The American Lover by Rose Tremain, book review: A playful blurring of boundaries

In this work, the “act of words” – as fiction, as memory, as apologia – becomes a deed of darkness

Author Rose Tremain poses with her trophy after winning the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction for her novel The Road House held in The Ballroom of the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre in 2008 (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

For an author who has spent so much time in and around the creative-writing scene, Rose Tremain takes a bracingly sceptical view of the literary vocation.

In the title piece of this, her fifth collection of short stories, a wild child of the Sixties writes a Bonjour Tristesse-style confessional bestseller inspired by her “transgressive first love” with a deadbeat photographer.

For all its renown, the book fails to bring Beth much happy-ever-after. Yet “the act of words” both tempts and consoles. Even Shirley, the drifting daughter of a retired bookseller couple in “A View of Lake Superior in the Fall”, tries to write a novel after her bid for glory as a Nashville country singer fails.

When literature does manage the life-enhancing trick, it happens by technological accident. Forlorn Fran, stuck in an affair with a married professor in “BlackBerry Winter”, only lures him away from his wife when, by chance, a mobile phone message gets scrambled. “Suddenly, fraudulently”, her prose takes on “the density and seeming economy of a poem”. With cool, forensic wit, her own prose both lush and lean, Tremain measures the gap between desire and experience; between the fables her figures pursue and the facts that ruin their plots.

Diverse dreams bloom and fade in these stories. In “Juliette Greco’s Little Black Dress”, a moonstruck Surrey girl in a twinset becomes an artist’s muse in Paris. In “Captive”, a solitary dog-lover finds that, over a single ice-bound night during one of the harsh winters Tremain paints shiveringly well, human malice has wrecked his paradise of a short-stay kennel in Norfolk. Two outstanding tales return to the vanity or cruelty of authorship. In different keys, comic and sinister, both spin fantasias around the lives of revered writers.

“The Jester of Astapovo” turns the tables on the dying Leo Tolstoy, who on his much-mythologised last journey died in a station-master’s cottage. Tremain imagines the great man’s final days from this bemused official’s point of view. Miserably married, more a Chekhovian than a Tolstoyan character, Ivan Ozolin frets that “my life’s at a standstill”. Just then, Tolstoy’s melodramatic deathbed carnival puffs into his station.

If that story shows us the iconic writer as terminal show-off, then “The Housekeeper” presents literary creation as a species of vampiric predation, with treachery on top. In 1936, the bisexual Daphne du Maurier has a passionate affair with Mrs Danowski: a Jewish migrant from Warsaw who now manages the Cornish mansion of crotchety Lord de Whithers. Fearful of scandal, the novelist covers up their beach-hut trysts, even though she thinks the writer has a duty to “prise open those shuttered and closed places”.

Soon the lovers part. To her horror, “Danni” later sees herself commemorated not with fondness, but as the scheming, demonic Mrs Danvers in Rebecca. Here, as elsewhere in The American Lover, the “act of words” – as fiction, as memory, as apologia – becomes a deed of darkness. Yet it takes a style as graceful and playful as Tremain’s to fathom all its depths.