FF Friday

A historical novel with two layers: the narrator, Livvie, goes to New York in the 1980s to find a job and the lesbian scene. The job puts her in contact with Clio Hartt, a giant of the lesbian literary coterie in 1930s Paris and author of The Dismantled, but now living alone in a Greenwich Village apartment.

The Dismantled is a classic, but Clio has published nothing since. Livvie's job is to try to get Clio writing again, which seems to lead inevitably into digging into her past to find out why she stopped writing in the first place. I enjoyed (and occasionally cringed) Livvie's attempts to find out, but the big twist behind this felt a bit like a fuss about nothing to me. I couldn't quite buy it on an emotional level.

Livvie's relationship drama tended to come second to her investigation of Clio's past. This worked for me, if only because I wasn't massively invested in it, and I rather liked the low-key way in which it played out.

I enjoyed the evocation of 1980s New York, and the contrast with Livvie's Southern background. My own preference would have been for a little more inter-war Paris, though that's purely personal, and the structure worked well as it was.

There was some period-typical but narratively unnecessary biphobia, and also some kink-shaming (pretty mild kink, at that) which again felt gratuitous.

I ought to have loved this one, dealing as it does with settings that I find fascinating, but overall it fell a bit flat for me.