Lifescapes

The Pink Suit: The Elegant Practice of Fashionable Hoodwinking

This is my latest book review, of a novel I enjoyed and will remember for a very long time. A writer's book, actually, although it is about a seamstress in the American fashion industry. You'll recognize the suit, no doubt.

 

 

"What a strange power there is in clothing."--Isaac Bashevis Singer

The Pink Suit, by Nicole Mary Kelby, is the story of Kate, a talented Irish seamstress who works in Chez Ninon, a New York fashion house that has been commissioned to copy a Chanel suit, in raspberry pink, for the First Lady--the pink suit that Jackie Kennedy was wearing when her husband was assassinated.

But the heart of the story isn't Jackie's suit: it's Kate's obsession with making a perfect copy of a Chanel suit (a knockoff, in fashion terms) and what that tells us about a young woman whose entire life is focused on creating perfectly beautiful garments for Perfectly Beautiful People. In fact, when the story begins, Kate has no other life. Even her relationship with her sister is defined by her gifts of copied clothing, and she very nearly rejects Patrick, a butcher (what a telling occupation!) for Mr. Charles, who wants her to work for him in his new fashion house.

The strength of this beautifully constructed, highly stylized novel is the skillful way Kelby assembles its many significant elements. Obsession with beauty and perfection. Copying (with and without permission) and fakery as an essential part of the fashion industry. High-fashion, artistically-styled clothing as a concealment for unpleasant realities. Clothing as a symbol of role and social status: the Wife, the First Lady, Her Elegance (Jackie's name never once appears). Details of fine fabric and exquisite stitchery, like the details of a painting or a sculpture. Ireland and Inwood (the Irish neighborhood in which Irish Kate lives) and the Irish Kennedy connection. America as the home of knockoff artists. And more, much, much more.

But through a series of events that are historically true and terrifyingly real (yes, the Inwood explosion really happened), Kate learns that the world of fashionable fakery is not a world she can live her life in. Real people need real work, real hopes, real love. While it is true that "a woman in a beautiful suit can go anywhere," the only place Kate is able to wear her personal and unauthorized copy of The Wife's pink suit is a knockoff amusement park, where she is soon discovered as a fake First Lady.

If there's anything unconvincing about The Pink Suit, it is the ending, where the pink suit is revealed as a symbol of strength. That may be, but it happens too quickly, almost clumsily, so that the revelation feels not-quite-earned. This is a minor flaw, though. It doesn't compromise the original design and beautiful execution of this daringly ambitious novel. Read it, enjoy it, but most of all think about it.

And then go look in your closet.

Reading note. The silk was as iridescent as pearls; it didn’t even seem to be real. Kate took a match to a thread just to make sure. True silk burns slowly. And this had. Then she had checked the bolt for its voice, the silk voice. Real silk sings in a very particular manner when the pieces are rubbed together. And it sang. It sang with the softness of wings. The silk was real— and daunting.--The Pink Suit, Nicole Kelby

 

A WILDER ROSE Goes Audio!

The upcoming (March 17) Lake Union reprint edition of A Wilder Rose now has a beautiful new cover! I loved the first cover (done by Sherry Wachter for my Persevero Press edition) and am delighted that this one is so strongly evocative of Rose's journey. I'll see the page proofs later this week, and will have a better idea of what the book is going to look like.

I'm also delighted to let you know that there will be an audio edition of the book, from Brilliance Audio (known for its outstanding productions). The audiobook is already listed on Lake Union's page, so if you want to preorder or add to your wish list, please do.

It's been interesting and fun to be a part of the Lake Union team on this project. They are professional, speedy (their production schedule moves right along), and they stay in touch at every step of the way. I've worked with quite a few publishing teams in the past three decades, and this one is up there at the top.

Book report. I'm now into the second half of the current work-in-progress, Hick and Eleanor. I'm still updating my Goodreads Roosevelt research shelf, which has proved a helpful way of organizing the background material. I'll stay with Hick for the rest of this year, hoping to get it substantially finished so that Kerry (the project's agent) can send it around in early 2015. Next up: A Malted Murder, the 2016 China Bayles mystery, due at the end of March. It'll be very good to get back to Pecan Springs again. After that: finish Hick and publish it via Persevero Press if we don't find a publisher. Then get back to the memoir my brother and I are writing. Lots of good stuff to look back on in 2014 and look ahead to in 2015.

