A CLEARING IN THE CLOUDS

An unexpected tragedy adversely affects the lives of three women in Peppe’s debut novel.

It’s an ordinary, sunny day in 2015 on Night Orchid Drive in Naples, Florida, when sudden tragedy strikes. A dog dashes out into the street, and 60-year-old retired lawyer Jim Franza is hit by an automobile and killed as he dashes out after his pet: “The thud was ear shattering as the man bounced off the car’s fender and was thrown to the ground.” As is the way with such tragedies, its effects ripple outward, radically altering the courses of several lives. After a long and happy marriage, Franza’s widow, Ivy, immediately envisions how her future will unfold: “The dream years are over,” she says to herself, “and now the nightmare begins.” Her best friend, Marge Coppola, notes to her own husband that “It’s going to take some time for us to adjust to not having him in our lives.” This proves true not only for Ivy and Marge, but also for their neighbor Elena Pineda; she’d been chasing the man in the car, who’d stolen money from her. Readers meet these three women, all in the prime of their lives and surrounded by fellow neighborhood residents, and as the novel’s time frame moves on, the trio changes as a result of the loss they all share. Ivy, who’s 62 years old, is initially remarkably healthy for her age (“Good genes combined with Ivy’s mission to maintain the illusion of youth worked magic”), but this changes as she descends into alcohol abuse. Elena, stung by Ivy’s increasingly vicious accusations that she’s responsible for her husband’s death, becomes a near recluse, and Marge becomes increasingly frustrated that she can’t seem to reach either of them.

Over the course of the novel, Peppe lays out all of these events with careful skill and an abundance of dialogue that alternately reveals and conceals. The novel offers a portrait of a wounding tragedy in a seemingly tranquil suburban locale, and Peppe exploits the inherent tensions that result with an understated skill that’s reminiscent of the works of Jacqueline Susann and Raymond Chandler, by turns. She manages to convey Elena’s pain, Marge’s confusion, and, especially, Ivy’s escalating emotional deterioration in sharp detail: “Mrs. Franza, have you been drinking?” a physical therapist asks her at one point, and Peppe notes that the therapist’s “nose twitched, as if she could discern not only the brand of Chardonnay, but [its] year and bottler.” None of the characters in this novel are simple and straightforward; indeed, Ivy, Elena, and Marge all have a refreshing complexity that invites readers to become more invested in them as the story goes on. A major plot twist in the book’s second half feels a bit mechanical, and the text contains a distracting number of typos, which would have been avoided with a stronger copy edit. Despite these flaws, however, the author works her way to a mature and unusually satisfying conclusion.

An intensely readable fictional study of three people under stress.