Lucky Us by Amy Bloom

Published by Random House on July 29, 2014

Lucky Us is an amusing novel that is more notable for its comedy than its drama. Stray remarks (like the notion that spilling brandy makes a room smell like "a French accident") keep the tone light even when the story is tragic. The meandering plot is offbeat and the characters are eccentric. Amy Bloom plays with gender and race and ancestry and sexual identity in a carefree way, making the point that none those things matter. All of that is admirable, but Bloom never induced me to make a serious connection to any of her characters, perhaps because I was never quite convinced that the characters were real.

Eva Logan has been living with her mother and visiting with her father, Edgar Acton, twice a week. When Edgar's wife dies, Eva's mother takes Eva to her father's house where Eva discovers she has an older sister named Iris. As Eva is getting to know Iris, Eva's mother leaves, never to return. As soon as Iris graduates from high school, she takes a bus from Ohio to Hollywood, where she plans to be a star. Eva, smarter than Iris but lacking her poise and ambition, tags along. World War II looms in the background.

Iris' road to stardom hits a pothole but she manages to impress and befriend Francisco Diego, stylist to the stars. Francisco joins the sisters and their unemployed but very literate father on a road trip to Brooklyn where a new life (and the meat of the novel) begins. The story continues through and beyond the war years and introduces a number of additional characters, including Edgar's new love interest, the "pale and dark" Clara Williams, who can't decide whether to pass for white or black. A boy who was not-quite-adopted by Iris and sort-of-raised by Eva seems like he will play a prominent role before fading into the background.

One of the more interesting characters is Gus, the ex-husband of Iris' eventual lover. Although he is an American, Gus is detained during the war for the crime of having German ancestry. If America is better than Germany because it doesn't send innocent people to death camps but only takes away their freedom, Gus writes, "future generations will admire our restraint." That's an example of the wry humor that persuades me to recommend the book to like-minded fans of understated humor.

While Lucky Us is in many ways a fine novel, its abundance of characters sometimes gives it a scattered feeling. I felt little emotional attachment to any of them. Scenes that should have emotional power failed to move me. I often found it difficult to understand why the characters behave as they do. Why does Francisco join the rest of the characters on their trek to New York? Why does Gus undergo such an extreme transformation of identity? Why does Eva make so many odd choices before she finally moves her life in an intelligent (albeit unlikely) direction?

None of the bothersome aspects of Lucky Us prevented me from liking it. The story follows a winding path and makes some sharp, surprising turns. Some characters fare better than others, but that's life. Some are lucky, as the novel's title implies (not without irony), but the story makes clear that good luck is fickle and not always recognized. The characters have happy and sad moments, like all lives, but they are resilient, each finding a way to make it through darker times. The plot depends upon a series of improbabilities and too many of them are less than convincing, but I enjoyed the overall effort nonetheless.

RECOMMENDED