C10| Saturday/Sunday, February 29 - March 1, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
BYMAUREENCORRIGAN
(and make minimal monthly pay-
ments on her student-loan debts),
Casey is waitressing at Iris, an up-
scale restaurant in Harvard Square.
She lives in a dump—a moldy room
on the side of a garage—and she
walks her landlord’s dog for a break
on the rent. That landlord, a guy
named Adam, revels in snide com-
ments about her writing. In fact,
many of the people Casey meets feel
the need to mock her literary ambi-
tions. Here, in quick succession, are
snippets of three conversations
Casey has: the first with Adam; the
second with her new gynecologist;
and the third with a postal worker
who weighs the boxes in which she’s
sending copies of her finally com-
pleted manuscript off to agents:“So,” [Adam] says,...“How’sthe
novel?” He says it like I made the
word up myself.“So, you gonna write the Great
American Novel?”
I’m tired of that question. “You
gonna cure ovarian cancer?”
He pulls the speculum out of
me, and my insides deflate.
He sits back in his round swivel
chair and looks me in the eye for
the first time. “Touché.”“I’ve been working on this book
for six years,” I say quietly.
“Huh,” she says, punching in
numbers....
She hands me the long re-
ceipt hermachine has spat out.“Let’s hope your next six years
are a little more exciting, sweetie
pie.”It’s not enough that Casey has to
steel herself every morning to quiet
her own creative anxieties and sit
down at her desk to write; she also
has to deal with these condescend-
ing Babbitts whenever she steps out
the door. The still-fresh loss of her
mother, her lodestar, further under-
mines Casey’s sense of self. (Like the
manipulative father in Ms. King’s
2010 novel, “Father of the Rain,”
Casey’s father sees her only in terms
of how she might benefit him.) Enter
two new men in her life: Silas, a
teacher and fellow writer-in-the-
trenches whose kissing “melts [her]O
NE EVENINGwhen I
wasinmylate20s
and still in graduate
school, the phone
rang in my studio
apartment. To call it a “studio” is
overselling the place: It was a closet
with a bay window carved out of a
West Philadelphia row house. There
was room for a foldout couch, a
reading lamp and a table on which
sat a stack of scholarly books and a
much shorter stack of paper repre-
senting two chapters of my disserta-
tion, which I had been writing for
the past five years. I was single and
scraping by on part-time adjunct
teaching jobs.
The caller was a woman I’d gone
to college with, a business major.
She was fundraising for our alma
mater, but before getting to the
“ask,” she filled me in on her life’s
milestones: a job at an investment
bank, a husband, a child on the way.
“What about you?” she asked.
What about me? No solid career,
no partner, no offspring—just the
wilting dream of somehow making a
life in literature. For anyone who’s
experienced (or is still experiencing)
the dread feeling of being stuck in
the life stage of “becoming,” when it
seems that everyone else has already
“become,” Lily King’s latest novel,
“Writers & Lovers,” will strike a
deep chord. With wit and what reads
like deep insider wisdom, Ms. King
captures the chronic low-level panic
of taking a leap into the artsy un-
known and finding yourself adrift,
without land or rescue in sight.
The main character of Ms. King’s
fifth novel is Casey Peabody, a 31-
year-old writer who’s been working
on a novel for six years. On the
strength of one published story, she
sometimes scores fellowships to
writers’ colonies; otherwise, she
moves around a lot, living with
friends or boyfriends. When “Writ-
ers & Lovers” opens in the summer
of 1997, Casey has moved to Cam-
bridge, Mass., where she’s recover-
ing from the shock of her mother’s
sudden death and the end of her
latest love affair. To support herself
In Lily King’s latest,
a young writer adrift
in Cambridge, Mass.,
fights off doubts about
the life she’s chosen.
Writers & Lovers
By Lily King
Grove, 324 pages, $27
bones,” and Oscar, a middle-aged
established novelist who’s a widower
with two little boys and a gorgeous
house. Oscar seems like the “full
package,” grounded and ready to
propose; sexy Silas “seesaw[s]...
hot and cold.” Casey’s decision to
stay with one, both or neither of
these men is also, of course, a
decision about who she is or wants
to be.
