rev. of The Pleasing Hour by Lily King
by
The Pleasing Hour
A novel by Lily King. Grove/Atlantic Monthly Press, $23.00 cloth. Reviewed by Jessica Treadway.
This may be the first time you hear of Lily King, but her debut novel,
The Pleasing Hour, assures that it won't be the last. With an acute sensibility tuned to the finest details of character, place, and experience, King delivers an emotionally suspenseful story in language nearly as exquisite as the setting itself -- a houseboat on the Seine in Paris, where a young American woman named Rosie arrives with one secret and soon after acquires another.
Seeking escape from the pain of a heartbreaking sacrifice she has made for her sister back in Vermont, Rosie takes a job as an au pair for the Tivots, a French family accustomed to a mutable list of
jeunes filles charged with helping the mother, Nicole, take care of the household. With her distant beauty and low tolerance for mistakes, Nicole intimidates Rosie, who is far from fluent: "I knew if she asked me my own name I would not be able to say it correctly." Despite her deficient language skills, Rosie is quick to discern a lack of communication between Nicole and her husband, Marc. When one of the Tivot children witnesses Rosie stepping into the breach, Rosie flees the family, a fugitive for the second time, and comes to rest in the south of France with Lucie, Nicole's elderly aunt, who provides Rosie -- and the novel -- with poignant historical context for Nicole's aloof, mysterious airs.
Though King tells most of the story in Rosie's voice, she also allows a third-person narrator to render each of the Tivot children's perspectives, as well as Lucie's account of Nicole's early life and her legacy of loss. In some hands, such alternating points of view might jar the reader, but King pulls it off masterfully; the shifts feel not imposed on the story's structure but organic to it, and add a layer of complexity uncommon to first novels.
One of the strongest scenes in the book depicts a bullfight in Spain, where the family has gone on holiday. In the space of eight pages, we see how the blood sport affects each Tivot child on a profound level. Guillaume, the nine-year-old who wants to be a priest, prays that the bull will be spared. When the bull, gored, collapses at the matador's feet, "amid the snap of whips, the jangle of bells, the scrape of a body along the ground, a thought surfaced and would not be submerged. It bobbed two or three times before Guillaume acknowledged its arrival:
Perhaps there is no God. The rest of his mind retreated quickly -- he had never, ever doubted before -- but the brain is small and there was no place to hide." At the same time, Guillaume's sixteen-year-old sister, Odile, is imagining the letter she will write to a girl, Aimee, with whom, despite her boyfriend and her desire to conform, Odile is falling in love.
"Wasn't there, she would write,
something nearly comforting about the certainty of death?" Finally, nine-year-old Lola experiences the pas de deux of the matador and his bull through the vibrations of burgeoning sexuality, though of course she doesn't realize this. "A few rows below her, a shirtless man pulled his girlfriend close for a long kiss, and Lola could see their red wet tongues tumbling over each other. She found herself wishing the matador would go for the sword and then was horrified by the wish. . . . It was not the bull or the matador or the rolling tongues or the arms around her or the blood in the ring or her own slippery sweat, but it was all these things together. She felt like standing up and walking a long, long way; she felt like bursting into tears."
So
The Pleasing Hour, like all intersections at which lives converge, belongs to more than one person -- but ultimately it is Rosie whose emotional evolution we celebrate, and with it the arrival of Lily King to the world of bright new literary voices.
Jessica Treadway, author of Absent Without Leave and Other Stories,
is director of the graduate program in creative writing at Emerson College.