Guardian Review

The house that inspired Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night is the setting for an equally tragic and compelling tale "I believe so in us," Gerald Murphy announced in a letter to his wife Sara in 1918, "it is my creed -- we can do anything ourselves." Defying the destruction of war and the constraints of their puritanical American families, they pursued a vision of creation together. He became a painter, she gave birth to three children and together they created a house, the sumptuous Villa America on the French Riviera, where a whole "lost generation" of artists could congregate to turn life into art. Among their visitors were Cole Porter, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, who would make the house famous as the setting for Tender Is the Night. Fitzgerald dedicated his novel to the Murphys and supposedly based his central characters on them, although in fact his fragile heroine owed more to his own wife, Zelda, than to the earthier figure of Sara Murphy. Now the American novelist Liza Klaussmann has followed Fitzgerald's example, making Villa America the setting for her second novel, a historical portrait of the Murphys and their friends -- the follow-up to her Tigers in Red Weather. It is certainly an enticing world, with its jazz-age parties, avant-garde bathing costumes and sexual freedom. The only character who doesn't have any affairs is Sara Murphy, though she is an object of frustrated, idealising longing for all her male guests. Klaussmann's compelling book does justice to this material, but arguably she has made up more than she needed to. In the afterword, Klaussmann suggests that the novelist's task is to explore the unexplained. She is intrigued by Gerald's sexuality, seeing his well-documented ambivalent masculinity as signifying repressed homosexuality, so she has invented a character and a storyline to delineate this. We know that one of the Murphys' parties featured caviar flown in by a local pilot from the Caspian Sea. Klaussmann forges this pilot an identity as Owen Chambers, an American who ends up having a tortuous and ultimately tragic affair with Gerald. In a novel that is profitably courageous in entering the heads of almost all its characters, Owen's point of view is represented almost as frequently as Gerald's and Sara's. This act of inventive licence enables Klaussmann to conjure a satisfying plot. Where a more rigorously accurate biographical novel such as Colm Toibin's The Master, about Henry James, is built up slowly out of indistinct encounters and moments of ambivalence, Villa America is unusual for its genre in its pace and symmetry. The price is a loss of authenticity. In Toibin's novel, James seems steadily to emerge from the shadows, like a figure in a painting that is being carefully cleaned. We are left trusting the fiction to illuminate the biography. In Klaussmann's novel, Gerald and Sara leap on to the set in full Technicolour but we cannot quite believe in the representation. Nonetheless, the creation of Owen enables Klaussmann to set up flying as a convincing thematic counterpoint to the more decadent fantasies enacted on the ground. Her characters are most contentedly themselves when they are in the air. Also, of course, they are of their time, in a book that celebrates the modern. We see Sara listening to The Rite of Spring, Gerald discovering cubism and Hemingway initiating the Murphys into the pleasures of bull-fighting. These scenes could be tediously predictable but they usually have a specificity that imbues them with life, as when Zelda Fitzgerald, hovering between brilliance and madness, performs a lengthy balletic twirl with her pink tulip skirt rising to reveal black knickers beneath. These moments of life-enhancing vitality enable Gerald and Sara to feel that their creed has been successful. But if it is life that is created by their imaginative vision, then it is life that is destroyed when the vision fades. As in Tender Is the Night, Klaussmann presents the imaginative idyll as necessarily transient. The tragedy that ensues is all the more terrible because of its disturbing formal consonance with the story they have brought into being. "Something can always happen," Sara tells Gerald towards the end of the novel, "especially when you think you're safe." She is proved horribly right when they are left grieving for a broken world that can no longer be enriched by fantasy. For Klaussmann, as for the Murphys themselves, the question now becomes whether their memories of happiness can remain a force for redemption. "The golden bowl is broken indeed, but it was golden," Fitzgerald wrote to Gerald and Sara as they tried to make sense of their loss. If nothing else, the moments of painfully recollected radiance provide confirmation that something precious has been at stake in the tragedy. * Lara Feigel is the author of The Love-charm of Bombs: Restless Lives in the Second World War (Bloomsbury). To order Villa America for [pound]9.99 (RRP [pound]12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pound]10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of [pound]1.99. - Lara Feigel.