boston adventure

Boston Adventure by Jean Stafford (Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1944)

A curious book — ambitious and cumbersome and somewhat impenetrable.  Its density and dullness make it difficult to believe that it was a bestseller when it was published in 1944, although there is something very appealing about the main character and her story.

Sonie (Sonia) Marburgh lives just outside of Boston, in Chichester, with her immigrant parents, who met on their voyage to the United States.  They are tragically mismatched: her father is an educated and cultured German who works desultorily as a shoemaker, and her mother is a beautiful Russian woman who is initially temperamental and later insane.  Her parents constantly fight, and Sonie grows up coping with their childish behavior by becoming precociously adult, competent, and wise.  Her mother works as a chambermaid at the nearby Hotel Barstow, where wealthy Bostonian widows and spinsters spend their summers by the sea.  Sonie often fills in for her lackadaisical mother, and one of the hotel’s most genteel guests, Miss Lucy Pride, takes an interest in the hardworking, observant, intelligent child.

After Sonie’s father deserts the family and her mother’s insanity necessitates her being institutionalized, Miss Pride takes the 18-year-old Sonie back to Boston with her, and sends her to secretarial school, so that she can serve as Miss Pride’s secretary as she writes her memoirs.  And so a new life begins for Sonie, and the second half of the book chronicles her (mis)adventures in and around Boston society.  She falls in love with a doctor who also seems to love her, but is out of her (social) league (and also engaged to Miss Pride’s bad-girl niece, the ridiculously named Hopestill) and is taken under the wing of “the Countess,” a displaced wealthy European woman with discreet Sapphic tendencies.

Sonie is a difficult character and the book’s complex and murky narrative does not afford easy pleasure or satisfaction for the common reader.  Yet Stafford is an ambitious and accomplished writer: the worlds of Chichester and Boston, so close together but so far apart, are both vividly and sensuously evoked, and the book is full of wonderful portraits of secondary characters (Sonie’s mother, Miss Pride, the Countess).   But this book doesn’t have the clean brilliant gleam of The Mountain Lion; it’s messy and overstuffed and a bit dull.  Nevertheless, I admired it and enjoyed reading it.