I must confess I had never heard of Andrew Sean Greer though evidently this is not his first novel. The nice people at Faber, who I am pleased to claim as my own publishers, sent it to me a few weeks ago and yesterday I finally started reading it. Once started, I could not stop. It is a most fascinating, beguiling, and moving read. In a sense the subtitle says it all: 'We think we know the ones we love...'. Love, certainly, is a central theme, and so are secrets. Set in San Francisco in 1953, the story is told by a young married woman, Pearlie Cook. Married for about five years, she is lovingly taking care of her little son, who has been afflicted by polio, and of her beautiful and much loved husband Holland, whose health is delicate. It is a peaceful life, though money is short and very little of any note ever happens. All this changes one day, with the appearance at the house of a complete stranger, Charles 'Buzz' Drumer, who claims to have been acquainted with Holland during the war. Buzz has secrets to reveal, secrets that will have a devastating effect on Pearlie's state of mind and will alter the course of her life in a number of irreversible ways. But Pearlie has secrets too, secrets she keeps from Holland, and some she keeps initially from Buzz, but also too that she keeps from the reader. As a narrator, Pearlie has the habit of with-holding information and gradually releasing it at crucial moments. This is all done with great skill and there are surprises right up to the last page, though the plot being what it is it is impossible to say much more about it without spoilers.
The detail of the novel is superb -- Greer has caught perfectly the mood of this strange post-war time, when the effects of the Second World War are still being felt, while the young men are being herded off to fight in Korea. Racism is still very much in evidence, as is anti-communism -- interlaced through the story are references to the trial and eventual execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, a Jewish couple accused of betraying secrets to the Russians. And Pearlie is a fascinating protagonist, one whose decisions we may often deplore while completely understand her reasons for making them. There is, indeed, much that is contentious here, and this novel will be loved by reading groups who will have many happy hours debating the rights and wrongs of it all. For myself, though there were moments when I questioned whether certain people really would act in the ways they are shown to do here, I was swept along by the sensitivity, the perceptiveness and the often heart-rending depiction of what it means to love someone so much that you are prepared to act in what seem, to an outsider, to be unthinkable ways.
