Short Takes
The White Rose
By Jean Hanff Korelitz
Miramax, 407 pp., $24.95
Within the comic plot of this lighthearted novel lies a weightier theme. Having played around with disguises, cross-dressing, and self-delusion, the characters happily gain the prize of self-knowledge.
Marian, a middle-aged author and professor, surprises herself by falling in love with Oliver, a much younger man. Even more surprising is that he loves her back. Since he is the son of her oldest friend, complications arise. They escalate when Oliver disguises himself in Marian's clothes and unwittingly beguiles her social-climbing cousin. The cousin, engaged to Sophie, the daughter of a wealthy and powerful man, proceeds with his marriage plans despite his same-sex infatuation. The bride-to-be falls for Oliver. Oliver falls for her. Assignations are arranged, cancelled, and interrupted. Based on a comic opera, the novel naturally ends with everything put right.
The unreal twists and turns of the plot are grounded by the reality of the setting: wealthy Jewish Upper East Side, trendy Greenwich Village, snobby Greenwich, Conn. The coincidental appearance of the flower of the title, the white rose, in Oliver's flower shop and Sophie's history project is similarly unlikely but beautifully balanced by its surprising and serious multiple meanings. Great comic plots persuade us that coincidence is not random chance but destiny.
The Great Indoors
By Sabine Durrant
Riverhead, 312 pp., $23.95
Martha, owner of a precious-antiques shop, is 38, single, and childless, and her too-perfect life is a setuip for mess and muddle.
At her stepfather's death, Martha is brought back to her deceased mother's house to sort out family heirlooms and sibling rivalries. She is also shamed into taking custody of the family cat. Finding a suitable home for the cat leads her out of her tidy existence and introduces her to an unruly household. In clutter and chaos live Fred, professionally known as Mr. Magic, and his two children. Their mother has gone off. Martha squirms on the ratty sofa, trying to ignore spilled food, grease spots, and a hideous tasteless painting, but finds herself oddly comfortable with Fred and the children.
Durrant seems to be moving toward rewarding Martha with predictable messy happiness but veers off into a more plausible and ultimately more satisfying conclusion. A novel that recommends mess should end, as this one does, with a bit of vagueness and unease.
Stephen Spender: A Literary Life
By John Sutherland
Oxford University, 627 pp., illustrated, $40
This is the engaged life. Stephen Spender was a poet, editor, reviewer, lecturer, teacher. He knew almost every important English writer of the 20th century and many American writers as well. He participated in the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, took stands on communism and Vietnam. Openly homosexual as a young man, he married twice, the second time happily and for life.
He endured a typically horrible English boyhood -- cold mother, critical father, brutal boarding school. At Oxford, he finally found happiness and friends, including W. H. Auden. He was in Germany before the war with his difficult longtime companion Tony Hyndman and Christopher Isherwood. His first heterosexual lover was Muriel Gardiner, from whom he discovered that he enjoyed women more than men. He later married the beautiful and brilliant pianist Natasha Litvin. Together they had two children. They traveled the world, spending long periods in the United States, where Spender taught and lectured at many universities, establishing his reputation as a poet, critic, and teacher on both sides of the Atlantic. He edited the influential magazines Horizon and Encounter, contributed to the controversial anti-communist volume ''The God That Failed," and published many volumes of verse, criticism, and fiction. His numerous friends ranged from Francis Bacon to Joseph Brodsky to Reynolds Price.
This long, respectful, and revelatory biography just manages to cover Spender's remarkably rich life. From the pretty boys of Berlin to the Guy Burgess spy scandal, Spender not only saw it all but actually lived it all.
Barbara Fisher is a freelance critic who lives in New York. 