A blurb tells us that admirers of The Da Vinci Code will enjoy this book. As I am immune to the genre of Vatican hit-men, I’d not have begun The Devil’s Prayer had it not been @ the suggestion of a GR friend, & never had stayed with it had not the earlier part been set in Australia, specifically Queensland. By the time the Devil (that’s right, Auld Hornie himself, wearing a fedora hat – when I was young wearing hats was something Australian men did) I was firmly hooked & had to see this one through to the end. The story is told in two time frames through the device of a diary, found @ an austere Spanish convent (they go in for penitential rites like flagellation) by a young woman named Siobhan, whose mother Denise had sold their souls to the Devil in exchange for wreaking revenge on her ‘friends’ who live on the Gold Coast who raped her, tortured her, & left her a quadriplegic to obtain her winning lottery ticket. After receiving diabolical cure (the Devil is good with spinal injuries), Denise travels under the mentorship of an elderly priest to a monastery in the Middle Eastern desert when she learns to copy ancient manuscripts containing terrifying prophecies (for reasons I don’t understand, one contains ancient illustrations of future environmental catastrophes, but with English captions In contemporary script – any 2nd year Greek student could have provided more authentic-looking labels).

Since mum is damned anyway, I’d thought she’d have chosen just to have fun rather than undertaking this austere regimen, but apparently daughter Siobhan gets damned too if she doesn’t. If you are old enough to remember such classics as Rosemary’s Baby (right, Siobhan is not Denise’s only child, there’s also Jessie, conceived by Satan in the guise of Denise’s husband Simon whilst she’s about to kill him), The Omen, The Seventh Seal, as well as Dan Brown’s opus, you’ll be on familiar territory with The Devil’s Prayer.

Tho’ even the most bizarre forms of folk Catholicism are staid by comparison, popular supernatural fiction & movies are supplied with an idiosyncratic heretical theology of their own. Basically it’s Manichaean, a label secular journalists like to slap onto any Christian who can tell right from wrong, but which properly means the belief that not only does Satan enjoy equal footing with God, but that so far is our earthly life on this planet is concerned, runs the whole show. On the mundane level, in popular culture the Vatican employs an elite secret service capable of the elaborate skullduggery. (Remarkable for a mini-state apparently incapable of running a high-street bank successfully.) Here they are called the Amalrican Monks (hardly very secret as they go about in bright red habits seizing young women @ railway stations) named for Arnaud Amalric, a nasty Cistercian who played a role in the Albigensian Crusade.

There is just enough information about real manuscript finds & scriptoria – I confess I’d never heard of the Codex Gigas before, sounds interesting – to provide a plausible flavor to this almost hilariously OTT tale. I wish the author Luke Gracias had thrown in a little Latin (‘Caedite eos. Novit Dominus qui sunt eius’ would have done nicely) & Greek to flavour a very spicy pot, tho’ the ingredients are overcooked & a bit past their sell-by dates.

Reflecting on this lovely book, I became aware that two subtle but major watersheds in English social history had been passed by in my adult lifetime. Our four principal characters are graduates of the University of Bristol, yet two of them go on to have very high-octane careers, one as a physicist practically on a first-name basis with the Higgs Boson & the other in the London financial sector. In Evelyn Waugh’s, or even in Kingsley Amis’s day, they would necessarily have been Oxbridge graduates, & one of them (the City trader) would not have been a woman. Also, they only discover that the father of one of them (the physicist actually) is a peer when they see the groom designated The Honourable on the invitations to his wedding. In Jane Austen’s era, or even in my youth, that would have been the first thing everyone knew about him.

We follow the trajectories of our four friends over a period of two decades from entrance to uni to the threshold of middle age. They are Benedict & Evie, who are reading physics, & Sylvie, an artist, with her brother Lucien, who claims to be an entrepreneur, a euphemism for dope dealer. Evie was reared by Keith, her single-parent socialist father, & she goes against the grain by heading for Canary Wharf & the big bonuses instead of the laboratory.

