What a masterpiece this book is. I started reading it in hardcover, couldn't go past the first ten chapters - stupefied, like many other readers, that Orringer had focused the story on Varian Fry's imaginary male lover from his Harvard days rather than the real-life artists he helped escape Occupied France, for which she got lambasted in the NYRB - but I decided to give the book another try when it came out in paperback and I am glad I did.
This time, probably because I had gotten used to the premise and also because Fry's son had written the NYRB to say Orringer had been right (his father had indeed been a closeted homosexual), I enjoyed it from beginning to end. It was hard to put down. The prose sizzles, the plot twists are unexpected, the dialogue reads vividly, and the insights into human nature (especially the big reveal about Tobias Katznelson at the end) deliver a punch to the gut. It saddens me that this novel didn't reach the large audience it deserved to reach because of the controversy regarding Fry, whom the world had not known to be a closeted homosexual before Orringer did her research and publisher her novel about him. But maybe it will be picked up by book clubs now that it is in paperback and will get a second life. Orringer knows how to write. Five stars out of five.
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