The Maze at Windermere
A Novel
-
-
3.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
Named one of the best books of 2018 by The Washington Post, The Seattle Times, and The Advocate
“Staggeringly brilliant . . . You’ll start The Maze of Windermere with bewilderment, but you’ll close it in awe.” —The Washington Post
“Pitch perfect.” —New York Times Book Review
When a drunken party guest challenges him to a late-night tennis match, Sandy Allison finds himself unexpectedly entangled in the monied world of Newport, Rhode Island. A former touring pro a little down on his luck, Sandy has nothing to stake against the vintage motorcycle his opponent wagers. But then Alice DuPont—the young heiress to a Newport mansion called Windermere—offers up her diamond necklace.
With this reckless wager begins a dazzling narrative odyssey that braids together four centuries of aspiration and adversity in this renowned seaside society capital. A witty and urbane bachelor of the Gilded Age embarks on a high-risk scheme to marry into a fortune; a young Henry James, soon to make his mark on the world, turns himself to his craft with harrowing social consequences; an aristocratic British officer during the American Revolution carries on a courtship that leads to murder; and, in Newport’s earliest days, a tragically orphaned Quaker girl imagines a way forward for herself and the slave girl she has inherited.
Gregory Blake Smith weaves these intersecting worlds into a rich, brilliant tapestry. A deftly layered novel of love, ambition, and duplicity, The Maze at Windermere charts a voyage across the ages into the maze of the human heart.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his emotionally expansive new novel, Smith (The Divine Comedy of John Venner) spins out five narratives set in Newport, R.I., from its beginnings as a British colony to its later incarnation as the playground of the very rich. In 2011, tennis pro Sandy Alison falls in love with Alice du Pont, the crippled heiress of the Windermere estate, despite the machinations of Alice's jealous sister-in-law and scheming best friend. In 1896, Franklin Drexel, a closeted gay man known as a lapdog of society ladies, tries to court the well-off Ellen Newcombe over the objections of her father. In 1863, a callow Henry James yes, that Henry James having decided to forsake his law studies to become a writer, comes under the spell of a young woman, Alice Taylor, forcing him to choose between art and life. In 1778, Major Ballard, a British officer charged with the defense of Newport during the Revolutionary War, becomes obsessed with a young Portuguese Jewish woman, Judith Da Silva, leading him to commit a shocking breach of military decorum. And in 1692, Prudence Selwyn, a Quaker woman whose father was lost at sea, strives mightily to make good matches for herself and her slave, Ashes. Taken individually, each story is dramatic and captivating, but as the author makes ever-increasing connections among the stories and shuffles them all into one unbroken narrative, the novel becomes a moving meditation on love, race, class, and self-fulfillment in America across the centuries.
