Fiction

Jessica Francis Kane, Fonseca (Penguin), 272 pp. Hardback, $28.00.

In 1952, Penelope Fitzgerald left her husband at home in London, dropped her two-year-old daughter, Tina, off at her in-laws’, and took her six-year-old son, Valpy, on what biographer Hermione Lee describes as “one of the most improbable trips of her life,” one made “all the more startling because she was three months pregnant.” Fitzgerald, known for her directness regarding everything but her personal vulnerabilities, was characteristically reticent about the journey, leaving her friends and family to guess why she went and what happened when she did.

Many years later, Fitzgerald would finally fill in some details with “Following the Plot,” a 1980 essay for the London Review of Books. She describes traveling to the Mexican village of Fonseca with her son to visit “two old ladies called Delaney who lived comfortably, in spite of recent economic reforms, on the proceeds of the family silver mine.” The women’s relations are all dead and they have intimated in a letter that, due to a distant family connection, they might take a liking to Valpy and leave him their money. When Fitzgerald arrives, she finds two women who have been “slowly drinking themselves to death” while visitors vie for their wealth. As time goes by, more “pretenders” move into the house, even someone who claims to be a Delaney. One pretender begins drinking “level with the old ladies” in the hopes of ingratiating himself and dies in a fall down the stairs. “My son and I were blamed for these and other disasters,” Fitzgerald writes, “and we left on the long-distance bus without a legacy, but knowing what it was to be hated.” Her playful relationship with both words and the truth is evident here: Fonseca, which means “dry well” in Spanish, is a fictional stand-in for the real city of Saltillo.

When Fitzgerald went to Mexico, she and her husband, Desmond, had just entered a state of financial precarity in which they would remain for the rest of their marriage. Desmond had returned from World War II with PTSD and a drinking problem, and they were in danger of losing the magazine they were co-editing as well as their home in London. Jessica Francis Kane’s third novel, Fonseca, sets out to do what Fitzgerald claimed she couldn’t—dramatize this tipping point in her life, when not only a financial legacy but her professional legacy and perhaps even her marriage were at stake.

The novel begins with Penelope and Valpy’s arrival in Fonseca and ends with their departure. As in Fitzgerald’s essay, Penelope’s original goal is to charm two Mexican-born Irishwomen named Delaney into leaving Valpy their fortune. The two old ladies live in a half-dark, high-ceilinged house, arranging their days around what they plan to drink and visits from “Pretenders” who hope to get a piece of their silver-mine wealth. A distant Delaney appears and throws his hat into the ring for the money and, later, for Penelope’s affection, and the manager of the mine gets extremely drunk and cracks his skull open on the marble staircase. Meanwhile, Penelope struggles with the tension between her professional ambitions, her responsibilities as a wife, and her responsibilities as a mother.

There are many rich, white families in Kane’s Fonseca, some who, like the Delaneys, emigrated from Ireland long ago, and others who arrived more recently. All of them are exploiting the village for their own gain, whether through mining or through more modern schemes like insurance or commercial property development. In “Our Lives Are Only Lent to Us,” a short story published just after Fitzgerald’s death in 2000, she describes the village’s white and Mexican cultures as “complementary, but in the way that death is to life,” adding that “the two cannot exist together, but just as surely they cannot exist without each other.” Through mutual exploitation, the cultures have come to rely on—while simultaneously destroying—each other. Still, in a conflict between the two, the Mexican villagers will almost always lose.

Kane successfully takes on these themes in her novel—in the dynamics between the two cultures, between the Delaneys and the Pretenders, between family members, and between married people. Penelope meets the long-married Hoppers—Edward Hopper, the American painter, and his wife, Jo, who is also a painter, if a too-often overlooked one. While Edward maintains near-tyrannical control over Jo’s work and life, she repeats this mantra: “I made up my mind.” She is living with a decision made long ago, one that has created a dynamic of destructive symbiosis, and as Desmond’s drinking worsens and Penelope’s pregnancy progresses, she has a similar decision to make: “If I could make it so that he would never be unhappy again, I would,” she says. “But I can’t, so staying is the only choice I have.”

“Fonseca” sets out to do what Penelope Fitzgerald claimed she couldn’t—dramatize this tipping point in her life, when not only a financial legacy but her professional legacy and perhaps even her marriage were at stake.

Letters from Valpy and Tina periodically interrupt the narrative, corroborating or contextualizing events that have already occurred or presaging those still to come. In the first letter, Tina expresses gratitude for “telling us about Hopper,” so that when Hopper appears two chapters later, the reader already knows this story line did not happen outside of the novel. Any fictionalization of actual people and events prompts readers to wonder what in it is “real,” and these letters provide some answers for those not familiar with the details of Fitzgerald’s life while also emphasizing and complicating the question itself. As Tina says, “the dividing line between fiction and fact is quite blurred in her biographies and novels,” so all you can do is “push on.” This interlude in Fitzgerald’s life is especially mysterious because, in Tina’s words, “she came from a family where a cloak of silence was thrown over any suffering,” and she was “an expert at avoiding any direct answers.” Though Fitzgerald did write obliquely about the trip, she revealed little of her inner turmoil, leaving only indirect answers for her readers.

Kane had many sources to draw from in writing this novel—Lee’s biography, the letters from Valpy and Tina, Fitzgerald’s published letters and writing. While this wealth of information mostly serves the book, the facts can sometimes obscure the narrative, particularly in the first few chapters. As Kane establishes Penelope in time, place, and situation, she tends to list dates, years, and events, rather than presenting them as someone would remember them, through images and feelings. Once this place setting is out of the way, however, the reader is allowed to develop more intimacy with Penelope’s emotions and point of view. The dream-like, uncanny descriptions of the setting create a particularly unsettling feeling that deepens the tensions resulting from Penelope and Valpy’s outsider status, and though the novel is haunted by ghosts and memories, it is leavened with refreshing frankness and humor.

Fitzgerald may not have obtained a financial legacy, but she did establish a literary one—when she died, she had published nine novels, one of which won the Booker Prize. However, the first of these novels wasn’t published until she was sixty-one, Desmond had died, and her children were adults. Blue Flower, her final novel, begins with an epigraph she attributes to Novalis but actually wrote herself: “Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.” She and Kane (whose first novel, The Report, is about the Bethnal-Green tube disaster) share a desire to make up for historical shortcomings by fictionalizing parts of the past that have been forgotten or overlooked.

In Fonseca, as Penelope and Valpy take the long, cheap way home, she decides “if she ever wrote a novel about a wife leaving, it would begin with the cost of the trip.” Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring does, in fact, open with what a man’s wife spends to leave him, but the costs of such a choice are much more than financial. Kane’s deeply imagined, delicate handling of this moment to which, as Fitzgerald put it, her “mind reverts naturally when it is left on its own” and the complicated answer to its central question—did she go to get the money or to leave her husband?—beautifully explores themes of gender, power, ambition, and what we ultimately owe one another and ourselves, whatever the cost may be.