At first all seems well, thanks in no small part to the warmhearted Sylvie, Julia’s bookishly romantic sister, who envisions herself as the impassioned heroine of a 19th-century novel and finds a model for later maturity in Walt Whitman’s “different attempts at excellence and beauty as he aged and loved and reconsidered everything.”
In a marvelous early scene, Julia and her sisters argue over their parallels to the fictional March girls in “Little Women.” As the eldest and most practical, Julia seems the logical Meg, though she and Sylvie both claim themselves as “the feisty Jo, and they were both right.” This is a clear sign of trouble, as is the scene’s hint of tragedy to come: “Whenever any of the sisters was sick or forlorn, she’d declare herself Beth. One of us will be the first to die, they would take turns telling one another, and all four girls shuddered at the thought.”
The italicized truism does its work, darkening the sisters’ youthful exuberance with misfortunes on the novel’s horizons both near and distant: an attempted suicide, alienation and betrayal, divorce, disease, early death. These are recurring themes in Napolitano’s work, which resists the easy satisfactions of the sentimental and never settles for simple answers to emotional predicaments faced by her characters.
Such quandaries help frame the book’s elegant structure. Chapters move along in the braided perspectives of William, Julia and Sylvie in an unvarying pattern that breaks only at the novel’s midpoint, as William and Julia’s marriage falls apart. Julia twice leaves us for seven chapters at a time, during her self-imposed exile from the Chicago Padavanos for a new life and successful career in New York with Alice, the daughter she shares with William.
Though only a handful of chapters come from Alice’s point of view, the first lands like an emotional grenade, beginning with a brutal if necessary fable about her origins and estrangement from her father — a lie Julia will repeat throughout her childhood. Upon hearing it for the first time, the little girl, only 5, reacts with the kind of understated stolidity she has inherited from William: “Alice put down her spoon and said, ‘Oh.’”
