"Lucky Us," a novel by Amy Bloom
Reinvention is the central theme of Amy Bloom’s third novel, “Lucky Us,” set in the 1940s. Luck doesn’t play much of a role. Her characters endure so much misfortune that at times, only sheer determination keeps them going.
Growing up in Ohio, 12-yearold Eva knows her father, Edgar, as a pleasant if distant man who visits her once or twice a week. One day she learns from her mother, Hazel, that he has another family elsewhere, and that Eva has an older half sister, Iris. When Edgar’s other wife dies, Hazel suggests that she and Eva “drive down to his place and see what might be in it for us.”
Eva is immediately in awe of Iris, who is 16 and looks like a movie star. They get along right away, which is a good thing, because Eva has no idea that Hazel has dropped her off at her father’s house with no intention of coming back.
“Maybe my mother hoped I’d have a better life with Edgar,” Eva says years later, reflecting on having been abandoned. Although she tried to imagine her mother suffering shame, guilt and loss over what she had done, Eva suspects that Hazel “felt more like a woman who’d dropped off a very bulky package. An easing of soreness and relief.”
Thus begins a tale of two sisters. The girls realize they have no one to count on but each other — especially after Iris discovers that their father has stolen the money she’s saved under her mattress — and they decide to run away. Iris is a gifted, natural performer with her sights on Hollywood, where she soon lands a contract with MGM. Eva serves as her much put-upon sidekick, helping Iris along as she transformed herself into a star.
Bloom conveys well the close yet fraught bond between Eva and Iris. Both characters are appealing and complex. What’s problematic about “Lucky Us” is the structure of the narrative, which is interspersed with letters over the years, written from various characters to Eva.
These epistolary sections are awkward and stilted, no more so than when they fill in plot points or relate an experience the girls had shared: “We stood there like people at a museum, admiring, assessing the different children,” writes Iris to Eva, recounting a scene at an orphanage years earlier. This device seems rather implausible, and it weakens the flow of the story.
“Lucky Us” features a hectic plot, involving con artists, a cross-country road trip, a lesbian love affair gone wrong, an illicit adoption, broken hearts and a death or two.
Although good luck comes fairly early on for Iris and Eva, when Iris gets her MGM contract in Hollywood, it is quickly lost. The gossip columnist Hedda Hopper learns of a passionate fling that Iris has with a famous actress, Rose Sawyer (known as “America’s Sweetheart”), and the scandal brings Iris’ encounter with fame and fortune to an abrupt end. She is just 19 years old.
Soon Edgar tracks down his daughters, but this time he’s here to help them. Along with their father and a makeup artist, Francisco, the girls set off (thanks to a stolen car) on a road trip to Long Island. Francisco has kindly arranged for Iris to work as a governess for a wealthy Italian family, the Torellis, and for Edgar to work as the butler and household manager. It’s hardly glamorous work, but it will help them get by.
There Iris falls in love with Reenie, the family cook, who is stuck in a cordial but loveless marriage to Gus, a mechanic. “Love for Reenie had knocked all the sense out of me,” Iris recalls later in one of her letters to Eva, after ending up ignominiously in London. She and Reenie become a couple, and even begin raising a boy together — an abducted orphan named Danny. (Don’t ask.) Meanwhile, Edgar begins a relationship with Clara, a black nightclub singer.
Eva, weary of all the romantic turmoil around her and admitting that she feels like “the odd man out,” tries to suppress her own infatuation with Gus. “I just wanted to begin my own life,” she says, “one that didn’t include my relatives.” After her sister commits an unforgivable act of betrayal, Eva feels more alone than ever.
In terms of its prose, “Lucky Us” is no different than any other book by Amy Bloom: The writing is eloquent and understated, with subtle touches of humor. The scope is ambitious. These characters are survivors, and they make no excuses for sustaining themselves in ways that are not always entirely honest or kind.
Yet the tragic elements here are too heavy-handed, and “Lucky Us” offers a final reconciliation that seems both abrupt and false. There’s nothing wrong with tenderness, of course, but Bloom is too gifted a writer to tie up the loose ends of her narrative quite so neatly.