Word: foxã
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...quarter of the way through Borrowed Finery, novelist Paula Fox??s new memoir, the author’s father makes a fitting observation. “People who’ve been parceled out and knocked around,” he says, “are always returning to the past, retracing their steps.” At 78, with six novels and 21 children’s works behind her, Fox is finally lending credence to the statement, offering an elegant, if fragmentary, portrait of her first 20 years...
...Spanish grandmother and wildly unstable uncles bookended 16 months on an extravagant and expansive sugarcane plantation in Cuba, where her grandmother worked as a companion to a wealthy relative, and where, Fox says, “no one said my name for hours at a time.” Fox??s parents repeatedly sent for her through the years, from Martha’s Vineyard, Florida and ultimately California, providing her with a few glamorous days only to pass her off on yet another friend or relative...
Such a chronological description of Fox??s early years, however, belies the content and structure of her memoir. Borrowed Finery is not a work of autobiography, and those looking for a comprehensive account of Fox??s upbringing will be disappointed. Rather than a coherent and patterned narrative, Borrowed Finery is a smattering of Fox??s memories and experiences, a collection of impressions—of places, of people, of kindnesses and betrayals. Geographical locations replace dates as the signalers of time, with each section of the book bearing simply the name of the place...
...Fox??s writing is sparse and measured, careful not to reveal too much, yet somehow seeming to reveal all. She acknowledges the limitations of her own memory, even while writing so confidently from it. “The room is always sunny in memory, though it must have rained and snowed some days,” she says of the Canadian finishing school where she was sent for a year. Her characteristic eye for detail is in full effect, and her snapshot portraits of people are often brilliantly perceptive. Of the actress Stella Adler, with whom Fox spent...
Other characters loom large throughout the book, not in their own right, but as anchors in Fox??s sea of impermanence, however unfit for the job they may have been. Fox??s mother is portrayed as unrelentingly cruel and unstable, a woman who hurled a glass of water at her young daughter’s back and begrudged her grown daughter a previous gift of a picture of her grandfather. “How could it be that Elsie was enough of an organic being to have carried me in her belly for a term...