Entertaining as these rom-com in-
terludes are (particularly Ms. King’s
droll take on Oscar’s oh-so-humble
performance while giving a reading
at a local bookstore), work, more
than romance, lies at the core of
“Writers & Lovers.” Much as Daniel
Defoe enthralled the earliest readers
of the novel with descriptions of
Robinson Crusoe’s fence building
and goat milking, Ms. King pays
Casey’s exhausting daily labors as a
server at Iris the respect of particu-
larity. Here’s a description of the end
of a long dinner shift:The last thing is drying glasses
and rolling more silverware for
lunch....Omar and I do the roll-
ups: napkin folded into a triangle,
spoon on top of fork on top of
knife laid alongside the long edge,
two side points folded in then
everything rolled to the pointed
tip....Wehavetohaveahun-
dred of them in the bin before
we can leave.And when Casey returns home to
her room, more work awaits: the
ego-depleting ordeal of plugging
away at her novel. “The hardest
thing about writing,” she says, “is
getting in every day, breaking
through the membrane. The second-
hardest thing is getting out. Some-
times I sink down too deep and
come up too fast. Afterward I feel
wide open and skinless.”
“Writers & Lovers” is a comic
and compassionate novel about
the cost of (perhaps) sticking with
the same dream for too long. It
may not have the historical reach
of Ms. King’s previous novel, the ac-
claimed “Euphoria” (2014), about
the life of the young Margaret Mead,
but it shares with that novel a fasci-
nation with the difficulty of defining
the worth of one’s life when the
familiar markers of adult achieve-
ment are slow to materialize. Like
Mead, finding her path through the
jungles of New Guinea, Casey has
to figure out a way to move herself
forward, beyond a life stage that’s
lost its freshness, to whatever lies
beyond.Ms. Corrigan, who teaches
literature at Georgetown
University, is the book critic for
the NPR program “Fresh Air.”Kidding on the Square
ALAMYBOOKS
‘There’s a great difficulty in making choices if you have any imagination at all.’—JOHN BARTH
The
novelistdaughter
of a
superstar
actress
explores
the
illusions
and
realities
of her
mother’s
celebrity.FICTION
SAMSACKSNORAH, THE DAUGHTERof
the film and stage superstar
Katherine O’Dell and the
narrator of Anne Enright’s
latest novel, “Actress”
(Norton, 264 pages, $26.95),
touches the central trouble with
her upbringing in a parenthetical
aside offered so casually that it’s
easy to miss. While recounting
her mother’s brief Hollywood
marriage, which began and
ended before Norah was
born, she tries to picture the
glamorous wedding. “How does
an actor say, ‘I do,’ up there in
front of the congregation?” she
wonders. “This was something
I worried about as a child—how
does an actormeanthings?”
The problem of truly knowing
the people one is closest to
haunts this behind-the-curtains
drama, a difficulty multiplied
when one is raised by a legend-
ary Irish performer. Even that
label is deceptive, Norah points
out, because Katherine was
actually born in England:
“Her Irish accent was a fake Irish
accent, which turned into a sym-
bolic Irish accent and then, in
time, to one that sounded almost
ordinary.” Norah, who has be-
come a novelist, is writing about
her mother decades after her
death in order to set the record
straight, but she finds that her
own account is filled with secrets
and silences and disguises worn
so long and so expertly that it’s
impossible to peel away the
make-believe from the real.
For all of the emotional
tumult in “Actress,” however,there is also a great deal of
simple and wonderfully immer-
sive storytelling, particularly in
the evocations of Katherine’s
beginnings in an itinerant
theater troupe performing
“Othello” and “The Merchant
of Venice” at whistlestops across
the Irish countryside. HereKatherine discovers the magical
dynamism of a play, a thing
“made of air, with rules of iron.”
