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The Maze at Windermere: A Novel - Hardcover

Smith, Gregory Blake

 
9780735221925: The Maze at Windermere: A Novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0735221928 ISBN 13: 9780735221925
Verlag: Viking, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Named one of the best books of 2018 by The Washington Post, The Seattle Times, and The Advocate

“Staggeringly brilliant . . . You’ll start The Maze of Windermere with bewilderment, but you’ll close it in awe.” —The Washington Post

“Pitch perfect.” —New York Times Book Review

When a drunken party guest challenges him to a late-night tennis match, Sandy Allison finds himself unexpectedly entangled in the monied world of Newport, Rhode Island. A former touring pro a little down on his luck, Sandy has nothing to stake against the vintage motorcycle his opponent wagers. But then Alice DuPont—the young heiress to a Newport mansion called Windermere—offers up her diamond necklace.
 
With this reckless wager begins a dazzling narrative odyssey that braids together four centuries of aspiration and adversity in this renowned seaside society capital. A witty and urbane bachelor of the Gilded Age embarks on a high-risk scheme to marry into a fortune; a young Henry James, soon to make his mark on the world, turns himself to his craft with harrowing social consequences; an aristocratic British officer during the American Revolution carries on a courtship that leads to murder; and, in Newport’s earliest days, a tragically orphaned Quaker girl imagines a way forward for herself and the slave girl she has inherited.
 
Gregory Blake Smith weaves these intersecting worlds into a rich, brilliant tapestry. A deftly layered novel of love, ambition, and duplicity, The Maze at Windermere charts a voyage across the ages into the maze of the human heart.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gregory Blake Smith is the award-winning author of three previous novels, including The Divine Comedy of John Venner, a New York Times Notable Book. His short story collection, The Law of Miracles, won the Juniper Prize and the Minnesota Book Award. He has received a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and the George Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bush Foundation, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. Smith is currently the Lloyd P. Johnson-Norwest Professor of English and the Liberal Arts at Carleton College.

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He was trying to explain to her how he'd gotten to be where he was. The condition he was in. His state of mind, the state of his bank account. His heart, his soul, whatever. They were in the Orangery at Windermere, Aisha newly naked beside him, the salt air coming in through the window, and this was the sort of moment when he somehow felt compelled to tell all.

What had gotten under his skin, he found himself saying, was the way the guy kept bringing up the Tennis Life article. "Lacks the killer instinct to break into the top fifty," he kept saying, drunk, obnoxious, smiling that smile that men smile to show they're just kidding even when they're not just kidding. Who was this bozo anyway?

At which Aisha leaned over and kissed him like "poor you," her dreadlocks spilling across her lovely shoulders.

This had been last August, he told her, a real low point in his life. His knee was shot and he'd just retired . . . or was on the verge of retiring . . . or wasn't sure whether he was retiring or not-but his right knee was messed up, his life was messed up, his ranking had dropped below two hundred for the first time in eight years, and the only options were to drift back down into the Challengers circuit, or pack it in and try to land a college coaching job, or failing that a gig at some luxury resort instructing Fortune 500 types on how to hit a slice backhand.

"Sandy Alison," he imitated the guy, the bozo, the guy with the motorcycle last August. "Out of Duke, a great shotmaker but lacks the killer instinct to break into the top fifty."

Thing was, that past August was the second year running he hadn't qualified for the US Open. It had been the beginning of the end. And even if he had qualified, he wouldn't have been able to play—his knee again—so he'd come to Newport to the Hall of Fame Champions Cup as a hitting partner for Todd Martin. (A tagalong, a hanger-on: was that his future?) His money was beginning to run out and he knew he had to make a decision, and soon, but in Newport a little of the old life beckoned, and after the semifinals he'd gone to the Champions Ball with the idea of catching on with some of the local wealth (this was Newport, he didn't have to remind Aisha), but the evening had degenerated from the waltz to the bossa nova to the Watusi until the surviving couple dozen partiers—the Champions had left a long time ago—had gone off barhopping down along Thames Street and ended up at this . . . this . . . he couldn't even remember where they'd ended up but the bozo, the guy with the antique motorcycle, just wouldn't let up.

