I was so taken with Julie Orringer's new novel, Luna, Phoenix, Queen that I read it twice -- in part to make sure it was really as good as I thought. It struck me as just about perfect both times.
Luna, Phoenix, Queen is a multivalent love story, a tale of sickness and health, dementia and brilliance, betrayal and loyalty. It's both heartbreaking and heartwarming, and it features a dog, though there's nothing shaggy about her or her story. This book gives damaged, adopted canines with patchy, mangy fur a good name. In fact, it gives this particular creature, a rescue who survived a brutal fire, three names. She goes by whatever anyone who shows her affection wants to call her.
After two seriously accomplished WWII historical novels -- The Invisible Bridge (2010) and The Flight Portfolio (2019) -- Orringer returns in her third novel to the contemporary domestic sphere of her first book. How to Breathe Underwater, a collection of nine intense stories about furious kids, was published in 2003. An outburst from the story "When She is Old and I Am Famous" reads: "Aida. That is her terrible name. Ai-ee-duh: two cries of pain and one of stupidity." This wonderful line has colored my view of Verdi's opera.
Barr Pennington, a novelist and professor of creative writing at a midwestern university, is the first of a constellation of characters Orringer introduces in Luna. Initially, we feel for this man in his late 50s who is charmed by the sight of an obedient dog at the local farmer's market. He wonders whether such a pet might ease his loneliness: "A dog could make you feel that your life had some worth after all, that you hadn't forfeited your claim to all affection in this world."
Is he divorced? Widowed? No. We learn by the second page that his wife, Dava, a professor of English literature whom he'd met 33 years earlier when she was a graduate student, "had lost the capacity to take care of a dog, or of anything else." About a year ago, when Dava's early onset Alzheimer's had progressed to the point where she needed more care than he could give, Barr had moved her into a nursing home. Their two sons were grown and gone, and Barr lived alone, struggling to write fiction that would appeal to a new generation of readers. His assistant, Evie, a former graduate student who had witnessed his impatience with his wife, reminds him that dogs are a lot of work.
With Dava gone, Barr moves into her vacated study, where he discovers a handwritten manuscript hidden behind loose wainscotting. To his surprise, it's a brilliant novel nominally based on a story Dava had told him about her mother, who had left Dava's father for a woman she worked with at a women's shelter, though she returned home when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. The cancer had killed her when Dava was 13.
Dava's manuscript reveals something upsetting that Barr "had known about in his heart for years" but had brushed aside. Without telling anyone, he transcribes her scrawled pages into his computer, tweaking the novel along the way to make it "his own."
That's the setup, which brings to mind Meg Wolitzer's excellent 2003 novel, The Wife, in which another husband was all too happy to take credit for his talented wife's work. Orringer expands her cast and explores the situation's ramifications in seven additional chapters, some set a decade or more earlier, when Dava was still cogent, others in the present. Each focuses on different characters in the Penningtons' orbit.
Close at hand, there's Evie, who feels guilty for having abandoned her ailing parents in order to pursue a literary career. That career has stalled, thanks in part to her unhelpful boss and thesis advisor, who's been sitting on the latest draft of her novel for a year. A welcome antidote to Barr's self-centeredness is Svetlana White, Dava's caring best friend and soulmate, a Russian literature professor. Orringer's portraits of the two women's children -- asthmatic Milo Pennington, obnoxious James Pennington, and Naomi White, who as a teen wished she were a graceful deer instead of a clumsy human -- again displays her keen understanding of adolescents.
And then, of course, there's the rescue dog, who -- not to give away too much -- comes to the rescue of several of these hurting people in her quietly supportive way.
Each chapter, full of drama and incident, packs the power of a well-crafted short story. A sense of ominous threat hovers over river walks, lake outings, lovers' difficult conversations, anxiety-inducing medical tests, moral quandaries, and disturbing power imbalances.
You may think you know where this novel about betrayal and progressive dementia is going -- and in some senses, you do. But there are happy surprises, and something else you may not know, which I mention because it adds another dimension to Orringer's extraordinary accomplishment: Around the time she started writing about Dava, her husband Ryan Harty, a fellow writer she met at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1994, was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's. Luna, Phoenix, Queen is not their story. But this masterfully plotted, gorgeously moving novel demonstrates how writers sometimes actually can spin a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
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