These novels vary greatly in style, but all are set in the 1900s, from the aftermath of World War I through to the end of the century.
The Paying Guests Sarah Waters (2014) Mrs Wray and her unmarried daughter, Frances, live in genteel poverty in 1922 London. Having lost her two brothers in the World War and her father to sadness and bad debts, Frances convinces her mother to take in lodgers. They reconfigure their house and rent rooms to a young married couple, Lilian and Leonard Barber. What starts out as a slow burn of a narrative—describing in detail the constraints of this joint tenancy arrangement—turns into an explosive crime novel. Readers witness a murder and know who the murderer is. But will this criminal be caught? Will the romance that has blossomed in the house be uncovered? Are the British barriers of class insurmountable? Can the miseries of wartime be alleviated? Over the course of 564 pages, there are some dips into melodrama, but the novelist kept my attention to the very end, for the resolutions to these questions.
This Strange Eventful History Claire Messud (2024) The title of this superb historical novel is taken from a soliloquy in Shakespeare’s As You Like It:
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages . . .
. . . Last scene of all
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion . . .
This soliloquy about the “seven ages” often comes to mind as Claire Messud recounts seven decades of the lives of the members of the Cassar family (from 1940 to 2010, plus an epilogue back in 1927). The Cassars were originally French Algerians, having dwelt for generations in the North African land that was controlled by France from 1830 to 1962. When Algeria won its independence after a lengthy war, the colonizers were forced to leave the country. They were not warmly welcomed back in France. Many of the Cassar family long for a return to Algeria but have to consider career opportunities elsewhere. They end up all over the globe—Toronto, Buenos Aires, Sydney, Paris, Connecticut, the south of France. No matter where they live, love of family binds them: Gaston and Lucienne; their children, François and Denise; their grandchildren, Chloe and Loulou. The novelist based This Strange Eventful History on her own family’s story, as recounted by her grandfather in a handwritten memoir, and the truth of the story shines throughout, with deeply perceptive probings of each character and striking evocations of each setting and time period. Many reviewers have pronounced this novel Messud’s masterpiece.
The Two Hotel Francforts David Leavitt (2013) In the summer of 1940, Lisbon is about the only port in Europe from which those fleeing the advance of Hitler’s armies can hope to board a ship sailing away from the Continent. It’s a crazy place, full of desperate people waiting for passage out of Portugal. At a café, Pete and Julia Winters meet another couple, Edward and Iris Freleng, and sparks fly. Pete is the first-person narrator of this novel that slowly reveals the state of his marriage and of the Frelengs’ marriage: the compromises, the secrets, the love/hate. Always in the background is the looming threat of the war, which, of course, modern readers know the outcome of. Leavitt’s prose is steamy and sometimes seamy; his plot is propulsive.
The Most Fun We Ever Had Claire Lombardo (2019) I always read the Acknowledgments section of a book before I start on the actual text, and I was surprised to find that when Claire Lombardo submitted this novel to her agents it “meandered beyond the nine-hundred-page marker.” Whew. I found the published version of The Most Fun We Ever Had to be overly long at 532 pages. But, to be fair, this saga of the Sorensen family is complex, with lots of births and deaths, betrayals and lies, successes and defeats. David and Marilyn are the parents of four daughters, each with her own set of neuroses. The narrative skips back and forth between the 1970s, when David and Marilyn meet and marry, and the intervening years between then and 2017. The Sorensen house is also a character, in a way, with much of the action taking place there, on an actual street in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. The dust jacket asserts that the author has joined the ranks of novelists Celeste Ng, Elizabeth Strout, and Jonathan Franzen in her chronicling of modern life. I’d say that Lombardo comes close to these three greats.