Question for you. I'd like to get a notebook computer that I can use in the evenings, while I'm reading away from my desk, to make notes on current/future writing projects. Do you have a recommendation (pro or con)? If so, please post a comment. 

Garden report. I'm back home in Texas (after a lovely, productive month in Colorado and New Mexico), and already beginning to think about the new gardening season. The only thing growing right now is garlic (just coming up) and the perennial onions. I'm waiting on my order of seed potatoes (Reddale and Yukon Gold)--I'll pre-sprout them and plan to get them in the ground after Christmas. Yes, I know that will sound very early to you Northerners. But I've been planting earlier every year, with better results every year. I do have to cover, to keep the tops from being killed by a hard February freeze. And of course you never know. But gardeners are gamblers at heart, always taking chances with the weather.

Reading note. I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.--Wendell Berry

Time for Time Out

I'm taking a month's working vacation at Coyote Ridge, our log cabin in New Mexico, on the eastern slope of the southern Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The peaks are often blood-red in the morning sunrise: hence the name, the blood of Christ, given by the pious Spanish when they traveled through the area in the 1600s.

Our cabin is on a long mountain slope overlooking the broad valley of the little Rio Manuelitas. In the fall, the valley grass is bronze and coppery and the aspens are bright gold. In the winter, after the snows begin, it will be an unbroken sweep of white, rimmed by snow-covered mountains. In the rainy season--June and July--it’s a sea of yellow-spangled green. It's always beautiful.

This valley has a long and vivid history. It was part of the Apache and Ute migratory range, then claimed by Spain when it conquered Mexico in the 1520s. It was a Spanish possession until Mexico declared its independence in 1821, then became part of the United States with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in 1848. For another sixty years, it was part of Texas--until New Mexico became a state in 1912. Three small villages were settled here: Rociada, at the head of our valley; tiny Upper Rociada, a few miles higher in the mountains; and even tinier Gascon, another mile farther, still higher.

In the 1870s, Jean Pendaries and wife Maria left their native Gascony and came here, making part of the long trek by wagon along the Santa Fe Trail. Pendaries helped to build the Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas, on the north side of Old Town Plaza. Then he and Maria moved to this valley and established a ranch in the river valley. It was isolated then, a full day's trek by horse/wagon from Las Vegas, the nearest source of supply. I like to look out over the valley and try to imagine life as it was then, with all the challenges of the seasons and the uncertainties and threats of the frontier. But mostly I admire the changing landscape as the sun moves through its daily arc over the valley and our mountain slope.

Book report. I took a week away from writing for the Women Writing the West conference in Golden CO, and for lovely visits with Colorado friends and family. A Wilder Rose was a finalist in the WWW Historical Fiction competition, and I enjoyed giving a talk on the book. If you'd like to read it, go here.

Now I'm back at the writing desk. As you probably know, the finished manuscript is not the end of a writer's work on a book. The next step is checking the copy-edited manuscript. Used to be: this pencil/paper process would take a week, and there would still be errors. Now, everybody uses MS Track Changes, and about 95% of the errors get cleared up. In the last few weeks, I've had two copy-edited manuscripts (CEMs) to work on: Bittersweet (China Bayles' April 2015 mystery) and the Lake Union reprint edition of A Wilder Rose. I love this part of the process, which generally takes about 3 working days.

Now that the CEMs are out of the way, I've back at work on Hick and Eleanor (a novel about the friendship of Lorena Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt). For me, the research is one of the great pleasures of writing biographical/historical fiction. I've been researching Hick for several years now, and have compiled an interesting shelf of research materials. If you're interested, you can get a look at it on my Goodreads Roosevelt research shelf, which is a work-in-progress. I'm always finding more good books about the subject.

Some of you have asked (thanks!) about the audio edition of A Wilder Rose. I haven't heard when (or even if) that will be released, but I'll keep asking and let you know. We do have a cover for the reprint edition and I love it. As soon as Lake Union gives me the go-ahead, I'll post it for you. It's quite splendid.

Other Stuff. We don't have TV here in the mountains, so in the evening I read and work on a couple of needlepoint projects I've brought with me. If I get tired of that, there's the floorcloth I started a couple of years ago--it would be nice to finish that, at last.

I'm also watching David Attenborough's The Life of Birds, a quite remarkable series--and I have all the seasons of Foyle's War, and a shelf of classic movies. Tonight, I'm watching Amadeus, which is at the top of my list of all-time favorites. I don't miss television in the slightest.

Reading note. It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it.--Roger Ebert [I'd say the same thing about a good book, wouldn't you?]