Invitation to a Bonfire by Adrienne Celt (Raven Books) $32.99
A novel fuelled by rage, a novelist driven by anger at a man’s betrayal – these are hardly new. But to write fuelled by rage at the newly discovered transgressions of a man the author has never met is surely novel.
Such is the driving force for the second novel by US writer Adrienne Celt, whose debut, The Daughters, won prestigious awards.
Invitation to a Bonfire is about a married writer, his wife and his lover, a relationship too challenging and complex by far to be summarised as a love triangle.
Celt’s tale of White Russian e´ migre´ author Leo ‘‘Lev’’ Orlov, his controlling wife Vera, ‘‘grandest and most terrible Vera’’, and his young lover Zoya, an orphaned Russian peasant, was inspired by the discovery that her literary hero Vladimir Nabokov, best known for his controversial
Lolita, had been unfaithful to his wife Vera. Nabokov’s editor, critic, muse and even security guard (she carried a gun for his protection), Vera orchestrated his life – as the fictional Vera does Leo’s – and he depended on and cherished her. ‘‘I’ve adored Nabokov, reverently, for my entire adult life, and yet this book came from a place of sudden rage at discovering that he’d had an affair (well, probably many affairs, but one especially significant one) – and quickly thereafter a desire to get even,’’ Celt has said.
Lev meets Zoya while teaching at the Donne School, an elite New Jersey girls’ school where he had accepted a teaching job, at Vera’s insistence, to provide stability. Dysfunctional Zoya was educated there – and relentlessly bullied – after arriving in the US as a refugee and stayed, working in the greenhouse.
There are elements of a thriller: Invitation to a Bonfire is constructed as a collection of papers, a Donne School alumni project funded posthumously by Vera Orlov, a supporter of the school since returning to France after her husband’s murder in
1931. This choice morsel is revealed in the introductory
‘‘A Note on the Text’’ which also reveals Zoya ‘‘died under hotly debated circumstances’’ that same year. So, in a sense, everything is leading to the revelation of what happened to them.
But progress is slow and convoluted.
The novel interweaves Zoya’s diary, letters from Lev, mostly to Vera while on a dangerous, illegal mission to Russia to retrieve a missing manuscript, and other documents such as newspaper clippings and police reports – fictional, of course. Celt plays with the chronology, at times confusingly so, and even emulates the arcane literary style of Nabokov himself.
This makes for challenging reading requiring considerable patience. It does not help that Zoya, whose diaries and point of view dominate, is not a particularly empathetic character.
As the denouement nears, the novel becomes livelier and tense, the reader driven on by the uncertainty of the pair’s fate.
The reward is an unexpected and not fully explained twist, but a satisfying ending nonetheless. But the journey to this destination is arduous. – Sue Green
‘‘I’ve adored Nabokov, reverently, for my entire adult life, and yet this book came from a place of sudden rage at discovering that he’d had an affair.’’