BookBrowse Reviews The American Lover by Rose Tremain

BookBrowse:

Expertly exploring the human condition and its myriad complexities, The American Lover would make a great book club choice.

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Rose Tremain's The American Lover is an exquisite and rewarding jewel box collection of thirteen compelling stories, focused on vastly different but richly imagined lives from different countries, different settings and time periods. The characters hail from England in the 1970s to Russia at the turn of the 20th century to Canada and America in contemporary time, and are all complex and unique but familiar — being well drawn and deeply human in their hopes and fears, their longings, weaknesses, regrets.

It is often said that writers are at their best when they write what they know and it's obvious that Tremain understands the intricacies of human nature. Famous writers are subjects for several of the stories — readers meet both Tolstoy and Daphne Du Maurier. And in the titular piece, "The American Lover," an injured and broken young English novelist remains obsessed with an affair she had with an older American married man. Even after writing an exposé barely disguised as a novel that makes her a world-famous author, she continues to be haunted.

Much of this collection explores disparate themes: the ways the past comes back to own us, how things fall apart, the price of seduction, and the deep emotional pain inflicted by carelessness. And most are quiet stories, interior stories. Things do happen but the focus is more on emotion than action.

The story "Extra Geography" is told in first person by Flic, a fourteen-year-old girl from an English boarding school's lacrosse team. It begins: "For two sublime years, we were the wingers. We could outrun the field. For those two years, at Upton Hall School, all lacrosse matches depended upon us…But in summer, there were no lacrosse games. We weren't heroines any more: just ordinary girls, and this felt worrying, as though we might soon die." And so, not sure what to do with themselves, Flic and another girl from the team decide to randomly pick a person to fall in love with — the first person they see — who turns out to be their female geography teacher. They proceed to court her with life-altering results.

One of the most intriguing stories is "The Housekeeper," told from the point of view of Mrs. Danowski who claims to be the distorted and villainized inspiration for Daphne Du Maurier's sinister Mrs. Danvers. "Everybody believes that I am an invented person: Mrs. Danvers. They say I'm a creation: 'Miss Du Maurier finest creation', in the opinion of many. But I have my own story. I have a history and a soul. I'm a breathing woman." She blames Miss Du Maurier for stealing her life. What follows is both a delicious and tragic account of how they met and what transpired between the author and the housekeeper.

If I had to pick a favorite, which would be very hard to do, it would be "Lucy and Gaston." The story alternates between two points of view: Lucy, an English woman who lost her first husband in WWII in the first airstrike of the D-day invasion in Normandy, and Gaston, a farmer in Caen who lost his father on the same day. It also toggles back and forth between two time periods: 1976 and 1944. Thirty-two years after losing her husband, remarried and with grown children, Lucy still mourns her loss. Believing her first husband's plane to have gone down in the English Channel, she has a deep phobia of the sea. She says, "I'm afraid of the sea — repelled by it — because Geoffrey's plane went down into it and his body has lain there, unburied, for thirty-two years, and I know that if I went swimming, I'd feel as though I was treading on Geoffrey's face." At the same time, Gaston too is dealing with the loss of his beloved father, to whom he was completely devoted. The story narrates how intricately their pasts and their grief are intertwined. The ending made me weep the kind of tears that come from a combination of empathy with a character's sorrow and relief at a rewarding conclusion.

I highly recommend The American Lover to any reader who loves literary short stories, characters intricately drawn, and narratives that take you into the far-away lives of others while tethering you to the familiarity of such humanity that you will begin to see your own life in a new and clearer light. It would be a great book club choice.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in March 2015, and has been updated for the February 2016 edition. Click here to go to this issue.