LILI

A first novel examines the big questions of war, love, and faith through the story of Lili, passionate and smart but debilitatingly self-absorbed.

The writing is powerful, and the admittedly intelligent Lili, who is also difficult and often callous, certainly dominates the narrative—so much so that other characters and even major events seem hardly more than props for her own role: In comparison with the turmoil of Lili’s emotion life, both world wars and the Holocaust are almost like off-stage tremors. Opening when Lili is a small child and a devout believer who intends to be a nun, the story follows her until she’s an old woman nearing death. When her older brother André, whom she always treated coldly, commits suicide rather than die in battle, and her cousin Claude-François, whom she loves, dies fighting in WWI, Lili, now a philosophy teacher in Paris, finally loses her faith. She marries Pierre, a war veteran who’s been in an asylum and is strangely reticent about his past. The two are ardent lovers until their son Claude is born; after that, Pierre, inexplicably, with one exception, never touches her again. Claude is retarded, though less realistically than symbolically so (no doctors are consulted, no diagnosis given), his condition serving as an example of pure innocence, the one thing Lili can love. She stays married but also falls deeply in love with Paule, a Jewish poet. Their affair is intense, yet Paule, a deeply spiritual woman, soon renounces Lili, converts to Christianity, and, after surviving Auschwitz, becomes a nun. Meanwhile, Lili contends with other losses as she struggles with religious doubts and her love for Paule.

Enormously ambitious, though Lili, vital as she is, repels more than engages, making of her life an extended exercise in fine writing rather than the deeply affecting story of a strong woman.