Untold Story
Monica Ali
Scribner
What if Princess Di hadn’t been killed in that tunnel in Paris but had instead faked her death some months later to escape a life that had become unbearable? It’s an attractive premise that gives rise to some interesting issues. Can she sustain friendships or romance, for instance, while guarding her secret so closely? There’s page-turning tension here, too: Will a paparazzo (disbelief must be seriously suspended to accept the coincidence by which he finds her) ruin everything? But Ali is better than this. Perhaps in an effort to highlight how prosaic Diana and her new American life truly are, she makes her people so flat that they are merely lists of predictable characteristics (and short lists, at that) rather than characters. The exception is the princess’s private secretary, whose diary entries showcase the subtlety and strict attention to point of view that are among Ali’s great talents. Unfortunately, they constitute only a small section of the novel. The pages of this book turn sleekly enough to while away some hours, but Untold Story is so much slighter than Ali’s Booker-shortlisted Brick Lane or In the Kitchen.
News From the World
Paula Fox
Norton
Slim but complete, this collection of Fox’s short works—a few essays, a smattering of memoirs, and a clutch of short stories—might function as a sampler of this once critically lauded, then neglected, and now resurrected grande dame of American literature. Although she’s probably best known for her Newbery-beribboned children’s books—among the first to treat dark subjects such as alcoholism and slavery—her voice is strikingly mature. A writer’s job, she implies in the preface to this collection, is to take a “living interest in all living creatures,” and these pieces attest to her brilliant success at that task. Their subjects are as wide-ranging and vivid as the experiences of a very long life—abandoned children, New Orleans in the 1940s, the intersections of Taos and D. H. Lawrence, neighbors and murders in New York, censorship and the deadening of written English, to name only some. What unites all is a penetrating intelligence, a sympathetic eye, and a dedication to the truth about human nature, whether discouraging or inspiring. Fox deploys the words of other writers—Lawrence, whom she reveres; Orwell; Milton—with well-earned authority and the ease of quoting old friends, and she leaves the reader with a bolstering sense of having been enriched by a view of the world at once rigorously thoughtful and deeply felt.