A fictional variant on the life of Frye

The House of Dreams by Kate Lord Brown, © 2016 St. Martin’s Press; ISBN 978-1-250-08453-8; 304 pages plus author’s note and acknowledgments; $25.99

By Donald H. Harrison

Donald H. Harrison
Donald H. Harrison

House of DreamsSAN DIEGO – This historical novel paints a picture of international rescue worker Varian Frye as he smuggles artists and poets out of France in 1940 and 1941 before the Nazis can arrest them for having Jewish blood or producing works they considered “degenerate.”

Actual artists like Max Ernst and Marc Chagall and writer/ poet Andre Breton populate this book along with the real-life Frye.  In large part, however, the novel dwells on the love affair of the fictional characters Gabriel Lambert and Annie Bouchard. The love affair’s details are divulged to readers 60 years later by the fictional Lambert, responding to entreaties from Sophie Cass, a young woman with a doctorate in art history who seeks to make her mark as a writer for the New York Times.

In employing the device of jumping back and forth between time periods, the author is able to prolong our suspense about why Lambert’s pre-war and post-war art works are so different, and also about the fate of the model Vita, who was Lambert’s first love.

Much of the story takes place just outside Marseille, France, at a villa named Air-Bel, where Frye sometimes relaxes from his work in town at the American Relief Center. At other times, it is at the country mansion where he arranges for forged documents and passage out of the country for the creative souls who have brought so much light to the world.

Frye leads a double life, on the one hand helping to obtain legal visas for people seeking to emigrate to America, and on the other hand smuggling to freedom those whom the Vichy government and their Nazi overlords would prefer to see rot in concentration camps.  The ever-present fear of their true work being discovered occasionally induces paranoia at the Villa Air-Bel, but at other times the independent spirits of the artists and writers who sojourn there cannot be repressed.  The joyous receptions and parties at the large home quite naturally arouse the suspicion and jealousy of other town folks.

The fictional model Vita was the great aunt of reporter Sophie Cass, and this has an important impact on her journalistic objectivity.

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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World.  He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com .  Comments intended for publication in the space below must be accompanied by the letter writer’s first and last name and by his/ her city and state of residence (city and country for those outside the United States.)