The House at Belle Fontaine

Starred review from March 4, 2013
The 10 stories in the latest collection from National Book Award–winner Tuck (for her novel The News from Paraguay) are compact, intense, and finely crafted. Tuck opens private windows into the lives of women in foreign lands, often on their own after unsuccessful relationships and often set in the past. Creating a decoupage of images and brief exchanges, Tuck pieces together her characters’ stories indirectly, with an economy of words, as in “Pérou,” when an au pair is raped by the family’s chauffeur: “More things tear and break. Poor Jeanne.” This style sometimes gives the writing an opaque quality, as in “My Flame,” when a middle-aged woman thinks back on her discovery of her husband’s betrayal after his death. But the method packs a punch. From blood on the ice around seals encountered by an aging couple on a trip to the Antarctic “looking like paint splashed on a canvas” in “Ice,” to the fatal car crash of another woman’s ex-husband, witnessed by her young tenant and his girlfriend, in “Lucky,” violence is an accepted part of life to the characters who inhabit these stories. These women, unsatisfied with their lives, go searching for answers to their longing, and though they do not find them, the reader understands that the act of striking out away from the known is somehow, itself, enough. Agent: Georges Borchardt, Georges Borchardt Literary Agency.

April 1, 2013

Winner of the National Book Award for her novel The News from Paraguay, Tuck proves she is equally gifted in the short form with stories reaching far into the physical and emotional senses. Her characters travel from Paris to Peru and from Bangkok to Tuscany, often within the same story. One memorable narrative ventures even further by following a long-married couple on a cruise to Antarctica that evokes the chilly distance between them that has widened through the years. Other stories span the decades, going as far back (through myth and memory) to the reign of Genghis Khan, who may or may not be the ancestor of a fellow named Chingis, born in the Caucasus in 1925, who teaches horse riding to teenage girls in a New England town circa 1970. VERDICT Tuck's agility and grace as a storyteller are quietly evident throughout her impressive collection. This is a writer at the top of her form.--Sue Russell, Bryn Mawr, PA

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