The 1920s is the time. Connecticut and New York are the settings. And the lives of the affluent are the plot of a new novel by Beatriz Williams called, A Certain Age. Book critic Joan Baum has this review.
The many online voices praising Beatriz Williams’ novel of manners, A Certain Age, are largely those of women, but don’t diminish this page turner as chick lit. It does have love and lust and, as the author says in an end note, “a torrent of sexual passion,” along with a lot of info on the food, dress, habits and customs of the tony upper-class crowd in Connecticut and New York in the 20s – a world of “silks and horses and ennui.” But the book also has a delicious smattering of cynical wit and a clever plot that includes not only scheming women but murder most foul. And a neat title: A Certain Age refers to the first-person narrator, Mrs. Theresa Marshall of Fifth Avenue and Southampton, a glamorous, “well preserved lady” of “a certain age” – she’s actually 44. But the story’s also set in “a certain age” – the ever-fascinating, roaring, proto-feminist, money-mad `20s, when women got the vote, and, if the alimony price was right a divorce.
Given the richness of characters and time and place, A Certain Age could well be a costume drama series for PBS along the lines of Masterpiece Theatre’s Mr. Selfridge. And just when you think the plot’s going one way, cliff-hanging chapters twist and turn it in another direction. You may be hot to hate certain manipulating socialites and root for the good folks, but Williams undercuts expectations and allows characters, good and bad, to exhibit nuanced behavior. She also surprises with some horrific realism, battle scenes from the Great War by way of handsome 22-year-old Octavian Rofrano, who had been an aviator in France and is now flying high with Mrs. Marshall as her “boyo” lover. BOYO, by the way is Welsh for Working Class Youth.
As Williams notes, the novel had an unusual prompt. Its plot and several characters are in a way modelled on Richard Strauss’ 1910 comic opera, Der Rosenkavalier, a favorite with the opera-loving author. Mrs. Theresa Marshall is named after Strauss’ Marschallin, Marie Therese, and young Octavian, as in the opera, is a chevalier, or “knight of the rose,” a rosenkavalier – someone who is sent to woo a young woman on behalf of someone else. Well, you know what will happen with that complication. But Williams adds her own compelling elements – a fictional “murder trial of the century” to get the action started, and, to heighten the action, the real-life horse race of the century, when Man o’ War won the Dwyer Stakes at Aqueduct. Williams’ inventiveness is apparent on the first page, a gossip column called “Tit and Tattle” written by one “Patty Cake,” who’s taking notes at the Trial of the Century. Even more fun are the chapter epigraphs – pithy, sarcastic Dorothy Parker like sayings by Helen Rowland, a real-life humorist and journalist who wrote for the old New York World. They’re priceless and wonderfully fit the subject matter and spirit of this satiric well-written romp.
