The Last Collection: A Novel of Elsa Schiaparelli and Coco Chanel

The Last Collection opens with the receipt of a telegram in 1954 that calls Lily Sutter to return to the Paris she left on the very brink of war. The vast majority of Jeanne Mackin's novels is set on that brink though, in the two years Lily Sutter spends in Paris following the tragic death of her husband. It's Lily's brother, Charlie, who calls her aware from the gray English boarding school where she teaches art classes to posh daughters with significant health challenges...like Marie "Gogo" Schiaparelli, whose childhood bout with polio has marked her gait and her relationship with her famous, fashion-designer mother, Elsa.

It's Charlie, too, who introduces Lily to the aristocratic Madame Bouchard and the world of French fashion, dominated by Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli. In Paris, as she becomes a friend and confidante to the two arch-rivals, Lily also re-learns to paint, and to live.

Having previously read both Mademoiselle Chanel (fiction) and Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life (non-fiction), I was familiar with Chanel and her rivalry with Schiaparelli. Mackin imparts more color, and also more of Schiaparelli, who largely emerges as the central character. Although Lily is a young widow and Paris is on the brink of a war that will nearly destroy it, to Mackin's credit, The Last Collection is not overly heavy, and manages to feel even hopeful. Certainly, it's a book to be enjoyed by those who love Paris, and all things Parisian.

Four stars.

Another Side of Paradise

The writing is beautiful. Sally Koslow's writing is what hooked me and why I finished, despite so thoroughly disliking both Sheilah Graham and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the main characters in Another Side of Paradise.

Told from Sheilah's perspective, this novel is the story of their nearly-four year romance while Zelda was institutionalized and Scott toiled in Hollywood, earning just enough to stave off his creditors. (The Hollywood period in all its agony and glory is the focus of West of Sunset, which I preferred to Another Side of Paradise because of the former's broader focus.) To say the relationship between Sheilah and Scott was volatile would be an understatement. And so, not surprisingly, their actions are repetitive: they're together happily, Scott goes on a bender, there's an ugly fight and break-up, he begs her forgiveness, she goes back to him. The cycle is broken only by Scott's death. Ugh.

The best of Another Side of Paradise are the other chapters covering Sheilah's life before Hollywood. Born Lily Shiel in an East End slum, her father dies and mothers sends her to an institution for Jewish children. As a teenager, she meets a kindly businessman who helps her create the fiction of Sheilah Graham and sets her on a course to hobnob with the likes of the Mitfords and Randolph Churchill.

In Koslow's telling, Sheilah struggles with the lies she has told and lives in constant fear of being unmasked as a fake and am imposter. This may or may not be true. Presumably she did love Scott Fitzgerald, though God knows it's impossible to understand why. I can but give her the benefit of the doubt and assume it had to do with his writing.

When it comes to a final reckoning, unfortunately, I found both Sheilah and Scott so dislikable, but they detracted from the overall experience, and so, where I would otherwise have said this was a solid 4-star read, I'm concluding with 3 stars and feeling generous. Skip the historical fiction and go for the real stuff: The Cruise of the Rolling Junk should sate any reader looking for a taste of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Three stars.

Marcel's Letters: A Font and the Search for One Man's Fate

I was drawn to Marcel's Letters for their central feature: letters from a gentleman by the name of Marcel written from Berlin at the height of World War II and mailed to France. An avid reader of WWII histories, and particularly those with a connection to France, I thought this would be right up my alley. I couldn't have been more wrong.

For starters, the letters themselves are a scant handful covering a few months' time. They're interesting, sure, but don't form the bulwark I had expected. More problematic for me was the overbearing presence of author Carolyn Porter, and all her various neuroses. Even having read the book, I cannot understand how or why this woman became obsessed with uncovering the story behind these letters, nor how, even upon ultimately uncovering what happened to Marcel she still could not let go of the questions around how the letters ultimately made their way to her. (Or, more specifically, to a flea market in France where they were purchased by the owners of antiques stores in the U.S., where she ultimately purchased them.) Her (fairly vicious) comments in the afterward in regards to a woman who may or may not have other letters added a level of acidity to otherwise run-of-the-mill annoying.

The full backstory is that Porter purchased the letters because she was drawn to the handwriting and wanted to use it to design a font. Great. The font, which she ultimately named for Marcel, could also be called classical French, so typically traditional was his handwriting. I will grant that no such font existed, and I might have been more interested in the process involved in designing a font, if the process, in this case, were not rife with commentary on everything Porter did not know about World War II and tears, tears, tears. Everything gets to her. The project - not the font, but the search for the man - consumes her life. Her coping skills seem to be minimal.

