lucky house, Jesse Burton
According to the economics of publishing, a sequel is a calculation, not a necessity. They simply mean that your publisher left its gates because what you wrote did well enough from the start. Doesn’t — but they at least get away with the difficult question of how to carry the story beyond its natural end. Push down the same lane? blaze new trails? Or, on further thought, do you go into a heated panic?
Jesse Burton doesn’t seem like the type to panic on the page, but she still has a pretty big job of advancing a story that seemed to end properly in the 2014 blockbuster The Miniaturist. I’m holding The book tells the story of Nella, a young Dutch woman who marries into a wealthy family in late 17th-century Amsterdam, and then watches the clan fall apart under its own buried secrets. Miniturist’ is an effective genre exercise, atmospheric, well-paced, with supernatural subtle teasing that expands into something bigger on the last page. It concluded with Nella, still her virgin widow of three months of marriage, embracing a biracial baby that wasn’t her own.
On the opening pages of “The House of Fortune,” the family carries forward 18 years. Baby Thea has grown into a beautiful maiden, but her home, which was her refuge, is now “a nasty mass of souls teetering on the brink of disaster.” Her father, Otto, has just been laid off from the Dutch East India Company and her family is so tight on money that they are forced to sell off old paintings to pay a butcher. Aunt Nella is now an elderly woman with “personal loneliness” who “felt as though her life was flowing too fast, clinging to nothing, flowing too strong to do anything but spiral. It still feels watery during the day, as if nothing could be done.”
Something must be done, and rescue comes in the form of Jacob van Loos, a wealthy Amsterdam bachelor who lives in a lonely splendor with his housekeeper and harpsichord, giving young Thea a glow. increase. Thea’s dad is reluctant to take up this interest, but the practicality-obsessed Aunt Nella thinks Van Loos is the clearest way to go.
The only problem is that the theater-obsessed Shia is spending time with a hot, rogue set painter named Walter. From Thea’s point of view, their affair is “an unwritten romance being staged in the back hallways of Sjoburg, the words of which are indelible and etched in the mind.” Just in case, Burton revives the enigmatic miniaturist from an earlier novel. Or are they really good at reading the fate of rooms?
The sequel by its very nature evokes comparisons, but it’s fair to say that ‘House of Fortune’ is a less compelling production than its predecessor. Nella’s deceased husband and sister-in-law, whose Gothic ending threw such a bleak fascination in the first volume, are now sad memories, and the current docket rises to their sorrowful pitch. Nothing. You may notice that Barton keeps hitting the same keys. Nera is still a bit of a thing after all these years. Otto has no dramatic role other than worrying about her daughter. And his daughter, to put it in fictional terms, doesn’t always deserve the hardships she got pregnant with. Cornelia can become Mrs. Patmore of “Downton Abbey” with just a few costume changes.
But Burton still has a way of drawing us into her world. Grooved the lady.) And, like the previous volume, Burton excels at closing. Having tried so hard to get her niece married to an unloved suitor, Nella unexpectedly finds herself returning to the rural landscape of her girlhood. She drives them under it.
By now all plot development had seen its day, and against all odds an alternate family had re-emerged that was essentially no different from the rest. It is.”
Louis Bayard’s latest novel is Jackie & Me.
House of Fortune, Jesse Burton | | | | | | | 304 Pages | Bloomsbury | Bloomsbury $28
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