Books |
The Runaway Wife
Elizabeth Birkelund
By
Published: Jul 12, 2016
Category:
Fiction
The first thing Elizabeth Birkelund said, as she walked into the restaurant: “I read your book.”
“And I’ve read yours,” I said, and we laughed, and cheek-kissed, and just like that, we were friends.
Which I promptly began to unravel.
“The thing about your book that made me crazy,” I said, even before we ordered drinks, “is the style. It’s… traditional. Old-fashioned narrative. A throwback. And then it wore me down. The story was so good I didn’t care. But….”
Elizabeth Birkelund is a publishing veteran, friend to many of my friends, what a woman who knows me well would describe as “the archetype of your type.” Many men have surely behaved stupidly in her presence. I will not be the last.
I was right about “The Dressmaker.” The title character is a gifted tailor, who makes wedding dresses for the most stylish women in Paris but who lives in a village 40 kilometers from the city. One client steals his heart. What follows is a love story, And something more: a kind of fable, a kind of out-of-time fairy tale. In the end: mesmerizing. [To buy “The Dressmaker” from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
“The Runaway Wife” is as disconcerting as Birkelund’s first novel. Again the setting is Europe, this time Switzerland, where Jim Olson (Princeton, Harvard Business School, Wall Street, apartment in Tribeca) has come to make some sense of recent events. He’s just lost a big job. His fiancée has dumped him. So he’s hiking the rock ledges of the Alps, with a friend, for a week.
Two handsome guys, alone? Not for long. At the Cabane des Audannes, they meet Clio, Thalia and Helene Castellane. They drink. They flirt. And on page 23, the young women make a request: their mother is missing. Not lost. Fled. Her philandering husband is the likely next President of France. And Calliope Castellane wants no part of his life. Could Jim find her?
Calliope: the Muse of heroic poetry, wisest of the Greek Muses — and the most assertive. An epic is in the cards. How can Jim refuse? [To buy “The Runaway Wife” from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
So the book is a romantic quest, times two: Jim’s weather-challenged, slow-motion hunt for Calliope, Calliope’s improbable search for a safe retreat. Of course, there will be unlikely helpers, and Jim will find Calliope. And if you think it will be like a vital young man finding a 49-year-old beauty — like a love story enabled by the Muse’s daughters — you’d be so wrong:
The melodic singing drew closer but was interrupted by a long, drawn-out cough. Jim had not noticed her coughing yesterday. He looked out the window. She was hanging laundry — sheets, lingerie, a long white nightgown — on a clothesline. Her slim body weaved in and out of the laundry so that he could never see more than a part of her at any time.
Ah, that cough — these Alps aren’t magic mountains. And this doesn’t play out like any love story and chase movie I’ve ever read. But the strangeness of the story and its weird improbabilities are the center of the novel’s appeal. The relevant question is for the reader, not the writer: Are you willing to take a ride?
Ok, I know Elizabeth Birkelund. I appreciate her quirks. I expect to fight them in every book she writes — and then surrender.