The unexpected star of the book is Aaron, Porter's husband, who maintains a sense of humor, calm, and equanimity throughout. The glimpses the handful of letters do offer into life in Germany during WWII are interesting, but in hindsight it would have been more enjoyable for me to read only the letters.

Two stars.

Aunt Dimity and the Heart of Gold

Creative would be one - charitable - word for this book. After all, much as I've read, a dearly departed friend providing advice and assisting with mysteries by writing notes that disappear after the intended has read them in the designated notebook is a first. And, despite Aunt Dimity being a series, it is the last time for me.

I expected Aunt Dimity and the Heart of Gold to be a modern take on the cozy, British mystery. Maybe not quite Agatha Christie, but perhaps along the lines of Dorothy Sayers. This seemed reasonable on my part since Nancy Atherton sets her story in the Cotswolds, at Christmas. Unfortunately, I quickly disabused of this notion. Not only did the mystery fail to materialize for ages (or to interest once it did), but I found the writing dull and the story plodding. The characters were not well developed; in fact, I had a difficult time keeping many of them straight. And I couldn't get past Aunt Dimity herself, the departed best friend of the protagonist's mother, who continues to communicate by way of a special notebook and disappearing ink. Twenties Girl, it isn't.

This is a book I skimmed, more than read, and even so debated whether to finish.

One star.

City of Flickering Light

In one word: fun. Juliette Fay's tale of early Hollywood is a fun read, full of fictional characters whose personalities mesh and who bring out the best of the golden age of film...even when starring in escapades drawn from some of Hollywood's darker moments.

Irene Van Beck and Millie Martin met in a seedy burlesque show and planned their escape - from a moving train, no less - before burlesque could completely chew them up and spit them out. Troupe comedian Henry Weiss gambles on jumping after them and the trio of friends make their way to Hollywood together where Irene begins writing and Millie and Henry find work as extras. All is not peaches and cream, of course; any good story must have its sources of conflict, and this is no different, with Millie, Irene, and Henry gradually unfurling compelling backstories that ultimately bind them together in more ways than they could have anticipated when they made the literal leap.

There's no shortage of tales of Hollywood out there, but City of Flickering Light stands apart to me because of what it is not. It's not a fictionalized account of an actual person (i.e., The Girls in the Picture and Frances Marion or Louise Brooks in The Chaperone or even Loretta Young). As Fay writes in her author's note, she drew inspiration from actual events in Hollywood circa 1921 (such as the use of morphine on sets after accidents, or the accusations against Fatty Arbuckle, or, most effectively for Fay's story, the still-unsolved murder of director William Desmond Taylor), but the lack of real characters allows Fay greater leeway with her story than those other early-Hollywood offerings that rely on the comings and goings of actual people.

And, although, it's a small thing, the quotes that open each of the 47 chapters added zeitgeist to the book.

Five stars.

Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

Suzy Hansen's Notes on a Foreign Country is a clear-eyed look at U.S. foreign policy (particularly in the Middle East) from the perspective of an expat American being enlightened about her country's misdeeds while fulfilling a fellowship in Turkey.

Honestly, while I was initially shocked by Hansen's naivete (which she acknowledges, and even refers to as ignorance, early and often, and which given that, when she departed for Istanbul she did so with an Ivy League education and several years of NYC work experience, only speaks to the larger issue of ignorance of international affairs in this country), she quickly gets to the heart of the matter in terms of the U.S.'s near-continuous and out-sized presence in the Middle East in the past 70-odd years. She builds the case that the U.S. has created an empire quietly and without the awareness of most Americans, and that, as she demonstrates time and time again, U.S. decisions directly impact the lives of those in other countries on a regular basis. (Case in point: today's headlines regarding the assassination of an Iranian general by the U.S.).

Hansen explores U.S-Turkish relations most closely, as that is where she now lives and has the greatest experience and knowledge, but she does a more-than-passable job is exploring similar imbalances between the U.S. and Afghanistan, Greece, Pakistan, and Latin American countries. Think coups. Lots of coups. Vietnam. The School of the Americas. Cuba and the Philippines. Hansen catalogues them all here, the questionable and the clearly wrong.

Because of the nature of U.S. imperialism, as compared to the old European empires, Hansen builds the case that the U.S. empire is equally if not more insidious and damaging than those older empires, which were openly acknowledged, and whose ties, for better or for worse, were formalized. (Those who haven't read it should follow Hansen's work with James Bradley's primer on the founding of the U.S. empire, The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War or Julia Flynn Siler's Lost Kingdom: Hawaii's Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America's First Imperial Adventure.)

Notes on a Foreign Country is a timely reminder of the precarious power exercised by the U.S. It is an indictment of U.S. foreign policy from time immemorial, but it is also an indictment of the generalized ignorance that has allowed this policy to continue unabated.

4-and-a-half stars.