I just came back from a few days in Maine, so to read a novel like
this one, which affectionately recalls the state's wild, spare
beauty and unsentimental character, is a pleasure. The "cottage" of
the title is actually a substantial house --- "a big, airy
ramshackle cross between a castle and a barn" --- that serves as
the setting for Beth Gutcheon's family saga. Its occupants are
summer people, city-dwellers for whom the yearly escape to the
coastal village of Dundee is like a breath of freedom. But it's no
guarantee of happiness: The book's emotional focus is on two
impaired relationships --- one between mother and daughter, the
other between man and wife.

The wife and daughter are the same woman. Born Annabelle Brant, she
rebels against her vain, controlling mother, Candace --- changing
her name to Sydney, moving to New York City, and studying voice
instead of taking "a lovely finishing year in Florence." But after
marrying Laurus Moss, a Danish pianist, nest-building takes over;
in time, unconsciously she turns into a clone of her mother:
conventional, moody, difficult to please. Sydney's vulnerability
makes her a character you root for, at least at first; in a
chilling REBECCA-esque sequence, Candace shows up at a debutante
ball wearing the same dress as her daughter. But there is a
curiously choppy, ungrounded quality to her story. Although it
spans many years, it never builds up emotional steam or gives me
the sense of being really lived-in. The many details --- dress,
food, conversation --- ought to help, but they clutter the
narrative rather than give it muscle.

Gutcheon does better with her parallel tale, set in Denmark among
Laurus's friends and family as Hitler occupies the country and its
people begin to resist. In fact, LEEWAY COTTAGE is somewhat more
interesting as history than as fiction. It highlights the way
Denmark protected and rescued nearly all of its 7,000 Jews, paying
tribute to quiet, decent people torn from comfortable lives and
forced into danger. The book gives us nail-biting escape attempts,
both tragically thwarted and exhilaratingly successful, and a grim
concentration-camp episode involving Laurus's sister, Nina, a
partisan. Laurus himself, meanwhile, has left a pregnant Sydney in
New York and gone to London to work for the resistance from afar
(he is too well-known a musician to operate undercover in Denmark).
Even here, though, despite a suspenseful plot, the scenes often
have the feeling of set-pieces worked up from careful research, not
born in the heart.

And as if juggling these multiple stories and continents weren't
complicated enough, Gutcheon has set herself another task in LEEWAY
COTTAGE: "I wanted to examine a certain kind of 20th century
American marriage," she said in an interview, "in which the husband
and wife, as they have grown and as life has changed them, appear
by mid-life to be so different as people that…their own
children can't understand how they chose each other in the first
place." It doesn't help, of course, that Sydney and Laurus are
separated for the four years he's in Europe, so she never
understands what the war meant to him and his family. He, on the
other hand, is unable to heal the loneliness and rage that have
crippled his wife almost from childhood. And yet they stay
together, as ill-matched couples in that generation did.

I think my grandmother and grandfather were like that: She liked
the city and he gravitated toward the countryside, so he lived on a
farm and she spent weekdays in an apartment. They bickered; yet
there was an abiding affection, too. He certainly had affairs; she
had flirtations. They remained married, though possibly ---
probably --- they would have been happier apart.

Although I believe Gutcheon is onto something true and important,
she isn't able to get deep inside the marital relationship, its
subtle comforts, frustrations, and deceptions. She clearly is
trying not to overanalyze: to "show, not tell," as fiction
workshops instruct. But the lack of intelligent introspection makes
the story seem rushed and sketchy. Before I knew it, Sydney and
Laurus were middle-aged, then elderly, with Sydney suffering from
what seems to be Alzheimer's and the couple depending more and more
on their (not very memorably characterized) adult children.

It's a lot for one book: the chronicle of war, the summer-place
story, the portrait of a marriage. There also is a cryptic
philosophical undercurrent having to do with Laurus's favorite
metaphor for death: "In heaven," one of his daughters explains,
"you get to see the movie of your life, with all the mysteries
explained. You get to see all the scenes you missed and the parts
you never understood." And after that? "You're content," Laurus
says. "You can be done with life and go on." Laurus is a lovely,
soulful character, but the volley of "surprise" twists launched at
book's end --- ostensibly to fill in the blanks of his life ---
seemed to me neither electrifying nor enlightening. It's one trick
too many.

It was no punishment to spend time with LEEWAY COTTAGE's engaging
people. I preferred the Danish chapters, because through them I
glimpsed a lesser-known side of World War II. But in the last
analysis, the book never gave me entrée to a rich,
three-dimensional alternate world, which is the whole reason I read
fiction.

The cottage itself, though, sounds dreamy. I'd go there for a
summer anytime.