This book could have been a whole series of novels, like A la recherche, A Dance to the Music of Time – both of which I burnt out on fast & early – or Simon Raven’s Alms for Oblivion, which I mostly hugely enjoyed in my youth for its mix of militarism, academism, & cynicism. But as a single novel, Invincible Summer is a perfect epitome. It recalled for me a lot Robin Kirman’s Bradstreet Gate, but much better, tho’ Bradstreet was a solid four star. Part of my preference is an almost indefinable quality that Adams puts into her characters – except for Lucien who very much overworks the loveable scoundrel persona till it lands him where he belongs. They seem to be people I would truly like to have as personal friends. Indeed, by the time I was half-way through, I almost thought that they were.

Especially Evie, who emerges as the protagonist. Adams’ account of her career as a bond trader is gripping. The only other novel I’ve read that offers the same opportunity to share vicariously the excitement & eroticism of the trading floor was Nicola Monaghan’s Starfishing. Both authors have worked in the financial sector & have a feel for the action. Best experienced audibly, the scene where Evie is trying to manage the purchase of 900 million (yes, million) Italian government bonds (BTPs) was so suspenseful I nearly crashed the car. The dangerous part is that such a huge buy order will drive to price up to the level that Evie’s firm will lose money (& her bonus & likely her job) on the transaction. The trick is to start buying slowly so the market doesn’t notice that there’s a big movement underway, then just before the market closes for the day, put in a large order to drive the price up @ the close & short the remainder of your transaction. Of course the next day lots of bond holders will take a profit @ the new high price & you can cover your short position @ a profit. But you almost feel you’re wearing Evie’s headset as she talks with her broker. ‘Graham. 95.00 bid in 10.” She’s offering to buy the first ten million @ 95 euros each.
“Working that . . . .’ several minutes silence then ‘95.20 lifted, 95.20 to 95.40 following.’ Then the price @ which Evie had to buy keeps going up: ‘Forty lifted. Bid over there, seventy offer on the follow.’ I love the feature where you can get both audible & text on your reader, so I could go back & figure out just what was going on. Of course what Evie is doing is something called “Market Manipulation” & it’s a bit dodgy, tho’ we should keep in mind that in the end all that happens is 30 million euros will be transferred from one financial institution to another & so far as the rest of us are concerned it makes no difference one way or the other. As Dr. Johnson once put it so well, men are never so harmlessly occupied than in making money. Goes for women too. Before it’s all over (& we know it has to end because we are approaching 2008) Evie finds out she was swimming in a shark tank.
Besides creating loveable characters, Alice Adams has a gift for felicitous phrasing: my favourite was ‘weapons-grade flirtation’. A hypercritic might complain that her minor characters are a bit flat & stereotyped – I found both Evie’s personal trainer live-in @ her Docklands ‘apartment’ (American is now upscale) boyfriend (like Lou’s in JoJo Moyes but not funny) Julian & her City mentor ‘Big Paul’ an odious fat oaf & she never quite convinced me that Benedict was really a physicist (tho’ even C. P. Snow didn’t know how to do that). Still, Benedict redeemed himself & lived up to his name by showing a real streak of spirituality. Even the child characters are affecting, especially Sylvie’s special-needs daughter.
No question. Emotionally Invincible Summer will be my Me Before You for 2016. I hope it may be yours.

Besides House Rules, Heather Lewis left behind two more novels; no horses, but like in House Rules very violent sexual episodes and a lot of drugs. Both offer as principal characters a wealthy couple who are addicted to sexually abusing teen-aged prostitutes. The Second Suspect is an apparent police procedural investigating the death of one of these girls. The other novel, Notice – published only after the author’s suicide – is a 1st person account by a teenaged prostitute who specializes in servicing businessmen commuters @ a suburban railway station car park. The two books are obviously closely related & artistically it makes sense to connect them.

