Book Review: Newport
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by Jill Morrow
William Morrow, 2015
Glamor, broadly understood, has always been a key element of the guilty-pleasure “summer” book. It's catapulted dozens of those books to the ranks of bestsellers, made stars of dozens of the purveyors of such books, and allowed hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of sunburned vacationers to forget, however fleetingly, the screaming kids and brooding spouse back at the no-ocean-view hotel room that's currently taking a shark-sized bite out of the savings account. Glamor doesn't need to equate to ease – in fact, in terms of drama, it had better not – but it's got to transport, or it might as well be Staten Island.
Jill Morrow seems to understand this concept completely; her new novel, a sinfully good crème brulee of a thing called Newport, shimmers with all the glamor of a night at the Oscars, and like such a storied evening, it effortlessly holds the attention while it's unfolding and then instantly disappears from the memory except for a spiked highlight here or there. It's easy to imagine readers finishing this book with a contented sigh in July of 2015 and then in July of 2025 remembering fondly when they finished it back in 1985. “Timeless” is too generous a term for such a book, but by the same token “derivative” is too harsh. Instead, the thing is a Golden Oldie that happens to be newly published.
And of course it heavily features the Newport, Rhode Island of the 1920s – the perfect setting in the perfect era to evoke glamor. Here, attorney Adrian de la Noye is returning to Newport (he has a long and tangled history with the place, having grown up there as an ambivalent misfit) with his assistant, 25-year-old Jim Reid (a kid from South Boston who “never quite fit in anywhere”), in order to update the will of a wealthy man named Bennett Chapman. Since Chapman has recently become engaged to a much younger woman named Catharine Walsh, his adult children are naturally worried that they'll be cut out of the new will. Adrian has a wife and two kids, but he also has a history with Catharine Walsh, and as soon as he and Jim arrive at their destination mansion, Liriodendron, the expertly-orchestrated machinations begin.
Those machinations take an unexpected turn when it comes to light that Bennett Chapman believes the spirit of his dead first wife has communicated with him and urged him to marry Catharine Walsh. This spiritualist element (the Chapman children naturally smell an elaborate con game taking place before their eyes) keeps the otherwise standard family-inheritance plot ticking along quite nicely, and along the way, Morrow indulges in some quick and quite vivid descriptions of her lavish setting:
A large white mansion sat planted at the apex of the drive, a northern paean to southern antebellum architecture. Adrian took in the graceful white columns that guided the eye from porch floorboards to ceiling, the well-manicured lawn with its early summer flowers in riotous bloom, and the expanse of ocean rolling behind the house in an endless carpet of motion.
Perhaps unintentionally on the author's part, young Jim Reid manages to steal a good deal of the book from its more high-profile characters. Perhaps it's because he's simply more likable than any of them, although in this book that wouldn't be difficult (for a group of people this uniformly unpleasant, you'd have to go all the way back to the castaways on Gilligan's Island), but there's also the nicely-controlled added brushstrokes of dimension Morrow gives to him, as when he's shown a stone balcony perched above the breakers and is told its history:
“Back around the turn of the century, servants from the summer cottages used to come here at night to play music and dance, Amy said. “Can you imagine how lovely it must have been?”He gazed across the star-dappled sea, straight out to the point where water met sky in a velvet union of darkness. He could see those servants. His Irish ancestors, mostly, smothered by starched uniforms and stuffy protocol during the day, free to let loose at night and dance by the ocean to the swirling pipes of home. This may not have been their native country, but it was certainly their sea. It cradled Mother Ireland, had carried their boats safely to this land of opportunity.
That land of opportunity is also a land of perils, as both Jim and all of Morrow's wealthier characters learn in the book's fast-paced, intensely predictable concluding chapters, but some of these characters are very enterprising, and you get the sense they'll work things out. True, they're trapped in a story being told by an author who seems to think that the “spirit world” is real and that smoking is just about the coolest thing a human being can do, but even the gods of Newport must bow to the whims of a writer.