Where They're Too Beautiful to Care

The Ivory Mischief by Arthur Meeker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'd never heard of this novel when I picked it up in a library bookstore. I just liked the looks of the hardcover--that was what sold me.

It's a great novel. It took me some time to read, but I loved it, and I am struggling to explain to myself what exactly held my attention so long. The genre isn't exactly my thing--straightforward historical novel, leaning more literary than popular, though it apparently was very successful in its day, that being the early 1940s.

Set mostly in France in the late 1600s, it is the story of two beautiful, rich sisters, Magdelon and Cateau. Cateau is the clever one, Magdelon the sweet one; Cateau has more beauty and more lovers, and is more adept in society; Magdelon makes a better marriage and has children and grandchildren, a family life her sister never achieves. But despite their differences, they remain close and live lives more similar than different. Both spend decades in the public eye, wearing the most expensive clothes, taking lovers almost without discretion. Both behave throughout the years of their youth and beauty as if nothing will ever change and the world will always be at their feet. But the novel follows them through their fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties, and we see them desperate and afraid for their souls when everything has been taken from them except each other (and Cateau's money, which they both live on).

Much of the novel is about their earlier years and their brilliant careers as fashion leaders, invited to dances and parties and dinners almost every day of the week. The men in their lives come and go, off to war each year, sometimes not to return. Cateau especially seems to have everything anyone could want, but even rich beauties are not immune to grief and loss. Nor is she or her sister immune to befriending the wrong people, or being too flagrant in their disregard for decorum, and both spend years in hiding, if not repentance, until their fortunes brighten once more.

And all of this is true. The novel is fiction, filled with scenes and events and dialogue that is invented, but the people (I don't say characters) were real, and lived these very lives, rising and falling in public esteem, in wealth, in fortune, as found in letters and other documents from the times. In a real sense, this is their joint biography, if somewhat embroidered. And so the ending, which leads us to their passing months apart in their eighties, is more than usually poignant. It's like we knew them as very young women, right around twenty, with all of their lives ahead of them, and fast-forwarded (well, through about 700 pages) to gray hair, failing memory, and anonymity. I found it very touching.

Maybe every tenth or twentieth book I concern myself with prose. It's not one of my cares, usually. But when it's striking, as it is in this novel, I become aware of how much I approve of it. A dull story with brilliant prose means no more to me than a lovingly-painted image of garbage (I don't know; that might be cool, after all...) but an engaging, lively, stimulating novel with amazing prose is fantastic. Meeker uses a lot of ellipses and em-dashes and parentheses, a style I actually vibe with, and I find it adds to rather than detracts from comprehension. Maybe it's just me. Here's a taste literally at random, from page 340:

At thirty-eight--an age at which most of her contemporaries were grandmothers--the Comtesse d'Olonne [Cateau] was still a beautiful young woman. Her outline was as slender and graceful as ever; her eyes were as blue, her curls quite as yellow--or very nearly: Cateau had lately fancied that they were losing something of their new-minted glitter and had experimented, in spite of La Martin's vigorous protests, with various blond powders, none of which, fortunately, had done any lasting damage. Her complexion, too, had retained its pure ivory pallor [the ivory of the title, btw], so that even from as close a point of vantage as her own dressing-table mirror Madame d'Olonne appeared to be the same white-and-gold idol that had been the admiration of Paris for two decades.

Is it more a novel of manners? Maybe so. It reads like many 19th Century novels, for sure. It's beautifully done, whatever category we want to put it in, and I would love it if more people knew about it. And it makes me wonder how many such novels are waiting in bookstores and basements that cry out to be read, like this one did.

Highly recommended.

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