Heather Lewis was Allan Gurganus’s creative writing student @ Sarah Lawrence. That of course was also Lucy Grealy’s alma mater @ about the same time, but I’d imagine they would have hated each other cordially. But they seem so similar, except that Grealy was outwardly maimed & Lewis wore her scars on the inside. Both died @ about the same time. It’s not clear that Grealy’s death was deliberate, as if the death of a heroin user were ever anything else. Lewis hanged herself with the sash of her dressing gown. (Gurganus calls it a “silk bathrobe” but in my idiom if it’s silk, it’s a dressing gown.) According to Gurganus’s afterword, “Notice had been adjudged too dark & disturbing in its bleak sexual frontally [sic] to prove in any way commercial.” Both House Rules & Second Suspect were edited by Nan Talese. Tho’ I’ve now tried to reform & read books for pleasure only, I still know how to do literary analysis & divined what happened as that Talese got Lewis to rework the entire concept and turn it into a mystery story with a police detective Caroline Reese as the central character & the narrator of Notice morphed into a subsidiary personage. (I am grateful to Robert Nedelkoff for confirming & providing some corroborating sources for my conjecture.) The girl in Notice never tells us her name but in Second Suspect she calls herself Lyn Carver, probably an alias, but it is the name I shall use also for the narrator in Notice. In both books the wife in the sadistic couple in named Ingrid, & she calls the teenager prostitute they abuse Nina, the name of their daughter, killed by her father either purposely or from erotic strangulation that got a bit out of hand. He is nameless in Notice but in Second Suspect is called Gabriel Santerre, & is the head of a pharmaceutical empire. His favorite kink is binding women’s necks & wrists with his own belt, then penetrating them anally, tho’ he prefers to ejaculate on their face & breasts. When he wants to put the frighteners on them afterwards, whether to insure their silence or just out of sheer sadistic nastiness, he employs a couple of hench-persons who like to cut. In Notice a character carries a piece of Lyn’s flesh (probably from her labia) in a vial on a chain round his neck; in Second Suspect it’s worn by Gabriel.

Notice offers us very little background detail. The narrator is a teenaged girl working as a waitress, but also as a lot lizard on the parking lot of a suburban railway station, servicing commuters in their cars. As her parents are wealthy, absent abroad & give her the run of their house & liquor cabinet, she seems to work @ the waitressing & sex trades only for independence & excitement. She agrees to go with one of her customers to his nearby mansion to play kinky games with him & his wife Ingrid. Next day he leaves her & Ingrid alone together & they form a relationship. Ingrid gives her several hundred dollars (later quite a lot more) & she leaves before Gabriel comes back. Later she goes back to working the station car park, where she is arrested by a couple of undercover vice cops who rape her & take her to jail. Apparently they were dispatched by Gabriel to teach her a lesson. Afterwards she is sent to what is supposed to be a rehab center where she is placed in “seclusion” (i.e. solitary confinement) till she is rescued by a therapist named Beth, whose husband is someone in the DA’s office. After she is released, she has relationships with both Ingrid & Beth, characterized by a pattern of extremely violent & aggressive sexual episodes followed by scenes of tender & caring lovemaking. So she alternates between top & bottom, aggressor, victim, lover & beloved, tho’ she never uses the word love; love’s a total non-starter, persona non grata for her. Notice ends after Burt & Jeremy, who’d 1st seemed generous suppliers of free drugs but prove to be Gabriel’s minions, abuse Lyn horribly, but leave her still unwilling to kill herself out of despair.

Second Suspect apparently takes place later. Gabriel & Ingrid are in a hotel room in New York with a dead teenaged girl prostitute whom Gabriel attempts to smuggle out in a golf bag, but unexpectedly Ingrid calls the cops. Gabriel, possessed of considerable political clout & a sleazy fix-it lawyer, attempts to cast the blame on his wife. Caroline, a police detective under a bit of an institutional cloud (her former partner had got a little too heavily into the drugs they were investigating & she had to kill him in self-defense), gets her lawyer BF to represent Ingrid & attempts to find out what really happened, which leads to the discovery of a number of teenaged prostitutes living in apartments owned in Ingrid’s name, as well as a girl now retired (@ about 20 too old to appeal to Gabriel & Ingrid’s sexual tastes in daughter surrogates) calling herself Lyn Carver, now living in a big house in Westchester County apparently subsidized by Gabriel with the understanding she will remain silent about her previous association with that couple. I read Second Suspect 1st, but just as soon as I began Notice it was obvious the narrator was her model, but now she’s recycled & a few years older.

