THE GUEST LIST; FOREGONE; THE LOST APOTHECARY; THE MAGICIAN
By Lucy Foley; Russell Banks; Sarah Penner; Colm Tóibín
All four published in 2021.
It’s time to clean out some book review backlog. Maybe one of the these will land on someone’s holiday wish list.
The Guest List (William Morrow Publishing, 314 pages) is about a celebrity wedding gone terribly wrong. Jules runs an online women’s magazine and her intended, Will, is a handsome dude who won fame on a TV survival show that made him into a “hot” actor. The two make the proverbial “golden” couple. Like many with more money than common sense, they decide upon destination nuptials on an island off of Connemara (Ireland) at a folly and estate owned by wedding planners Aoife and Freddy.
Will is essentially a frat boy who hasn’t grown up and the same goes for his buddies. Best man Jonathan is a sloppy loser, but other attendants–Duncan, Pete, Angus, Femi, and Charlie–have at least made a stab at adult life. Everyone, except the island proprietors, Jules’ half-sister Olivia, and their womanizing father from whom Jules is estranged, are in their early 30s. Assorted spouses have varying opinions about Jules, Will, and all the dosh they had to spend for an event they had little interest in attending. Plus, old friends have a lot of history from their university days, including who slept with whom. What could go wrong?
The Guest List is constructed from chapters with alternating points-of-view, which intrigues because everyone is essentially an unreliable narrator. I’m not a fan of wedding novels (or movies)–they are often unimaginative and trite–but Foley’s novel has its moments. ★★★
Russell Banks specializes in damaged people and his works sparkle in a literary sense. Foregone (Ecco, 305 pages) is the antithesis of Foley’s in that its central character, Leonard “Fifi” Fife, is a dying Baby Boomer. Fife won renown as a lefty documentary filmmaker whose terminal cancer is probably traceable to a film he did on Agent Orange, the infamous chemical sprayed during the Vietnam War. He once taught at Vermont’s Goddard College–a progressive and experimental school during the 1960s/70s–and one of his students, Malcolm MacLeod, has journeyed to Canada–Fifi’s longtime home–to spotlight his mentor in a documentary film of his own. Good luck with that plan.
Most of Fifi’s films exposed “hypocrisy, greed, and political corruption,” and he literally has no time for hero adulation. The project makes him feel like he’s Pinocchio with carrion-eating scavengers pulling his strings. Is it jealousy, anger over of his impending demise, the realization that he’s no hero, or all three? Try as he will, Malcolm cannot deter Fifi from ignoring questions about his films and launching into a rambling confessional. Fifi imagines he is setting the record straight, acknowledging his sins, and telling the truth “to himself–and to the one person who still loves him,” his wife Emma.
Sounds reasonable, except this is a Banks novel and he doesn’t do cheap sentimentality. Does Fifi even know “truth” anymore? Did he ever? What parts of his memory have been recovered, what makes no sense outside of its context, and is the whole thing confabulation, false or idealized memories associated with dementia? Foregone is a smart novel that manages to be provocative though there’s not much action in any conventional sense. You might even find yourself sympathetic to Fifi, though he is and was a cantankerous figure. ★★★★
When does one realize that a relationship isn’t working? Once you know that, can it be salvaged? Does it take a bit of mudlarking to make to make things clear? This is the essence of The Lost Apothecary (Park Row Books, 269 pages), the debut novel from Sarah Penner.
Mudlarking is a phenomenon still very much associated with Greater London and the River Thames. The flow and silty banks of the river tends to preserve relics old and new. Thames artifact hunters are analogous to those who don rubber boots and dig for clams at low tide. Caroline (“Caro”) Parcewell is in London, where she and hubby James are supposed to be celebrating her 10th anniversary and perhaps reopening her desire to have a child. James, a workaholic, doesn’t want kids, is still in the States, and plans to join her later. Happy anniversary!
Caro is depressed, angry, and not at all enjoying herself. On a whim, she is talked into a bit of mudlarking and unearths a mysterious bottle. This is Penner’s setup to toggle between the present, the 1790s, and a tale of an herbalist, Nella, with a secrect sideline in abortifacients and a few other things as well.
How can Caro reassemble any story based on a single bottle? She has no names or records to guide her, but what the heck else can you do when you’re partnerless in London except revive past dreams of getting an MA in English literature and mucking about with tools used by professional historians? She unearths (puns intended) a past that involves a 12-year-old servant girl, her rich mistress, lawbreakers past and present, a splash of the supernatural, an old bookstore, James’ attempt to save his marriage, and Caro’s investigation of finishing her MA at Cambridge.
If you suspect there are too many coincidences and illogical plotlines, you’re right. (I mean, seriously, just any Yank wanting to restart an abandoned thesis can enter Cambridge University, right?) Penner has wonderful material, but it’s not a good thing when a reader pokes holes in a fabric made of cheesecloth. ★★ ½
I bailed on it a third of the way through The Magician (Scribner’s, 512 pages). Colm Tóibín intends a fictionalized biography of German writer Thomas Mann. It is the sort of book that thrills literary scholars, as its ultimate goal is to give insight into the title. (The Magician is Mann’s unfinished novel.) I suspect Tóibín was also trying his hand at writing in the style of German novelists such as Herman Hesse. I so wish he hadn’t. I’ve read exactly one of Mann’s novels, Death in Venice, and it made a better movie than book.
Mann led a life of adventure and misadventure, but Tóibín takes too long to unspool salient highlights. There is the added problem that Mann was a despicable human being who married and had children, though he was gay. I’ve no problems with that, but I draw the line at pedophilia and I really draw it when an object of Mann’s desire was one of his own sons. I suppose one can wax rhapsodic about Mann’s literary merits, but blast if I have any desire to read a wordy retelling of a debauched personal life, especially when Mann’s Wikipedia entry is more interesting than Tóibín’s account. ★
Rob Weir
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