From beach house to restaurant to art studio
Wit's End
By Karen Joy Fowler
Putnam, 336 pp., $24.95
Turning Tables
By Heather and Rose MacDowell
Dial Press, 324 pp., $24
The Forgery of Venus
By Michael Gruber
Morrow, 336 pp., $24.95
April brings a delightful and eccentric new tale from a best-selling author, a scathingly funny first novel set in a high-end restaurant, and an unusual psychological thriller that unfolds in the shadowy world of art forgery.
Readers hoping that Karen Joy Fowler will give them another "The Jane Austen Book Club" may be disappointed in her fifth novel, "Wit's End." But Fowler is too talented a writer to repeat herself. If you're willing to put those expectations aside and read - and reread - "Wit's End," you'll find Fowler's understated wit and storytelling skills in full flower. In this novel, as in her last, Fowler explores the ways in which readers appropriate a novelist's work for their own purposes. But there the resemblance between the two books ends.
Rima Lanisell is a 29-year-old Ohio schoolteacher, the last of her family. Her mother died when Rima was a teenager; her beloved brother was killed in a car accident; her father, Bim, recently died of leukemia. Stunned by grief and loss, Rima accepts an invitation to stay with her godmother, whom she barely knows, in Santa Cruz, Calif. Addison Early is a successful mystery writer, "The Grande Dame of Murder." Now in her 60s, Addison struggles with writer's block. Meanwhile, her obsessed fans speculate and gossip on the Internet about why the reclusive and secretive author hasn't written anything lately and what her famous detective character, Maxwell Lane - who has a life of his own in many readers' imaginations - might be doing. They even write "fanfic," original fictional adventures featuring Lane, and post them on websites and chat rooms devoted to him.
Addison lives in a magnificent Victorian beach house, Wit's End, once owned by a woman who survived the Donner Party, with her two miniature dachshunds, Stanford and Berkeley, and an oddball housekeeper, Tilda, a formerly homeless alcoholic. Wit's End is littered with dollhouses, replicas of murder scenes from Addison's novels. When a fan slips past Rima and steals a tiny figure from one of the dollhouses, she feels an obligation to retrieve it. In the process of solving the miniature "crime," Rima digs into the past, trying to discover the nature of Addison's relationship with her father and their ties to a defunct right-wing cult. Why did Addison name a murderer in one of his books after Bim Lanisell? Did her father play a part in a real murder? In "Wit's End," the facts are no match for the inventive speculation of Maxwell Lane's devoted fans.
"Turning Tables" ought to be required reading for restaurant reviewers and lousy tippers. It's the work of identical twins Heather and Rose MacDowell. Together, the MacDowells have more than 10 years of experience waiting tables at some of the best (and worst) restaurants in Manhattan, San Francisco, and Nantucket. They've put in the time, they've suffered, they've taken notes, and "Turning Tables" is the entertaining result.
When 28-year-old Erin Edwards is downsized from her marketing job, a family friend offers to use his influence to get her a job as a waiter at Roulette, one of Manhattan's most avant-garde new restaurants, the kind of place that charges big money for heirloom tomato-flavored foam. Erin's only restaurant experience was a brief stint in a fast-food chowder house, so she's unprepared, to put it mildly, for Roulette. The first night on the job is a disaster, but she manages to get through it with the help of a sympathetic co-worker,
Erin perseveres, takes all sorts of abuse from the kitchen and customers, and comes back for more. Along the way, there's sex with a sous-chef, drinking, drugging, and all the other bad behavior Anthony Bourdain celebrated - if that's the right word - in "Kitchen Confidential." Erin's hard-won confidence falters when she starts dating a customer, a TV producer. She feels socially inferior because she's a waiter. "Turning Tables" is smart and painfully funny, and has the unmistakable ring of authenticity.
Artist Chaz Wilmot narrates his story in Michael Gruber's imaginative novel of psychological suspense, "The Forgery of Venus." Chaz is a brilliant painter whose talent is out of fashion. He works in the style of the old masters - Leonardo, Gainsborough, Goya - stubbornly refusing to cater to the contemporary marketplace, unlike his father, a famous illustrator, who, Chaz believes, sold out his talent for money. Chaz and his estranged wife, Lotte, a gallery owner, have a sick child, however, who needs expensive medical treatment. To make some quick cash, Chaz agrees to execute a series of paintings for a magazine, portraits of celebrities in the style of the masters - Madonna by Leonardo, Scarlett Johansson by Vermeer. He produces them in an extraordinary burst of creativity that he suspects may be related to his participation in a medical study of a hallucinogenic drug that has him vividly reliving episodes from his past.
When the magazine rejects Chaz's paintings, Lotte offers them for sale in her gallery, where they are snapped up quickly. They also inspire Chaz's old friend, Mark, an art dealer, to offer him a lucrative commission from "an Italian zillionaire" to restore a fresco on the ceiling of a 16th-century Venetian palazzo. The ceiling is a ruin, beyond restoration. Chaz re-creates the original, producing a stunning forgery that defies expert detection. Chaz's creativity is in high gear, and so are his hallucinations, which seem increasingly real, as though he has somehow slipped through time, back to the 17th century, and actually become the Spanish artist Velasquez. When a shady character offers him $1 million to forge a "lost" Velasquez, Chaz, thinking of his sick child, sells out his own talent and finds he's caught up in an elaborate and dangerous criminal scheme.
Diane White writes every month about new light and popular fiction. 