Artistically I have no doubt that Nan Talese’s judgement stank & that Notice is the better book & that the voice of the Lyn character in Notice is far & away more vivid & affecting than the 3rd person POV mostly from the police perspective in Second Suspect. But I honor & respect Talese. She had a job to do, publishing houses are in business to make money not to foster literary art, & an editor has to be decisive. Also, the ending to Second Suspect, when Lyn puts herself into the hands of Gabriel, would have made the superb finish that Notice fails quite to achieve. She goes in not quite totally intrepid & clean. She’s carrying a lethal dose of heroin in a bag tucked under the top of her stocking – with a sadist who loves to cut, a girl had better have a plan B.

But the end turned out perfect. As an editor sometime myself, I’d love to have had the chance to try to help Heather Lewis knock these two into one terrifically moving novel. As it is, Notice lacks the beauty of House Rules; there is no possible equivalent for the erotics & grace of equestrian competition when the main character is a teen hooker. But like Lee in House Rules, however much pain Lyn endures in Notice, she never loses our admiration & respect. Always ready to plunge in, headlong, fearless, with no safe-words, working without a net. That’s why I find these characters, & the story of Heather Lewis herself, so attractive & affecting. In Notice, Lyn describes a force within herself that she calls “the Leviathan” that impels her recklessly into extreme situations. She denies it is a “death wish” but I think I know what it is. To gaze unflinchingly into the abyss is the object of mystical spirituality. The drugs & violent sexuality are signs that the author & her characters wandered off the path, but they had the right intention.

 

Lindisfarne or the Holy Island is where Saint Aidan brought Christianity to Northumbria. That it should be the site of murder is shocking, & that the victim should be a young woman apparently killed in a ritualistic manner & left on the altar of the parish church deepens the sacrilege. Because the island is inaccessible except by boat during times of tidal high water, the range of suspects is quite limited. All of which makes for an excellent location for a mystery story.. My take is a bit mixed. Of course, having once visited the site myself in the company of a priest from Kelso – an American Episcopalian & a Scottish Episcopalian @ the holiest place in England – I was eager to read this one & I loved the descriptions of the setting, tho’ disappointed that the CofE vicar proves rather a weak reed.

What I liked; Most definitely the setting. The sense of being on a tight little island came through well, especially at the Christmas season. Tho’ on the audio DCI Ryan speaks pretty much what used to be called Received Pronunciation, most of the other characters speak a Northumberland dialect which is absolutely priceless. Anna the forensic archaeologist was attractive & likeable, tho’ as usual in such stories, has to confront oafish men who won’t take her scholarly expertise seriously. That she would be the sister of Megan the island femme fatale & murder victim seemed a bit of a stretch for me. I spotted the principal villain early from one clue (which I give away in the spoiler thread for the August Kindle English Mystery Group read). But there were enough suspects & subordinate villains to keep me on edge. Personally I found DCI Ryan a bit of a cliché – officer suffering from PTSD from last case, has he been called back in too soon?

What I did not like: The holiest & most ancient Christian foundation in England & there is just about zero Christian spirituality – Celtic or Anglican. (The vicar in the book is a squib as damp as the bottom of the North Sea. I’m sure the real incumbent must do a better job.) Given the general state of spirituality in contemporary England (Christmas is celebrated as an excuse to stay drunk from Christmas Eve till the day after the New Year), I was not surprised, but still disappointed. Anna, as an expert on neolithic beliefs, objects to using the p-word to refer to how people worshipped before Christianity, but as practised in this story, I had some trouble really believing in any p*g*n spiritualIty. I also found it inconceivable that Ryan, an inexperienced sailor, could have navigated a small boat out to the island in a major storm. At night!

But @ the end of the audio version there is a foretaste of the rest of the series, & tho’ tempted I’ll not go there, many might enjoy the continuations. Given my spiritual expectations, I’ll hold @ three stars, but lots of us would give it four.

