Valerie Martin’s charming new novel, Mrs. Gulliver, lies simply past the horizon. The 12 months is 1954. Verona Island floats a longish ferry trip away from the mainland. Lila Gulliver’s shoppers enter via a aspect door behind a hedge, unseen from the road, although prostitution is authorized on the island.
Lila, who tells this story, is a eager observer of surfaces. She crisply describes the clothes and demeanor of everybody we meet. Of the 2 destitute farm women who arrive in her drawing room one humid day, Carita stands out. She possesses a wealthy velvet voice and “an archness as well, distant and amused.” Carita has been blind since start. Lila thinks Carita may simply fulfill a fantasy of some of her shoppers.
We readers, like Lila, her shoppers, her colleagues and a school boy named Ian, are quickly enchanted by Carita. Lila notes that Ian is “a romantic, self-righteous boy, and I liked the idea of him with Carita, two healthy young bodies driven together by sexual attraction and not much else. . . . She would forget him in a month, but he would remember her for the rest of his life.”
Alas, Lila is just not fairly proper. Ian decides he should save Carita from this den of iniquity. (Lila’s home, by the best way, is a spot the place part-time intercourse employee Mimi describes the financial theories of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, and Carita decides Marx is correct.) Ian, scion of the wealthiest household on the island, is concerned with a homicide which may be a gangland hit. He loses his thoughts. He and Carita flee to an impoverished fishing village.
Many problems ensue, largely having to do with cash, and the various temperatures and energy dynamics of love. In her afterword, Martin writes that she didn’t need Carita to finish up like Juliet Capulet, a tragic heroine. Instead, in Mrs. Gulliver, Martin provides us an idyll, maybe even a comedy. Her contact is tender and lightweight. There are shadows and there’s sunshine. All’s properly that ends properly. We hope.
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