FONSECA

A British novelist takes a vexing trip to Mexico, seeking money and inspiration.

Kane’s third novel is based on the true story of a trip taken in 1952 by Penelope Fitzgerald, author of modern classics like The Bookshop (1978) and The Blue Flower (1997), to Saltillo, a desert town in northern Mexico. Two elderly sisters-in-law, the Delaneys, onetime owners of a profitable silver mine, contact Fitzgerald to invite her to visit, noting a distant relation and dangling the possibility of an inheritance. Fitzgerald, pregnant and in dire financial and marital straits—a literary journal she founded with her husband, Desmond, is struggling, and he’s sinking into alcoholism—heads out with her 6-year-old son, Valpy. The women’s manor is impressive, but the Delaneys have their own drinking issues, and there are other visitors competing for the women’s finances—one hoping to build a bird museum, a Catholic priest lamenting various church needs, and so on. Fitzgerald often depicted women in desperate straits through eerily poised prose, and Kane nicely evokes that style here, as Penelope struggles to detect the Delaneys’ intentions, parent Valpy through the confusion, and manage a growing attraction to one of the manor’s visitors. Playing a cameo role is the painter Edward Hopper, who visited Saltillo multiple times with his wife, Jo; though there’s no evidence he and Fitzgerald ever met, Kane nicely deploys Hopper as an inspiration for Penelope’s writing career. The trip was futile in the short run—in a London Review of Books essay, Fitzgerald called Saltillo “Fonesca,” Latin for “dry well”—but, in Kane’s hands, profoundly influential. The novel also includes actual letters from Fitzgerald’s children, bolstering the sense that their mother’s trip to Mexico was thick with mysteries. Kane’s novel elegantly fills in the gaps.

A finely turned novel that evokes its subject’s gift for slyly biting domestic tales.