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Joanna Rakoff
NYT Syndicate
Though its title comes from the French ” Camus's well-worn"In the depths of winter, I finally learned that there lay within me an invincible summer" ” Alice Adams's irresistible debut novel falls squarely into that most English of genres: the comedy of manners. Bringing to mind exemplars of the form ” from Persuasion to The Emperor's Children ” though ultimately falling short of their heights, Invincible Summer concerns four friends who meet in 1994 at the University of Bristol and follows them over two decades as they drift in and out of one another's lives.
We first encounter Eva, Benedict, Sylvie and Lucien lolling about on a grassy hill, drinking wine and discussing, in typical undergrad style, the meaning of life. Eva, artless and unfashionable, was raised by a gender studies instructor who"eschewed 'Dad' as a title, imbued as it was with patriarchal associations of authority." Benedict, who pines for Eva, hails from the actual patriarchy: He's the son of a lord. At their redbrick university, he hides his posh background, not just from"Comrade" Eva, but also from the glamorous siblings Sylvie and Lucien, the privations of whose upbringing have made them as angry and reckless as Eva and Benedict are placid and cautious. Lucien ” who's not actually enrolled at the university and on whom Eva harbors an unhealthy crush ” is the sort of drug dealer who refers to himself as an"entrepreneur." Sylvie, a painter, possesses"a prodigious .u8200?.u8200?. talent,""striking good looks" and"a certain shine, a vividness" that lead the other three to find it"impossible to imagine her being anything other than a great success."
After graduation, Eva shocks her friends and father by taking a job as a derivatives trader at a large investment bank and reinventing herself as a sleek sophisticate in a"tailored suit waving down waiters and asking for mineral water by brand." Benedict stays in Bristol, completes a PhD in physics, marries and moves to Geneva to work at CERN, all the while dreaming of Eva. Lucien makes a fortune peddling drugs in London's thriving rave scene ” though he now calls himself a"promoter" ” while Sylvie flounders."In these days of pickled sharks and soiled bedclothes," Sylvie's realist paintings hold no interest for London gallerists. Soon, she and Eva ” who's brokering huge deals and bringing home huge bonuses ” can barely suffer through a drink together.
This, of course, barely touches on the twists of Adams's densely plotted tale. A crackerjack storyteller who deeply inhabits her characters ” deploying pitch-perfect dialogue to poignant and hilarious effect ” Adams uses the conventions of the form to examine larger ideas about class and commerce, art and science, friendship and family at the time of the most recent fin de si'e8cle.
Ultimately, though, this is a novel that strives to define a generation ” the one known, ominously, as X ” and it falters when Adams overreaches, struggling to establish her characters as representatives of their era, shaped by the historical events of their day. As when Benedict and Eva, in the fall of 2001, gaze out into the night sky,"thinking about this new world in which planes flew into towers" and that"there were men who so hated their world that they were willing to die a spectacular death to make their point." Or when Eva gives heavy-handed voice to Adams's overarching question."What was the spirit of our age?" she asks. Though the definition at which Eva eventually arrives ”"We cared, but not enough" ” rings true, this charming novel derives its power less from its author's reductive attempts at answers and more from her restless questioning.
