First Nights - Hardcover

Richly evocative double portrait of two extraordinary yet finally elusive women, silent-screen star Anna Asta and her Caribbean maid Ivy, who meet only after Anna's retirement from films but spend most of their alternating narratives recounting their earlier lives. The first half is dominated by Ivy's recollections of her magical, turbulent childhood on Green Island, but her life--even after the affair that takes her away from the Indies to Nostrand Avenue and a doomed marriage--continues to be shaped by Green Island ``story tailor'' Miss Blue, who listens to her dreams and troubles and then suggests new, more shapely or fulfilling endings. Meanwhile, Anna's life follows Greta Garbo's. Discovered in a Swedish shop by director Max Lilly (Mauritz Stiller), she's brought to Hollywood, where the shy, lumpish farm-girl takes The Studio (MGM) and town by storm in a string of Noble Sinner hits beginning with The Roses (The Torrent). Fired from her second American film, The Siren (The Temptress), Max returns to Sweden to die, while Anna, wondering what's become of a life that now seems compounded entirely of movies, lies, memories, and studio publicity, plunges into an affair with self-destructive costar Charlie Harrow (John Gilbert), a series of abortions, and a parade of fallen heroines until declining European markets force her to try a comedy, Double Trouble (Two-Faced Woman), which makes her realize, devastatingly, that both halves of her personality represented in the film have become equally unreal. A healing epilogue back on Green Island is more fervent than convincing. As usual with Schaeffer (Buffalo Afternoon, 1989, etc.), the weight of lived experience becomes overwhelming, at times oppressive, and the models for that experience--Garbo's career, Andersen's fairy tale ``The Snow Queen''--are designedly inadequate. Schaeffer's exquisite writing burrows too deeply inside her two heroines to allow them, or us, the comfort of wholeness. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Fully developed, multilayered characterizations and authentic, assiduously researched settings distinguish Schaeffer's beautifully crafted novels ( Anya ; The Madness of a Seduced Woman ). Both virtues enhance her latest work, which features two heroines whose life stories are woven through the narrative in counterpoint. Swedish film star Anna Asta is based on Greta Garbo; Ivy Cook is her companion and maid; the women are polar opposites in cultural backgrounds, dispositions and ways of looking at existence, yet they are bound by love. Alternating their distinct voices, Schaeffer adroitly recapitulates the events of their lives. We read of Asta/Garbo's discovery in Sweden by brilliant director Max Lilly, who becomes her mentor; her turbulent Hollywood career and romance with a famous actor, and her increasing reclusiveness. Anna's recital is tart, bitter, often despairing, and her tendency to define her life in terms of movie scenarios sometimes bogs down the lengthy narrative. Ivy's story, meanwhile, involves the loss of her mother and a difficult childhood in her native Caribbean island; her tale has the charm of folklore as she speaks of ghosts and island superstitions. Though Anna's life is more dramatic, and her conflicted personality more subtle, it is Ivy who captures the reader's heart. Two cameo appearances--portraits of Hollywood mogul Sol Pinsky (read Goldwyn) and his kindhearted, rotund wife--add comic relief and dimension. The novel succeeds, in the end, as a moving exploration of the "thin thread of meaning"--embroidered by love--that connects lives.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.