Most of the of progeny of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca bear the same resemblance to the original as those “Rolexes” you can buy in Hong Kong. Not The Fire Child. It is a genuine Patek Philippe: the best contemporary gothic I have ever read. Mysterious haunting ruins are a staple of the gothic, & the remaining towers of the abandoned tin mines on the wild Cornish coast one of the best & most moving sights in England. (The Cornish aren’t really English, but their language, akin to Welsh, died out early in the 19th century, tho’ some enthusiasts have tried to revive it.) The ruined towers were situated on the coast so the mine shafts could stretch out under the ocean. The thought of the toil, danger, hardship & care the miners endured so that the family of the mine owner could live over them in a mansion (with 78 bedrooms!) makes one understand why people turned Bolshevik. (The old photographs, along with some new ones by the author, add an especially spooky touch – the one of the miners on p. 354 really got me.) Following the traditional formula, Rachel, a working-class almost-30 woman from a very dysfunctional family in South London, has married David, the scion of the mining aristocracy, tho’ the family fortune is gone & David is trying to restore Carnhallow (our Manderley knockoff) by overworking himself in London as a City solicitor. (How, we wonder, does he preserve his ‘muscular’ body Rachel loves with a 12-hour desk job fuelled by alcohol?) The previous chatelaine, Nina, perished mysteriously by falling down a mine shaft – leaving an 8 y/o boy Jamie, for whom his new stepmother experiences an immediate attraction. But Jamie seems obsessed with the memory of his mother, who has a grave site in a churchyard, tho’ no body was ever recovered. There is also a grandmother, Juliet, who serves as a communal memory like Mrs. Danvers, tho’ unlike Danvers, Juliet is an attractive character & her memory seemingly impaired by the onset of dementia. Is it possible that Nina could still be alive? Rachel thinks she caught a vision of her on a bus. Could Rachel be going insane? Is she slated for the role of madwoman in the attic? (The same turn occurred in Judy Finnigan’s Eloise.) All the traditional elements of gothic fiction are present in The Fire Child, but they are prepared with fresh & delicious ingredients & presented with a brilliant twist that is both ancient (King Oedipus & Tom Jones are classic prototypes) & up-to-the moment.

Personally, I find our fascination with plot twists in fiction overdone. ‘I never saw that one coming’ is a frequent term of praise in reviews, but I think more is required for the real literary pleasure that comes only on a 2nd reading. I like a twist that raises what has already been an acceptable but seemingly routine plot to a new artistic level. It is less important for me that I didn’t see the twist coming but that it makes all the elements of the plot come together seamlessly & suddenly. Also, the twist should not depend too much on mere coincidence or accident, but feel inevitable & right, what in hindsight must happen. In The Fire Child, the author achieves both brilliantly. I loved The Ice Twins, but find The Fire Child even better. It is completely faithful to the settings, characters & plot elements of the traditional gothic, & yet strikingly new & original.

Let’s begin by giving the author high marks for what is well done. In The Sister, Louise Jensen handles superbly a complex plot with a big cast of characters that unrolls over more than a decade. Grace & Charlie had been BFs since Grace had been sent away at 9 y/o to live with her grandparents, along with a couple of frenemies, Siobhan & Esmée, & a boy named Dan, who has now become Grace’s SO. (Following contemporary mores, the couple have acquired a mortgage before bothering with the ring; & yes, this absence becomes relevant to the story.) Grace tells us the story in the 1st person, jumping back & forth between past & present.

I found the subtitle of the book: A Psychological Thriller with a Brilliant Twist You Won’t See Coming utterly disarmingly ingenuous. Even tho’ the execution seemed less than brilliant, I had to admire the author’s openness about her intentions & I think she lived up to her promise, but not exactly subtly, by flooding the narrative with suspects: sort of the mystery story equivalent of the full-court press. (For example, there is more than one sister who could be the title character, who may or may not, be the mysterious villain who is persecuting Grace.) As for the thriller part at the end, where the villain puts in the frighteners, to intimidate not just one, but two adults (one, granted, “fragile” from alcoholism) into being manacled to a bed while villain’s armed only with a “paring knife” made me thoroughly incredulous. (You’d best put up a fight even if the villain wields a Bowie knife; with a paring knife there’s a good chance of emerging not much the worse for wear than if you’d tried to shave with a dull blade.)

