous, capable of holding her own in weighty political discussions–she even gets the better of Emmanuel Macron–asks hard questions, and provides dramatic footage for her viewers. I suppose I could be acidic and say we know she’s not a real TV journalist because she asks hard questions, but it’s the footage about which we should be cynical. France is often the center of the action, as we see her helmeted and running past explosions with gunfire whizzing past in the background. Or we see her in North Africa interviewing Tuareg fighters and in a boat with refugees. Because we see behind the scenes–de Meurs shadowed by her persistent assistant Lou (Blanche Gardin)–we know that most of the broadcast is staged and as phony as a histrionic supermarket tabloid headline.

 

France is part Network (1976) and part Wag the Dog (1997). If only director Bruno Dumont had stayed the course, France could have been a decent update of those two classic black comedies. You’ve probably read past reviews in which I’ve spoken of the inherent difficulties of mixing satire with drama. It can be and has been done successfully, but France crumbles like a week-old croissant when it wants us to turn serious.  

 

We observe that France is a workaholic whose job has made her rich. She, her author husband Fred (Benjamin Biolay), and their son Joseph (Jojo) live in a fancy well-appointed home, but they could be the poster children for the bored bourgeoisie. The marriage is loveless, Jojo is more a fixture than a son, and many of their friends exist largely to worship France. Thus, when France absent-mindedly knocks over a motorbike rider in Paris traffic, she snaps under the toxicity of her situation.

 

If this turning point had been less cartoonish, the drama part of the film would have been more compelling. Instead, France turns Florence Nightingale-meets-Andrew Carnegie. She visits Baptiste (Jewed Zemmar), the young man she injured, in the hospital and his home. His wounds aren’t serious and his starstruck parents assure de Meurs all is well. Yet, when France discovers Baptiste was largely supporting his immigrant mother and unemployed father, she turns Florence Nightingale-meets-Andrew Carnegie and lavishes money and gifts upon them. She also announces she’s done with TV when French scandal sheets come down on her. Good deed, a revelation, or just a guilty conscience?

Bruno and the script writers veer toward farce. France returns to TV, is caught in a different scandal, heads off to a Bavarian sanitorium in the dead of winter to clear her head, meets Charles Castro (Emmanuelle Arioli), and gets punked in still another scandal. Only then does some moral reasoning kick in–just in time for tragedy, a soul-shaking interview, and an embrace of fate. Is this drama or melodrama hiding behind a cynical veil? You can decide, but either way we have two halves of one movie that are the equivalent of a befuddled carpenter trying to force-fit unmatched ends.

 

Léa Seydoux, whom you might have seen in Blue is the Warmest Color, is a good choice for the sort of blonde beauty that Fox News would hire, a look-at-me face who you stare at rather than analyze her words. Seydoux is, however, a bit stiff when she moves and I can’t tell whether that’s her or the way she was directed. Though she’s in a supporting role, Blanche Gardin, a French actress/comedienne, is ultimately more convincing in her role. She has two dots on her nose and tilts her head to express moods through them. She’s also excellent at shifting between being worshipful, manipulative, and playing CYA. The rest of the cast has presence without gravitas.

 

You’d have to watch to get what I mean about Gardin. Is it worth it? I’m tempted to tell you to dust off Network and Wag the Dog to see what France could have been. If not, just know that France isn’t as good as it looks.

 

Rob Weir

The Lost Boy of Chionia: Adrift in 1960s Italy

 

 

 The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia (2024)

By Juliet Grames

Alfred A. Knopf, 416 pages

★★★★

 

If you've ever gone on a college J.Y.A. program, joined the Peace Corps, stationed overseas, or were a Fulbright scholar, at some point you were probably jarred to awareness that not everyone sees the world the same way you do. Ironically, sometimes it hits hardest for those seeking to connect to their roots, as in the case of an Italian-American in Italy. Imagine how much harder it might have been in 1960.

 

Francesca “Franca” Loftfield comes from an Italian American family of professionals. She's a Barnard grad who pursued a PhD at Oxford and Venice. She even married an Italian guy and moved to Rome. Franca had been in country long enough to be fluent in Italian and know the proverbial lay of the land.

 

Ahh! But Rome isn't the same as Calabria, and it's especially not like a remote village and the Aspromonte region. The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia takes us to a village that's a time warp in which the present and future take a back seat to the past. It's literally beyond where the road ends; a flood washed away the bridge that crosses the Amendola River and a waterfall. To get there, the bus stops at Bova, you walk for three hours, cross a plank over the river, and enter a world of tradition.

 

This is to be Franca's home for the next two years. She has walked away from her marriage and signed on with Child Rescue, a charity that plans to set up a nursery school in Santa Chionia. Her only other charge is to stick to Child Rescue’s mission. Officially, Mayor Stelitano, Father Pantaleone Bianco, and most area residents are enthusiastic. “Officially” every villager is a “Christian,” there are no Mafioso in the area, and everyone is a goatherder. Yet, Franca's warned never to walk alone at night, no one would dream of calling the carabinieri, there are clearly some rich locals, and everyone warns her that nothing will ever get done. Nonetheless, everyone has agendas that are outside of Child Rescue’s purview.

 

To her face they call Franca maestra (teacher), but that's not what they say behind her back. Her cranky landlord Cicca doesn't want her to turn on the electricity–a single light bulb–and the local diet consists of lots of lentils, borage, and spiky plants. The postal service is slow and the phone lines are always “out.” It doesn’t help that Franca pokes her nose into things that upset the locals–like the fate of a missing boy or noticing  that everyone seems to be related, perhaps too much so! They also harbor secrets and speak Griko, an Italian dialect mixed with Greek, which takes getting used to.  

 

Grames opens her novel with an epigraph: “The deepest despair that can take hold of a society is the fear that living honestly is futile.” It is, in many ways, the crux of the novel. Troubles bubble up regularly, but more attention is spent on tradition, resignation and rehashing old mysteries than in moving forward like a plucky American would do. Yet Franca can't resist being drawn into investigating the fate of locals said to have emigrated decades ago, the identity of a skeleton discovered in the foundation of the post office during a 1950s flood, an old photograph, local elections–whose results she fails to see are predetermined–domestic turmoil, legends, and the possibility that the village might be abandoned. Not to mention her own libido. Except for the latter, she's trapped between rules and customs.

 

Grames gives us a tale of culture clash, deception, mysteries faux and real, dishonesty, naivete, regret, and a young woman out of her depth. There is, though, some redemption amidst the deeper despair and futility. The Lost Boy requires concentration as there are few shortcuts to direct readers. Grames also often leaves it to readers to translate Griko and Italian terms and sometimes uses English vocabulary in nonstandard ways. Personally I appreciated her approach as it had the effect of encouraging close reading to keep tabs on who is playing whom and why. I did find it somewhat perplexing that Franca feels overly clueless and the novel’s villain is too easy to discern. Nonetheless, The Lost Boy of Chionia is a reminder that crossing either a washed-out bridge or cultural gaps requires going beyond preconceived expectations.

 

Rob Weir