We first meet Nick and her cousin Helena in 1945. They are leaving their house in Cambridge, Massachusetts with Nick headed to Florida to join her husband Hughes who is leaving active duty in the Navy and Helena about to marry Avery and move to Hollywood. Helena’s first husband was killed in the war.
The cousins will miss each other but know they will meet at the family’s compound on Martha’s Vineyard: the magnificent Tiger House and the small bungalow built years ago for Helena and her mother.
Helena’s relative poverty has tamed her in comparison to Nick, whose privilege of wealth and status protect her while she indulges in wild and whimsical shenanigans. These could be shocking her conservative Florida neighbors by wearing her bathing suit on the street, ignoring her own dinner party because she feels like lying on the grass smoking and watching the stars, or helping herself to any man she fancies.
Hughes is more complicated: often distant, yet never complaining about her antics. Avery turns out to be the sort of Los Angeles oddball I remember hearing about in my younger days. He devotes himself to collecting memorabilia about his deceased former love, an actress, and trying to get the money to make a film about her life.
As the book progresses through the 1950s and 1960s we see them and their children—Nick’s daughter Daisy and Helena’s son Ed—spending overheated summers at Tiger House. Daisy’s obsession with a boy named Tyler leads her through various ups and downs, including a violent tennis match. Ed, though, is a cipher. He watches. Still, he and Daisy have an enduring connection.
One reason I read this book was that it was supposed to be set in Martha’s Vineyard. Indeed most of it is, but the setting is barely mentioned. It’s simply a wealthy colony by the sea with nothing to distinguish it from any other such spot. That is probably appropriate for the characters who just want to drink and flirt and, at least for the children, play tennis. Yet such a point had been made about how this was so important a family home that I was surprised there wasn’t more made of it.
We are left with just the characters, who bumble around doing things they think will make them happy or at least make their privileged lives bearable. A murdered girl turns up, but this is not a murder mystery. None of the characters try to find the killer, though the murder does have consequences. The author does beautifully convey the preppie world of the 1960s and the subtle lines of status and discrimination within the world of the wealthy.
What I liked about the book were the different points of view. It is hard to handle multiple points of view well, but Klaussmann succeeds brilliantly. There are five parts to the book, each narrated by a different character. Thus we get to see the events of the novel through varying perspectives, each new view adding nuance to what’s come before.
The title comes from a Wallace Stevens poem, Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock, about conformity and imagination. Klaussmann’s peculiar characters and her use of multiple points of view remind me to consider how others see things and why their opinions may differ from mine. It makes me reinterpret Stevens’ line “None of them are strange” as being not a critique of conformity but a call for empathy.
Have you read a novel set on Martha’s Vineyard?