Grace & her friends are unfortunately not very interesting people. Grace now misses their younger days “curled up in front of [a] fire with a case of Budweiser & bowls of tortilla chips & salsa, the way we all used to one Saturday night before Charlie died.” Wish I could swap countries with these characters: what is it about American crap food & culture that is so attractive to a certain kind of English person? Personally I’d prefer Old Peculiar & Stilton! Jensen can do some good stylistic effects tho” & toss a mean zeugma: I loved, after fight with boyfriend Dan: “The breakfast table is heavy with preserves & accusations” & “I sweep toast crumbs & guilt into my cupped hand.” But sometimes dialogue rings false, as when Dan says: “When Charlie died, you became so insular.” “Insular?” I mused, what would an estate agent whose only interests are sex, football & of course Budweiser know about mediaeval Irish monastic scriptoria?

I have to fault the author too for withholding information for no reason except simply to keep the reader guessing, with no relevance to the actual mystery. We don’t find out what happened to Grace’s father till we are ninety pages in, & about just how Charlie met her fate till fairly close to the end. So whilst The Sister: A Psychological Thriller with a Brilliant Twist You Won’t See Coming (oh, I so love that long subtitle!) didn’t thrill me like it did some of my GR friends, I shall keep an eye out for Louise Jensen’s future efforts.

Were this book not based on one of the most sensational crimes of the last century, I wonder if it would have garnered so much attention from its publishers & from the reading public. For some readers it seems to be a roman a clé, a fictionalized account of the Manson cult & their murders. (To avoid libel suits? It’s hard to imagine what could cause any more damage to the reputations of Charles Manson & his followers.) Other readers see a reflection of the personal or political legacy of that period we still call, “the sixties.” I was intrigued by how a young author dealt with the historical archaeology of nearly a half-century ago. A reference to an “air travel card” brought me up short. I think it was the first “credit card” I ever saw (my father had one) & required a mammoth deposit; businessmen (they were of course nearly all men) carried them. Still, by the mid ‘60s I’m pretty sure American Express & Diner’s Club cards were fairly common, and the first bank cards as well. One change from the historic original I very much like is the switch of the geographic center of the story from Southern to Northern California. The Bay Area was the artistic & spiritual epicenter of that convulsive era.

The story is told by the same narrator, Evie, @ two periods in her life, @ 14 when she becomes involved with the cult, & @ the present time where she barely gets by as a “live-in-aide”; I inferred that having experienced far too much @ an early age, Evie has somnambulated through much of her adult life. As a depiction of the anomie & bogus spirituality of the period, I thoughtThe Girls was absolutely superb. When the 14 y/o Evie encounters Suzanne, who invites her to visit “the Ranch” we see how for the 1st time Evie feels a sense of belonging, something neither of her estranged & totally self-absorbed parents can give her. The cult leader, called Russell in this novel, delivers wonderfully plausible tho’ completely vacuous pseudo-profundities that brought back for me vivid recollections of the phony pundits & gurus that abounded from the Monterey peninsula all the way to London’s Tavistock Square.

Tho’ I normally avoid historical fictionalizations, basing this story on real events made it better because I knew pretty much how it had to end, so didn’t have to worry about solving a mystery. The pleasure was that which one usually enjoys reading a book only for the 2nd time; I could concentrate entirely on the characters & the moral & spiritual aspects. We know from the start that Evie is not going to participate in the murders – she barely manages to commit even shoplifting – so our only concerns are discovering how she manages to remain uninvolved, & what the after effects of her experience will be. Here is where my verdict is mixed.

The 14 y/o Evie’s account of her relationships with her parents, her previous BF, & with her new friends in the cult, especially with Suzanne, are excellent. Some of us have had the experience in early adolescence of 1st finding a friend who seems truly to understand us & to attract our admiration & even adoration – to be drawn to someone who already seems to be the person we’d aspired to become without even knowing it. If that person is genuinely virtuous, better yet even, holy, we may be put on the strait way to perfection. But if it is someone who is superficially attractive but inwardly deeply flawed & harboring dark impulses & desires, we have a guide to take us on the downward path to plumbing the depths of our own depravity. I believe it is only right that we should blame Evie’s parents & the general spiritual slackness of our culture for placing her in such danger. It interested me that tho’ she did not want to go away to boarding school, one she got there Evie actually rather liked it & got on well with her roommate. She needed & found somewhere to belong, even tho’ when Suzanne drops by, Evie is all ready to jump back onto the bus.

