The Day

‘The Foundling’ turns a serious subject into a perfect beach read

- By MARION WINIK

Recently I heard an author known for her beach reads discuss what makes a perfect beach read. Her contention was that it has nothing to do with whether the book has a beach in it. Plot, not setting, is the key element. It should have a narrative so compelling that reading it seems to take no effort at all, and everything around you — your job, your problems, your plans, even the beach you may or may not be sitting on — magically disappears. The act of reading itself is the vacation.

Despite the no-beach requiremen­t, beach reads often announce themselves with a woman wearing sunglasses on the cover. This is not the case with “The Foundling,” which sports the moody image of bare branches and a hulking Victorian building in shades of deep blue. It also has an introducti­on by the author explaining the historical threads that inspired her novel: the early

20th-century incarcerat­ion of “feeblemind­ed” women and the disturbing­ly widespread support for the eugenics movement. Sounds serious, right?

Well, it is, but it's also insanely fun, with fascinatin­g characters, jaw-dropping plot twists and a hair-raising caper finale that recalls the nail-biting climaxes of “Ocean's Eleven” and “The Shawshank Redemption.”

The narrator of “The Foundling” is a smart, sardonic 17-year-old girl named Mary Engle. After her mother's early death, Mary was raised for several years in a Catholic orphanage. When we meet her, she is living in Scranton, Pa., with relatives. The teacher of the secretaria­l class she is taking recommends her for a job with Dr. Agnes Vogel, who is passing through town on a speaking tour. Dr. Vogel is an elegant, attractive, suffers-nofools type woman; she hires Mary on the spot, and they leave the next morning in her limo to the institutio­n she runs in a rural part of the state.

Impression­able Mary has never met anyone like Dr. Vogel, and she easily absorbs the woman's sense of mission: The inmates at Nettleton State Village for Feeblemind­ed Women of Childbeari­ng Age are being offered not just a healthy, invigorati­ng lifestyle on a lovely farm, but protection from the rapacious men who would so easily take advantage of them, given their intellectu­al disabiliti­es. At first, Mary worries she will die of boredom out in the sticks — her one potential friend, Gladys, is a bit dull. “Because I shared my bedroom and office with Gladys, and because she never shut up, I knew (her boyfriend) Hamish `Hammy' Van Sutter more intimately than I'd known any man, and I'd never laid eyes on him,” she cracks.

Fortunatel­y, she soon meets the lively campus nurse, Bertie, who includes her in outings to speakeasie­s and dance halls in the nearby college town, and introduces her to heartthrob Jake Enright, a local journalist.

Then one day among the smelly, dirty “dairy girls” who do the farm labor, she recognizes someone she knew at the orphanage. It's Lillian Faust.

What could she possibly be doing there, Mary wonders. Feeble-minded? No way! Lillian was one of the smartest and most talented girls in the orphanage. Because she was a foundling, a baby dropped off with no identifica­tion, the Irish nuns believed she would be blessed with special good luck. Clearly, that luck has run out.

The story unfolds from there, with plenty of reverses and reveals that keep the momentum high. As Mary struggles to make sense of what is happening at Nettleton State Village, where she is moving up into the circle of power around her idol Dr. Vogel, she runs into prejudices and deep-rooted fears of her own. She has a lot to learn. For example, there is a great scene at a dance hall where she finds out her new boyfriend, Jake, doesn't go to church. If he went anywhere, he explains, it would be a synagogue.

“`So, do you mean ... you're a ...'

“`Jew. Yup.' Jake said, grinning broadly.

“We'd been leaning across the table to talk over the loud music, but now I drew back a little so that I could look at him anew. `I would never have known. I mean, you don't really look like a Jew, do you?'”

This causes a little bump in the road of the relationsh­ip, as you might imagine, but it's just one example of the clever ways the author develops the character of Mary and our relationsh­ip to her. Similarly, when Mary finds out the real story on her old frenemy Lillian Faust, her ingrained racism and sexism are challenged. When Mary finally blossoms into a real heroine, it's a wellearned and richly satisfying fictional moment.

Yes, “The Foundling” is a harrowing story of our sexist, racist, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic past, with certain striking and depressing resemblanc­es to the present day. It's also a beach read. Bring your own sunglasses.

 ?? ?? The Foundling
By Ann Leary
Scribner / Marysue Rucci Books. 336 pp. $27.99
The Foundling By Ann Leary Scribner / Marysue Rucci Books. 336 pp. $27.99

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