OPINION:
LUCKY US
By Amy Bloom
Random House, $26, 240 pages
Amy Bloom has the gift of making her readers chuckle and even laugh while, simultaneously, causing the heart to ache. She did it in “Away” and does it again in her new novel, “Lucky Us.” The story takes place from 1939 to 1949, with World War II looming in the background. The writing, including chapter titles, is ironic and wonderfully imaginative.
“Lucky Us” is the story of two half sisters, Iris and Eva Acton, who take life into their own hands. En route, they meet odd characters such as Clara, the singer at the Nite Cap, suffering from vitiligo, whose “skin was no color — it was the color of fat on a pork chop, the frizzled edge of a bug bite after your bath”; Francisco Diego, the Hollywood makeup man, who made the actresses “beautiful when they had just been pretty … [and] made the rare beauties unforgettable”; Mrs. Vandor, “tall, fair, and regal, rather than thin (if [Eva] hadn’t been star-struck [she] would have said that she looked like a very pale camel)”; and Gus Heitmann, who was “what people called a man’s man. He fixed things, and he had a deep laugh. He looked like he could carry you out of a burning building, and he looked like the kind of man who would go back in to get your poodle.”
In “Away,” the main character’s father told his daughter that “smart was good” and “pretty was useful,” but “lucky was better than both of them put together.” In “Lucky Us,” similar advice is given by Eva’s grandmother to the girl’s father, Edgar: “It’s good to be smart, it’s better to be lucky.”
Eva Acton, the young protagonist and principal narrator of “Lucky Us,” is not pretty, but she is smart. Nor is she lucky — abandoned by her mother at age 12, serving as an assistant to her ambitious half-sister, coerced by Iris into stealing a little boy from an orphanage, left alone to care for that child and abandoned by her now-evangelist mother a second time years later.
Iris is the lucky one. She is also pretty, if not overly smart. She successfully competes in amateur performances while still in high school, earning enough money to get herself and Eva from Windsor, Ohio, to Hollywood, where she quickly gets small parts. She always lands on her feet.
However, Iris creates disaster. First, in California, when she is involved in a lesbian scandal and forced to return to the East Coast in a rollicking journey with Eva, Edgar and Francisco. Once in Brooklyn, Francisco’s lively sisters, Bea and Carnie, “took in a skinny fifteen-year-old girl with thick glasses and a stubborn look and her sister, a stuck-up former starlet (with a former starlet’s ways) and a snooty Englishman with fancy manners and nothing else.” Edgar and Iris find work as butler and governess to the Torelli family in Great Neck.
Disaster strikes again when Iris falls in love with Reenie, the Torellis’ cook, and alienates Reenie’s husband, Gus. She anonymously informs the FBI that Gus is a German spy, causing him to be sent to prison, and brings about the accidental fire that kills Reenie and burns Iris’ hands.
In the meantime, Iris coerces Eva into stealing a small boy from an orphanage for Reenie, who is desperate for a child. After Reenie’s death and Iris’ departure for the hospital and then London, Eva is left with the child and her now ailing father. Eva wails that “[w]orrying was my nature. My father had been a beaker of etiquette and big ideas, Iris was a vase of glamour, and I was the little brown jug of worry.”
The novel is also a story of reinvention. The zaniest reinvention belongs to Gus, who is “repatriated” to Germany where he takes on a German identity, marries a German woman with two children (who are killed in an Allied bombing raid during the war) and then returns to America after the war as a Jewish refugee. The subject may be grim, but the telling is delightfully ironic and amusing.
As for “the little brown jug,” she too reinvents herself, going from Iris’ personal servant to an assistant at the Diego sisters’ beauty salon to becoming a tarot card reader and fortune teller. Ultimately, she finds personal courage and is rewarded with a happy ending. Sometimes courage and determination are better than luck.
The themes of “Lucky Us” are serious, touching on survival, poverty, loneliness, the loss of love, the search for belonging and the need to be loved, but always expressed without sentimentality and with caustic wit and off-beat comments. The unique tone of this original novel is well expressed by Iris’ comment to Eva, “Someone once said: God gave us memory, so we could have roses in December. Someone did not add, So we could have blizzards in June and food poisoning when there was nothing to eat.”
Corinna Lothar is a Washington writer and critic.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.