FICTION
`The Inn
at Lake Devine'
By Elinor Lipman
Random House, 261 pp., $23.00.
Remember the dreaded drive on the
way to your favorite summer vacation
spot? Stuck in the car with pesky sib-
lings, you sang camp songs out of
sheer boredom while fantasizing about
ditching the adults to cannonball into
the swimming hole. Anyone who ever
escaped to the Catskills or any posh
lake resort will welcome "The Inn at
Lake Devine" and its spunky feminist
protagonist, Natalie Marx.
Natalie, an argumentative Jewish
10-year-old, dreams of vacationing in
the one place she isn't welcome. In
1961, The Marxes inquire about a
Vermont inn only to be turned away
because of anti-Semitism. Natalie, not
one to accept no for an answer, fina-
gles an invitation. While there she
develops some lasting friendships,
which cause her to return to The Inn
a decade later. On her return, Natalie
winds up on a path to self-discovery in
which she battles racism, overcomes
loss and eventually achieves happiness.
It is a pleasure to accompany Natal-
ie as she struggles with questions of
Jewish identity. She'll even make you
laugh out loud. During an argument,
a friend notes, "We've been fighting
since the second I arrived." Natalie
replies, "Fighting. ... This isn't fight-
ing. This is a stimulating discussion."
Ms. Lipman has a talent for writ-
ing realistic dialogue and characters
with personalities that leap off the
page. Unfortunately, the only other
fully realized characters are Natalie's
parents, who are introduced in a
compelling and humorous narrative
about their courtship. Other charac-
ters, such as The Inn's owner, lack
motivations for their beliefs and
actions. Ms. Lipman also falls short
in developing many of the other
peripheral players.
Another shortcoming is Ms. Lip-
man's failure to address directly inter-
faith relationships. They are present
throughout the narrative, but never
materialize satisfactorily. Instead, con-
flicts related to the issue are treated as
a joke and then summed up too neat-
ly.
Yet, the story is a sweet one, and
worth reading. It's an agreeable
quick read to have on hand when
drifting lazily on an inflatable raft or
snuggling up in an Adirondack chair
on the porch of your favorite get-
away.
— Amanda Krotki
`The Archivist'
By Martha Cooley
Little, Brown and Company, 320 pp.,
$22.95.
First time novelist Martha Cooley
tries too hard to establish parallels
among the characters in "The
Archivist." Nevertheless, Ms. Cooley
accomplishes the remarkable feat of
using T.S. Eliot's poetry to illuminate
the thoughts and actions of her char-
acters.
Matthias Lane, an archivist at the
Princeton University library, is in
charge of a collection of letters that
the poet wrote to Emily Hale, a
young woman from Boston. Eliot
wrote his passionate letters to Emily
during his long-time estrangement
from his wife, Vivienne, who spent
most of her adult life in a mental
institution.
Although he left his wife years
before she died and never visited her
during her confinement, Eliot was
devastated by her death and broke
off his relationship with Emily. He
destroyed all of Emily's letters, but
she retained his correspondence,
donating them to Princeton with the
condition that they not be read until
-
Mendels Dwarf'
By Simon Mawer
Crown Publishers, 293 pp., $23.00.
the year 2020 when all of the
involved parties are long gone.
Like Vivienne, Matthias's wife,
Judith, was institutionalized for men-
tal illness ,until her suicide in 1965.
At the heart of Judith's mental
anguish was the void left by the
death of her parents. Raised by an
aunt and uncle in New York, Judith
was told that her parents died in a
car accident. After she learned the
truth about their deaths — they were
Jewish Socialists executed in Russia
while helping Communists set up a
printing press — she became
obsessed with her Jewish roots.
Matthias buries his feelings about
Judith until he meets Roberta Spire,
a graduate student intent on reading
Emily Hale's letters. Like Judith,
Roberta was denied her true heritage.
Her parents were assimilated German
Jews who converted to the Dutch
Reform Church and raised their chil-
dren as Christians.
Matthias and Roberta have won-
derful chemistry and their moments
together are very satisfying. But one
has to wade through Judith's jour-
nals, written during her stay in the
mental hospital, to get to the book's
rewarding moments.
However, a line from T.S. Eliot's
poem "The Dry Salvages" best
explains why "The Archivist" failed
to engage this reader thoroughly.
"We had the experience," Eliot
writes, "but missed the meaning."
— Melinda Greenberg
It seems fitting that "Mendel's Dwarf"
is published as we near the millennium,
for it unearths some of the 19th century
roots of the most traumatic events of
the 20th century, and points out some
of the wrenching ethical dilemmas we
must face in the century to come. This
powerful novel about the history and
science of genetics manages to be,
simultaneously, a chilling suspense tale,
an erotic love story, and a lively theolog-
ical debate. It is British author Simon
Mawer's first U.S. publication and it
signals the arrival of an important and
original writer.
Mr. Mawer interweaves two narra-
tives, moving back and forth in time.
One is the history of Gregor Mendel,
the 19th century middle-European
monk who discovered the laws of genet-
ics by experimenting with pea hybrids
in the garden of his monastery. His
work went completely unappreciated
until after his death, though it went on
to form the basis of modern genetics,
and its evil twin, eugenics. Mr. Mawer
reimagines Mendel's life in vivid derail.
And he traces the influence of Mendel's
discoveries, through the eugenics move-
ment and Nazi Germany, to the brave
new world of modern reproductive
technology.
The novel's present-day narrator is
genetics researcher Benedict Lambert,
a fictional great-great-great nephew of
Mendel, and a dwarf. Lambert is a
brilliant, witty and angry man. His
words and deeds are saturated with the
bitterness and irony that come from
his perspective as a "mutant," as he
often describes himself.
He takes his revenge on God and
nature by shocking others with his
dark humor and even cruelty. Yet we
root for him in the laboratory as he
chases down the gene for dwarfism,
and in the bedroom as he pursues an
unhappily married woman.
Lambert is all too aware that find-
ing the gene for dwarfism will eventu-
ally allow parents to choose to abort
the likes of him. His internal struggle
over such ethical issues mirrors soci-
ety's struggle to handle an onslaught
of new genetic information. Simon
Mawer's novel is as morally complex
and fulfilling as they come.
— Susan Katz-Miller
6/12
1998
79