Book Review: 'Oriental Wife'

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ROBERT SIEGEL, host: Still on the topic of new books, we have a review now of a novel that may be painful to read, but our critic says it's worth it. "The Oriental Wife," by English novelist Evelyn Toynton uses Hitler's Germany as a backdrop and New York City as the setting for a story about love and survival. Here is reviewer, Alan Cheuse.

ALAN CHEUSE: How much reality can you take? That's a question I think you have to ask yourself before opening to the first pages of Evelyn Toynton's fine new book. It dramatizes the problematic lives of several German immigrants who put Nazi Germany behind them for the freedoms and struggles of life in New York City.

Red-haired Louisa, the main female character, becomes the oriental wife of the title. The phrase comes from her days when, as a student at a girls' school in Switzerland, she hears a Japanese classmate describing a wife as a servile state, always meek, always docile, the student said. My eyes cast down, never making my own destiny.

After a series of love affairs, the last of which brings her to America, Louisa marries her childhood friend, Rolf, who's become a New York businessman. She suffers a difficult pregnancy and an horrific medical diagnosis, but Louisa eventually separates from her philandering husband, living a kind of freedom. Her daughter, Emma, grows up to find her own destiny intermingled with that of a contemporary refugee from South Asia.

Sentence by sentence, Toynton makes a mordant, if not morbid book, but when she describes love and lovemaking, the emotional high points of Louisa's and Emma's life seem to leap from the page. As when Emma goes to bed with Kim, her Cambodian refugee lover, and by the end, there was not a single bone in her body, only blind heat and his breath moving through her.

In case you're worried this novel might veer more toward soap opera than superior fiction, consider that last line. No soap opera I know ever made you feel that. No, no, no.

SIEGEL: The novel is "The Oriental Wife" by Evelyn Toynton. Our reviewer, Alan Cheuse, teaches writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

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