Trying to make sense among the surrealists

Courtney Maum has written three novels. Because I heard her speak at the Wesleyan Writer's Conference this summer, I looked up her second novel Touch, which was published in 2017. It's a fairly conventional story set in the near future; the self-driving car which ferries the narrator around New York City is virtually sentient. It's wonderfully well-written and in places made me laugh out loud. And while the surface is slick the underlying theme (message?) is serious: We are in danger of losing our humanity to our devices. Put down that damn cell phone and look at me! Touch me!

Maum's first novel, I'm Having So Much Fun Here Without You, was published by Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, so she started with a major publisher. G.P. Putnam's Sons, an imprint of Penguin published Touch, suggesting (to me at least) that Fun did not meet Touchstone's sales expectations. And although Touch was one of NPR's "Best Books of 2017"; a New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice; one of Glamour's "The 6 Juiciest Summer Reads”; one of the New York Post's “The 29 Best Books of the Summer”; and one Huffington Post's “24 Incredible Books You Should Read This Summer” I suspect it was not the breakout best seller Putnam had hoped it would be. Which brings us to Maum's third novel, Costalegre, published in July this year by Tin House Books, the publishing arm of the now defunct Tin House literary magazine, and hardly a giant publishing company.

Costalegre is so different from Touch in setting, mood, tone, situation, and story that one could make a case that they were written by different people who happen to share the same name. I suspect this means that some of the readers who loved Maum's first two novels are going to feel betrayed by Costalegre.

According to Wikipedia, "Costalegre is a series of different beaches, capes and bays of all sizes and extensions distributed along the Pacific Ocean on the western coastline of the Mexican state of Jalisco, in an area located between two other major and very well-known tourist centers, Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco and Manzanillo, Colima. In recent years, the Jalisco state government has promoted this zone as a tourist attraction, grouping all these beaches under the common name of 'Costalegre,' which literally translates as 'Coast of Joy,' but the area has been known as 'The Virgin Coast' of Mexico for a long time."

Costalegre is set in 1937. Leonora Calaway, a wealthy, thrice-married American art collector, has brought a group of surrealists to a Mexican resort to save them from a Nazi regime that certain artists, writers, and thinkers as "cultural degenerate." The book is a series of diary entries of various lengths by Lenora's neglected fifteen-year-old daughter Lara.

Lara is lonely, bored, and observant. There are no other children her age, and her mother forgot to engage another tutor for her. She fills her days as best she can: "I changed for lunch. Who cares. Sometimes it feels as if my beauty is this expected thing I must show up with, so I try not to, but I guess I'm vain, as well. I didn't want my mother to whine about how she would have preferred the white dress to the pink one, how my hair shouldn't be banned. Even Baldomero puts his word in: says when my hair's down, that it's striking. Legrand reaches for it, runs it through his stubby fingers. A treasure, he says. An international one."

Costalegre was inspired by the actual relationship between Peggy Guggenheim and her daughter Pegeen. I didn't know that when I read the book because I do not usually read the flap copy. Too often  it either tells me enough to spoil the story or is badly inaccurate. At the end of the book, however, in the note from the author Maum writes,"I researched maniacally for this project, until some of the experiences I read about became part of my own makeup. It is a testament to the personality of the American art collector Peggy Guggenheim and the artists she supported that so many of them felt moved to document their time creating—and promoting—art under her protection . . . ."

Because you've read this, you cannot not know that Lara Calaway is Maum's idea (notion? conception?) of Pegeen Guggenheim, and I don't know whether that makes Costalegre more or less satisfying to read. I do know that for all Maum's research, the novel does not read like a research project. It reads like the diary of a fifteen-year-old girl trying to make sense of a world drifting into a senseless war among a group of ex-pat artists and writers for whom "sense" is concept to be subverted. Without knocking the pleasure I found in reading Touch, I found Costalegre more thought-provoking and ultimately more rewarding.