Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man.
From the first page, a middle-aged Lily lets the reader know “it all fell apart.” The novel is framed within Lily’s preparations to attend a 1985 museum retrospective of a now-revered Evan’s work, her visit to the now-elderly Trenthams, her first conversation with Eva since their relationship ruptured decades earlier, and her growing if conflicted desire to write a memoir about them all.īitto adapts a leisurely storytelling pace that matches the period as she explores with quiet passion both the cost of creative life on family and the definition of family itself.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. The dangers of the Trentham's creative neglect come to fruition when the girls blossom into puberty in close proximity to attractive male artists in their 20s. But what seems Edenic to Lily becomes increasingly problematic for the Trentham daughters, particularly the youngest, Heloise, whose emotional struggles no one takes seriously until too late. Meanwhile Lily and Eva develop an intensely close friendship author Bitto is particularly strong at portraying “the depth of intimacy in that first chaste trial marriage between girls.” Drawn to the atmosphere of “carefree detachment” in which Helena and Evan raise their children-Evan unselfconsciously naked much of the time, Helena paying erratic attention to basic needs like food on the table-Lily yearns to be part of the family, not just a friend or guest. Soon other young artists move in as the Trenthams experiment in creating a free-spirited bohemian utopia. Entranced by Eva but also her glamorous mother, Helena, and painter father, Evan, who don’t mind flouting convention, Lily is soon spending as much time as she can at their estatelike home, which has belonged to Helena’s family for generations.
Narrator Lily is the 8-year-old only child of overprotective parents struggling their way through the Depression when she meets Eva Trentham and her two sisters, Bea and Heloise, at her new school. A first novel from Australia about an artist and his wealthy wife living with their three daughters on the creative edge in hidebound 1930s Melbourne.
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