When we talk casually about “whatever happened to so-and-so?”, we usually mean a once-famous singer or actress. The more serious version of this is Amelia Earhart, the pilot lost in the Pacific attempting an around-the-world flight. Patti Callahan Henry, whose career is in high gear with “Becoming Mrs. Lewis,” “Surviving Savannah,” “The Secret Book of Flora Lea,” and others, has found her inspiration for this new novel in a real-life disappearance.
Barbara Newhall Follett was a child prodigy, not in music like Mozart, or drawing like Picasso, but in language. She was writing at 5 years old, wrote a novel at 8, and published “The House Without Windows,” a hugely successful children’s book, at 12. In December of 1939, at 25 years old, Follet had a quarrel with her husband, walked out of their apartment in Boston and was never seen or heard from again. This story, and other similar stories, like that of Beatrix Potter, started Patti Henry thinking about why any person, but especially a super-sensitive young woman, would leave it all behind.
The protagonist of the novel is Clara, whose mother, Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham, is that savant, wrote the novel as a child, then fled her home in Bluffton, South Carolina in a small motorboat, abandoning 8-year-old Clara and the husband she loved. There had been an accident and Bronwyn feared being labelled mentally ill and institutionalized. Bronwyn left behind the sequel to her brilliant novel but written in a private language. Twenty-five years later, Clara has grown up without knowing if her mother were alive or dead. Clara, like her mother, is an artist, an in this case an illustrator of children’s books and the winner of a Caldecott Prize.
The novel is really set in motion when Bronwyn’s leather briefcase is found among the effects of an English gentleman in St. James’ Square in London. How on earth did it get there? Clara goes to London. She and her asthmatic child, Wynnie, herself a kind of genius, nearly perish in the poisonous smog of 1952. They escape to the Lake District, and the novel takes on the pace of a Robert Louis Stevenson story, transformed from time to time into a frustration dream, one roadblock after another.
There is a Englishman, Charlie, perfectly eligible. Clara is divorced; can she let another man into her life? She is searching for the dictionary, the key to her mother’s sequel. If she can read the sequel, will it change her life? Is her mother alive? If she is and they meet, can Clara forgive her desertion? This is an adventure story, but intensely emotional. Clara especially muses on the relationship between love and forgiveness and on fate, generally, concluding that, in a sense, many fates are offered us and we have to choose one. Is that fate, after all?
