LAURA RIDER’S MASTERPIECE
Jane Hamilton
Grand Central Publishing
Fiction
ISBN: 9780446538954
Two of Jane Hamilton’s earlier novels --- A MAP OF THE WORLD and THE BOOK OF RUTH --- were both featured as selections of Oprah’s famous Book Club. Partly thanks to this early exposure, readers have expected Hamilton to keep producing more of the same dramatic, gut-wrenching women’s fiction that drew the attention of Oprah Winfrey in the first place.
With LAURA RIDER’S MASTERPIECE, they might be in for something completely different. Although this new novel disguises some significant issues behind a veneer of humor and lighthearted description, it does so in a way that will certainly surprise many of Hamilton’s long-time readers.
The title character, Laura, is a middle-aged woman who has recently decided she’s finished having sex with her nearly insatiable husband Charlie. The two of them have a happy enough marriage as spouses and business partners, as they’ve together built a successful nursery and garden center near their rural Wisconsin home. But after 12 years of marriage, Laura is ready to devote herself more fully to her new passion: writing. She’s branching out from the articles she’s written as part of the nursery’s e-newsletter and into what she knows she’s always been meant to write: romance novels.
Laura got the idea to write a romance novel starring an unspecified “Every Woman” when she heard a literary historian interviewed on a public radio program starring her idol, Jenna Faroli, who has recently moved with her husband to Laura and Charlie’s small town. When Laura finally meets Jenna, and when Jenna and Charlie hit it off after a chance meeting, Laura has a spark of inspiration. What if she could follow all the formulas in her “how to write a romance” guidebooks, to manufacture a textbook romance --- in real life?
The expected, often hilarious, complications ensue when Charlie (and Laura) woos Jenna via e-mail, and when worldly Jenna finds herself oddly drawn to Charlie’s exuberance, naïveté and powerful sexual charms. Will Charlie and Jenna’s love affair be the masterpiece Laura envisions? Or will the yarns she’s spinning ravel out of control?
LAURA RIDER’S MASTERPIECE is a broadly comic novel that, at first glance, seems at odds with Hamilton’s previous works. However, although this title might not be an obvious choice for Oprah’s Book Club, there’s still plenty of fodder for discussion in Laura’s story. The expectations and disappointments inherent in marriage and parenthood, the contrast between urban and rural, educated and uneducated people, the at-times ludicrous endeavor of fiction writing --- all these are explored with great aplomb, and more than a hint of satire, in Hamilton’s latest. In particular, a biting scene in which a wounded Jenna conducts a radio interview with a clueless Laura, who pontificates on everything from gardening to writing to her views on the purpose of fiction, is a small, painfully funny work of comic brilliance that nevertheless manages to convey poignant truths.
In the end, LAURA RIDER’S MASTERPIECE is exactly that --- a slim, riotous comic masterpiece that will both surprise and delight Hamilton’s many readers.
--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl
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