Saturday afternoon, rain falling, Mozart’s Prague #38 playing, and beside me, A Servant’s Tale, Paula Fox’s sixth and final novel.

I was surprised after writing blogs on Fox’s two memoirs, to realize I had this novel in my library. I must have bought it from Daedalus Books after I read Borrowed Finery and The Coldest Winter, written after Fox stopped writing novels. She did, however, keep writing books for children; and A Servant’s Tale shows her keen understanding of them.
Luisa is a child when the novel begins in Malagita, on the Spanish-speaking island of San Pedro in the Caribbean. In Fox’s early and complicated life, she spent time in Cuba with her grandmother; and in part one of the novel, Fox’s evocative prose conveys tacit knowledge of this place where “The bats would begin to fly… vague, smoky shapes in the fading light.” The reader lives closely with Luisa and understands why at the end of part one, she dreams “of the day when I would return to San Pedro, now a bluish haze receding on the horizon.” Her father had made them leave because of his mother, “so rich she could settle the question of who belonged in this world and who didn’t.” The father’s story is a complicated one, woven throughout the novel, but his wife does not adjust to their new life, a common story of estrangement, not learning English, and yearning for home.
Part two takes place in a New York City barrio and frequent moves within it for father, mother, and Luisa. For this inquisitive child to become a young woman who feels herself to be “a shapeless lump of obduracy” is unsettling, as is the question she asks: What if defeat is a large portion of your heritage?

You might be asking, “Why let yourself in for 321 pages of a novel that sounds dismal and dreary?” Because the writer is Paula Fox who communicates what’s worth understanding in a prose worth reading. One reviewer wrote, “Luisa Sanchez is as indelible and eternal as many in Dickens, Balzac, or George Eliot.” Luisa is not without a memorable friend like Ellen, and she does marry and have a son, Charlie, though no happier ever after with her husband and a disheartening scenario with her son.
Yet the core of this novel is Luisa’s work as a maid, and for a decade or longer, in the same three residences. There is the decent Mr. Erwin, an antique dealer, the neurotic and animal loving Mary Lou Jester, and the unforgettable Phoebe Burgess with her “glutinous violence of soul.” You would need to read the novel to understand how something from the first chapter has resonance for Phoebe, whose innards are as rotten as the doll Luisa opens in Malagita.
I liked the Baltimore Sun reviewer who wrote, “A reader will not take anything away from this novel. It is too rich for that. What the reader will take away, and will live with, is the entire work.” I know I will not forget this novel and will read others by Paula Fox.
Next week: The popular and wildly praised James