A Jane Austen of Our Own
On her lively website, novelist Cathleen Schine lists a handful of favorite books. Among them: Colette’s Cheri, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Jane Austen’s Emma and “everything that Barbara Pym ever wrote.” The last selections are the most revealing; the late British writer came closest to the tone, wit and social acuity of Austen—until now.
Everything about Schine’s eighth novel carries with it a resonance of other times, most of them reminiscent of bygone Britain. The title, for example, is a wry echo of “The Three Wise Men of Gotham,” the legend of a village in olde England where citizens mix shrewdness and folly. A piece of doggerel wagged that tale:
Three wise men of Gotham
Went to sea in a bowl,
If the bowl had been stronger
My story would have been longer.
So it proves with The Three Weissmanns of Westport. Their misadventures cover fewer than three hundred pages, but this short, deceptively slight novel provides a year’s worth of entertainment and enlightenment.
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Stefan Kanfer is the author of more than a dozen books. His new book, Tough Without a Gun, about Humphrey Bogart and the male image in American cinema, will be published this fall.
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