But I found the older Evie a disappointment. In the retrospective narrative she shows a lot of evidence of having learned how the world works, but she does not seem to have developed into the mature and centered woman whom I should have hoped would have emerged annealed & purified by her youthful experiences. Having gazed deeply into the Abyss, she might have developed into a person of greater moral & spiritual stature. She seems to have graduated from the School of Experience with barely a 2.0 GPA. Fortunately she is only about 60 & believe me, that’s not too late for serious adult spiritual education.

So 5 stars for the teenaged portions, but the mature Evie scarcely earns 4. Sill, for GR purposed, I’ll round off @ the whole 5 stars. Thank you all you GR friends who recommended The Girls. I’ll think about this book a lot.

As in Dare Me, here with You Will Know Me Megan Abbott portrays the intense world of teenaged athletic competition, but with a wider focus and from a different angle. Tho’ the story centers on the 15 y/o gymnast Devon Knox, it is told in the 3rd person almost entirely from the point of view of Devon’s mother Katie, who is herself just in her mid 30s. She & her husband Eric have devoted themselves totally & gone in debt up to their lower middle-class ears to further Devon’s ambition to Elite status, the gateway to the US team & the Olympics. The irony is that there is but one fleeting chance for a girl; only a sleek but very muscular prepubescent body can execute the routines @ the championship level; by the time a girl is old enough to have a driving license, she’s over the hill. College gymnastics is for failures.

Because we see things from Katie’s POV, we only gradually discover what is happening in Devon’s personal life. As a 3 y/o, she lost a couple of toes in a lawn mower accident – her father’s fault – & her deformed foot plays a complex role in the working out of the story, as well as symbolizing an inner wound both in Devon herself & in the Knox family. Personally I failed to find Devon anywhere near as engaging a character as Anton DiSclafani’s Thea Atwell or Heather Lewis’s Lee in House Rules or Megan Abbott’s own Beth Cassidy in Dare Me. But Devon’s total devotion to excellence is both her most admirable trait, & her most frightening as well. She is indeed a kind of monster. The title of the book seems both ambiguous & ironic. We will know Devon because she is going to be famous; but will we ever really know what she is like on the inside? Does she even have an inner life? There were moments when we catch glimpses of her true self. Not in school essays, where Devon describes overcoming her fears: these read like stagey posturing, how a teenaged athlete is expected to feel as a role model for other girls. But we do when we’re told, “She hadn’t learned, Katie & Eric hadn’t taught her—that the things you want, you never get them. And if you do, they’re not what you thought thety’d be. But you’d still do anything to keep them. Because you’d wanted them for so long.” There’s a moment where Devon tells Katie, “You never want to hear what it’s like being me.” Rings completely true, it’s what every teenager probably says to a parent @ some point, & yet it brings out the unnatural reversal of roles. The adults, Devon’s parents, had put their selves & their entire future as a family in the hands of a 15 y/o, her dedication, , her drive, her muscles, her skill, her ability to resist temptation.

Yet I’d not felt the snobbish superiority towards Eric & Katie that I had towards the parents in The Fever, tho’ Megan Abbott’s portrayal of the other girl gymnastics’ parents, the BelStar Boosters, has a marvelous satiric edge. Teddy, the coach, captures our sympathy, but he cannot be what Coach French briefly manages briefly to be for Addy in Dare Me, the adult friend & model a teenager like Devon so needs. Ironically—& beautifully artistically—the character who ought to play that role, the coach’s niece, becomes instead Devon’s worst enemy.

As a mystery story, You Will Know Me plays very fair with the reader & I expect most will divine the main secrets before Katie does. But spiritually & morally I found You Will Know Me leaves the reader a lot to think about & as with Dare Me, I’ll probably need to write a fuller retrospective review sometime later. For now, tho’, I think that spiritually it is successful in showing how admirable it is to devote oneself totally to athletic or artistic success, even @ the price of forsaking or betraying personal relationships, especially when inappropriate. But only when one is still immature & in one’s formative stage. (Which also explains why so many outstanding young athletes & artists burn out or become badly warped personalities later.) On the moral question of whether you should help cover up a crime for someone you love – especially when the victim may have needed killing – I quite approved of how the Knox family dealt with a messy situation.

