Lady Jean
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Jean Barrie is an enormously successful, award-winning singer who spends her time in self-imposed retreat in her huge, dark St. John's Wood home. Here she wanders around the empty rooms drinking gin and vodka. Upstairs in the attic lives her mysterious lodger, The Fallen Nun. Beyond the house, Jean's narrow world is inhabited by her octogenarian Aunt Dizzy, who smokes hand-rolled cigars, wears blood-red hot pants, and gave up aerobics at 79; Jean's best friend Freida—the self-styled Devils Dyke; and Christopher—a 17-year-old with a Bible-bashing mother and a passion for his Uncle Fergus—who tends the garden and cleans the house. But Jean's solitude is about to be invaded: the house rapidly becomes a haven for eccentric souls drawn to her by chance or design, and sudden death and revelations of past horrors dart in from unexpected directions. A satisfying gem of offbeat humor with dark tragedy, Lady Jean is Virtue at his best, as he skillfully weaves his narrative into a unique tapestry. A romantic novel from one of New Zealand's most revered writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New Zealand-born Virtue (Among the Animals; Sandspit Crossing, etc.) isn't well-known in the U.S., but his excellent novels have been published to considerable acclaim in Britain since 1987. "Lady Jean" Barrie is a legendary British blues singer who retired for mysterious reasons at the height of her fame and now lives, semireclusively, in a big manse on Acacia Road in London. Publishers have hired a young ghostwriter, Anthony Hibbert, to try to coax her life story onto tape and into a book. Unbeknownst to Jean, her elusive tenant, Catherine Truman (nicknamed the Fallen Nun by Jean's best friend, an outrageous lesbian named Frieda), is also listening in, her intentions less than honorable. In Jean's 58th year, her house suddenly fills up. First, she takes in her Aunt Dizzy, a wealthy, endearing oddball with a checkered past. The management of the exclusive hotel to which Aunt Dizzy had retired have gotten fed up with her eccentricities, which include "hanging her rinsed undies out the windows of her rooms." Then Christopher Harcourt, Jean's teenaged handyman, needs a room, having been abruptly thrown out of his home by his evangelical mother when she discovered him in the arms of her brother, Fergus. Next, having found her ex-husband's father, Ivan Fitzpatrick, puttering around in a seedy apartment in Bath grieving his dead wife, Jean invites him to stay in the house in Catherine Truman's now vacated room. Frieda, temporarily hiding from an overbearing girlfriend, moves in, too followed by Mr. Harcourt, Christopher's father. Like Henry Green in Loving, Virtue immerses us in the folkways of an enormous household, letting the humor emerge from the gradual accumulation of juxtaposed eccentricities. The result is a delightful conglomeration of high spirits, Wildean wit and rattled optimism.
