Ben Lerner Reviews Rosmarie Waldrop's Poet's Novel for the New Yorker

Ben Lerner reviews The Hanky of Pippin’s Daughter (Dorothy Project, 2019) a poet's novel by Rosmarie Waldrop, for the New Yorker. "This is a novel, like many great novels, about infidelity," writes Lerner. More:

...The aspiring singer Frederika—the perpetually frustrated mother of Lucy Seifert, the book’s narrator—sleeps with Franz Huber, a charming music teacher eager to accompany her arias on the piano, within two months of her wedding to Josef Seifert, in 1926. It is also a novel about paternity (is Franz or Joseph the father of Lucy’s elder twin sisters, Andrea and Doria?) and the repetition and repercussions of transgression across generations: Andrea will enter a nunnery, marrying the lord; Doria becomes “a busy mother of five”; while Lucy—definitely Josef’s child—will emigrate to Providence, Rhode Island, where she is writing this book. Lucy is also conducting an affair of her own, living with the gentle, abstracted Bob while sleeping with the jolly and itinerant Laff. The novel in part consists of Lucy’s letters to her sister (or possibly half sister) Andrea, who has long since left the convent. Lucy is confronting her family’s past, but she’s also reckoning with historical catastrophe, especially because Franz was a Jew, a fact of debatable importance when he gave horns to Joseph in the Bayreuth of the nineteen-twenties—“He’s Jewish,” Josef says of Franz before the affair, “but he is alright”—and a fact of mortal importance by the time of Lucy’s birth, in Kitzingen, when Hitler was making Germany great again.

A novel of desire and scandal and the interplay of personal and political circumstance, “The Hanky of Pippin’s Daughter” is also about the problem of narration, the gaps in knowledge that a smooth story conceals, the oversimplifications involved in tidy, geometrical plots...

Read on at the New Yorker.