For the sheer erotics of competition, I’d not quite put You Will Know Me @ the level of House Rules or Dare Me, but I would rank it very high. Megan Abbott captured for me the combination of athleticism & beauty that characterizes women’s gymnastics. I have already seen some reviewers who declare that this is Megan Abbott’s best book. Personally I think I find the characters in Dare Me more attractive & deeper. But for scope & as an understanding portrayal of family dynamics, You Will Know Me is simply brilliant.

Pamela Moore attracted me initially because I loved books about teenaged friendships & they meshed with my life review & my attempt to understand my 16-year old self who has been a constant presence for the last year. Back then I’d not have liked Courtney, the principal character of Chocolates for Breakfast, but I’d surely have found her attractive, & the Ivy-Leaguers majoring in alcoholism Courtney encounters would become very familiar indeed. Though Courtney did not achieve the tragic stature of Megan Abbott’s Beth Cassidy or Anton DiSclafanif’s Thea Attwell, I found her an intriguing creation & was haunted by wondering what Pamela Moore might have accomplished had she not killed herself @ age 26. Fortunately an enthusiast found me online & pointed me to some sources of additional information about her life & work, including her second novel, The Horsy Set, published in 1963, the year I graduated university. But it was set a decade earlier, in the early 1950s like Chocolates for Breakfast. which seemed almost deliberately insulated from the larger world. Just as in Pride & Prejudice you’d scarcely know the Napoleonic wars were taking place (why are all those officers about?), only one very vague reference to bad news from Korea gives the reader a clue to what was happening in the great world. What is really most important to Courtney’s mother is the introduction of television—tho’ she herself is reduced to featuring in a soap opera—on radio!

In The Horsy Set, we are continually reminded of the now nearly forgotten war in Korea, as one of the principal characters is a young army officer whose West Point classmates are serving & dying there. But Lieutenant Kar is instead being prepped for the equestrian Olympic trials, @ a very upscale stable in Westchester County, where he encounters Brenda, the keen 17 year old horsewoman who is the book’s narrator. She has a boyfriend named Larry, scion of a wealthy family, a 20 year old undergraduate @ Harvard who has pretentions as a playwright. Brenda is still a virgin when the story begins, which would not have been unusual in that era before “the pill” nor would it that Larry has recourse for sexual relief to professional assistance. (This pro normally charges $500—which in 1952 would have made her a very high-class whore indeed, tho’ she offers an 80% student discount—that being a sardonic comment on Ivy League virility!) Other details recreated the period well. The description of Patsy’s apartment let’s us experience what would have been “the shock of the new”—Brenda has never before seen Bauhaus or international-modern furniture (@ the time I think we called it “Swedish modern”) & Larry drives a “white Triumph” (must have been a TR2, capable of the then astounding speed of 105 mph.) Brenda & the lieutenant feel underdressed @ NYC bar in their riding outfits—now the tee-shirted clientele would think they’d taken a break from a film set! I can’t remember if then I was ever in the city without jacket & tie—maybe in the Village listening to Bob Dylan before anybody had ever heard of him—but that was already the “60s.

As with Chocolates for Breakfast, reading The Horsy Set I was more attentive to its depiction of a now-vanished world than to novelistic artistic quality. It struck me as just clipping the top rail of the fence separating satire & realistic fiction, which flattened the characters. But while I’d not rank Brenda with Thea Atwell and surely not with Lee in House Rules in tragic stature, I felt that Pamela Moore was a huge loss. I’d still swap Salinger’s entire Glass family for Courtney & Brenda. One thing I loved about The Horsy Set was that our language had not been censored by zealots & Brenda could call what she prized sportsmanship & horsemanship. So as I reflect on Pamela Moore & her sad fate, I think the lyrics to an old song:

Broken hearted I’ll wander, broken hearted I’ll remain
Since my bonny light horseman in the wars [s]he was slain.

Listen to the version by Kate Rusby.

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