We read of the joys and acci-
dents that fill her stage educa-
tion, and of her revelation that,
pre-show jitters notwithstand-
ing, an actress never feels safer
than in the midst of a produc-
tion: “The audience would not
touch you, not ever. They liked
sitting in the darkness, forgetting
who they were...Thatiswhat
Mac [the troupe’s manager]
meant when he said, ‘the play
is the thing,’ he meant the story
itself would keep you from harm.”
The first half of “Actress”
concerns Katherine’s emergence,
her turn on Broadway and her
apotheosis as a 1950s Hollywood
starlet typecast to play red-
haired, green-eyed Irish nurses.
These passages afforded me
more enjoyment than anything
I’ve encountered this year. Thereis something that seems effort-
less about Ms. Enright’s writing
—an illusion, of course, but
one brilliantly sustained. Her
anecdotes are charming, percep-
tive and raconteurial without
histrionics. Like a great actress,
the author is made invisible by
the spell of her performance.
Perhaps inevitably, the tenor
of the novel changes as it charts
Katherine’s decline. The actress
moves to Ireland and returns
to a stage career after Norah
is born in mysterious circum-
stances. There are still triumphs,
but the little men who run the
industry turn vengeful and her
efforts to “keep up appear-
ances”—the trouper’s credo—for
an audience whose attention has
swiveled elsewhere is a recipe
for madness. (There is a jarring
moment when, at the age of 47,
she gives in and moves “from
her unconvincing twenties to her
mid sixties—there was nothing
for her to play in between.”)
In these years Norah begins
to have equal billing in the
narrative. When she speaks
about herself, her reflections are
scraped and raw, untouched by a
lacquer of enchantment. Know-
ing nothing about her father,
she feels doomed to replace him
with lovers, and her identity,
too, becomes confused by a
performance of deference to men.
By the end of “Actress” the
prose has become high-strung
and insistent, an outlet for long-
repressed anger. Some of its
anger is aimed in the direction
of Norah’s faltering marriage. Itbecomes clear that her husband,
an absent “you,” is the audience
to whom she’s trying to explain
herself. (“I am no longer sure
what I actually see, these days,
when I look at you.”) I will
confess that I missed the
glamour and excitement of the
opening of the book, when the
play was the thing. But I don’t
deny the bare-knuckled force
of Ms. Enright’s unanswerable
concluding question. Who are
we, to ourselves and to others,
when our illusions finally fail?James McBride’s knockabout
comic novel“Deacon King
Kong” (Riverhead, 370 pages,
$28)takes place in a Brooklyn
housing project in 1969, soon
after the poor but close-knit
community has been fractured
by the arrival of heroin. The
book begins with an act of fool-
hardy vigilantism—or maybe it’s
just drunkenness: One morningan old widower known as
Sportcoat, fortified by a bootleg
liquor called King Kong, steps
into the courtyard and shoots
a drug dealer in the head. The
dealer survives but the after-
shocks are enormous. Not only
does the shooting invite the
police to come sniffing around
the project but it kicks off a
turf war between drug gangs
competing for supremacy.
Mr. McBride dealt with
comparable material for the
terrific short stories set in a
black Pennsylvania neighborhood
in the 2017 collection “Five-Carat
Soul.” He’s great at front-stoop
banter and again he creates fond,
funny portrayals of community
old-timers, like the housing-
project janitor Hot Sausage,
or the fearless Sister Gee.
But with this book he may
have spread himself too thin.
There’s a running joke in which
people ask just what exactly
Sportcoat does in his role as a
church deacon. He enumerates
a list of random odd jobs, calling
himself a “holy handyman.”
Mr. McBride is here a jack-of-
all-trades, as well. He shifts
from broad, slapstick comedy
to shoot-’em-up violence to
nostalgic meditations on New
York history. There is even, for
reasons I couldn’t quite grasp,
a subplot involving a hidden
work of art that was smuggled
out of Europe after World War II.
All of it is readable but none of
it stands out, making the novel,
much like its shambling hero,
a likable but minor eccentricity.Secrets, Silences and Stage Disguises
THIS WEEK
Actress
ByAnneEnrightDeacon King Kong
ByJamesMcBrideALAMY