The Great Lenore by J.M. Tohline
My rating: 4/5 cats
this book really makes me want to read Zuleika Dobson again, even though technically it is a retelling of The Great Gatsby.
it’s probably nothing like zd except that it centers around a beautiful, vivacious woman who drives all the boys to distraction, it is both comical and deeply tragic, and there is probably a lot of drinking (i don’t actually remember the drinking-quantity in z.d.)
so richard is a novelist, struggling with that second-novel curse, house-sitting in one of the wealthy enclaves of nantucket when he finds himself enmeshed in the walking greek tragedy of the family next door.
lenore is a woman who has a catastrophic effect on every man who meets her, and she is married to the elder son of richard’s new neighbors. she is beautiful and charismatic and the sweetheart side of the femme fatale coin. and the plane she was supposed to be on has just crashed, leaving no survivors.
it is a perfect opportunity to see how people really feel about you, right?
so richard becomes her investigator-of-sorts, and oh, the things he discovers…
it is a satisfyingly sad little book. some of the transitional elements are blurrier than i usually like, but this gives the book a dreamlike quality, and since the narrator is usually drunk or stoned or just confused, this actually works out pretty nicely. he is one of those “empty vessel” narrators, who drifts around as the perfect observer, but his inebriated state makes him an unreliable observer, so it gets complicated.
we don’t get to see too much of lenore, not enough to understand why she is the greatest chick since sliced bread, but all of the characters’ comments to richard involve some sort of “you just had to know her” statement which makes for a nice authorial sidestep; he doesn’t have to make her irresistible on paper, because she is only beautiful in flight.
i recommend this as an end-of-summer read, when all that sunshiny promise starts fading into dying leaves and chilling snow. that is, if sorrow is your bag. sorrow is definitely my bag.
in searching online to show off the nice edition of z.d. i have, i came across this cover, which might be the biggest crime against literature ever:
like it’s some piece of summer beach blanket erotica.
i laff.