What he didn't tell her was how that phrase—"lacks the killer instinct"—had eaten at him for nearly a decade. It came from a year-end issue of Tennis Life, a Future-of-American-Tennis sort of thing about the new crop of guys making the transition to the pro tour. This was back in 2002 and he had just made it, as a freshman no less, to the NCAA Semifinals, and some of the things they had to say were cool. They called him "the Southern Gentleman," said he had an artistry on the court, was well liked in the players' lounge. But that last summing up had seemed to doom him to the hinterland of Almost But Not Quite, which, if he was completely honest, was exactly where he'd spent the decade of his pro career. He had in fact cracked the top fifty (Sandy Alison, 2006, #47 in the world, you can look it up), had made it once to the third round of Wimbledon, twice to the second round of the US Open, had a dozen Challengers titles to his name, the courts back at his Charleston high school named in his honor, but somehow none of that was good enough. He was, somehow, in spite of all that, a loser. It didn't matter that in 2006 he could beat all but forty-six freaking players in the whole freaking world. It didn't matter that whatever town he drove into he could beat whoever their best tennis player was, could beat him left-handed for Pete's sake (and he could too; he used to mess around on the court playing left-handed when he should have been doing drills)—none of that mattered. He was—even while people wanted to know him, wanted to hang out with him because he was a professional athlete—somehow he was still a loser. He hadn't been a winner—he lacked the killer instinct—and therefore he had to be a loser. That was how it felt anyway, although he didn't ever tell that to anyone. Certainly not to the woman lying beside him.

So yeah, the motorcycle. Maybe all it was, was just that the guy was a bad drunk. Maybe he was just a bad drunk and it just happened to have been Sandy who had gotten in his way. But the guy started calling shit at him across the room the Casino party had settled into, the women in their cocktail dresses and the men in their dinner jackets with their ties undone. It got bad enough that everyone started getting embarrassed for Sandy. The women wouldn't look at him, or they'd shush the bozo—there was this one British woman there who kept saying, "Oh, what rot!"—and the men had that look men get when one of them is being singled out. The challenge, the appraisal, the are-you-just-gonna-sit-there-and-take-it? look.

Earlier in the evening the motorcycle guy had been friendly enough. Sandy had stood with him on the sidewalk in front of one of the bars down on lower Thames Street and they'd talked tennis. The guy knew who Sandy was, knew his career, had himself played for Williams twenty years earlier, and Sandy had complimented him on his motorcycle parked alongside the curb—an antique red Indian Chief with those deeply valanced fenders and the whole Steve McQueen look—complimented him not because he cared about motorcycles but just because he was a nice guy, right? Hadn't Tennis Life said so?

Anyway, inside the bar it got to a point where Sandy had to answer the guy, had to say something, anything, so he called back over the tables and chairs that separated them: "Dude, I could beat you left-handed!"

"Dude?" the guy had said. "Dude?" Like it was the sorriest-ass thing anyone could say. And he had this way of spreading his hands about himself, gesturing toward the others as if to include them on his side, as if it was the lot of them who'd paid a thousand dollars a plate against the tennis pro who lacked the killer instinct. There was no way Sandy could beat him left-handed, the guy said, and when Sandy challenged him again, the guy had said okay, he was on. One set. Sandy left-handed. Him right-handed. He'd put up the Indian.

"No Indian," Sandy had said. "We just play."

The bozo went "pfft," like what kind of loser was this? Of course they had to play for something. That's how it was done. "The Indian," he said again. "You were drooling over it an hour ago, pretty boy. It's yours if you can beat me."

He had tried to keep his own nonchalance, but the faces on either side of him began to swim at the edge of his vision: the low-cut necklines, the pearls and spaghetti straps, the men with expressions of wanting to look away.

"Lacks the killer instinct," the guy said and gazed around the room with an easy gesture like voilà.

"Okay," Sandy had said. He...

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Verlag
Viking
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0735221928
ISBN 13 
9780735221925
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
352
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