EMPTY THEATRE by Jac Jemc

“Sensual, intricate, and filled with the verve of its own opulent language.”

empty theatre

PINEAPPLE STREET

Jackson, Jenny Pamela Dorman/Viking (320 pp.) $28.00 | March 7, 2023 978-0-59-349069-3

Money makes the world go round, particularly the world of an elite Brooklyn family. “On good days, Sasha could acknowledge how incredibly lucky she was to live in her house. It was a four-story Brooklyn limestone, a massive, formal palace that could have held ten of the one-bedroom apartments Sasha had lived in before. But on bad days....” As Sasha finally admits in a glovesoff monologue following a gender reveal party gone awry, on bad days, it’s “a janky Grey Gardens full of old toothbrushes and moldy baskets.” A wealthier cousin of Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s The Nest, Knopf editor Jackson’s fiction debut is a comedy of manners charting the fates of the Stockton siblings and their spouses, circling around the house where they grew up in Brooklyn Heights, now inhabited by Cord and his wife, Sasha, who is referred to as the Gold Digger by Cord’s sisters, Darley and Georgiana. That’s unfair, though: Sasha signed a prenup. Meanwhile, Darley and her husband, Malcolm, a Korean American aviation-industry analyst who did not sign a prenup, are living off their own money as Darley fights the tedium of the entitled mommy lifestyle. Georgiana, much younger than her siblings, still single, is considered the do-gooder of the family because she works for a nonprofit, where she becomes involved in a passionate and very ill-advised relationship. From the opening scene, where Sasha’s mother-in-law shows up to dinner with an entire replacement menu and a revised “tablescape,” Jackson has a deft hand with all the passive-aggressive interactions that are so common in family life, perhaps particularly in this socio-economic stratum. She knows her party themes, her tennis clubs, her silent auctions, and her WASP family dynamics. Rich-people jokes, cultural acuity, and entertaining banter keep this novel moving at a sprightly pace as the characters learn their lessons about money and morals, though some of the virtuous reform seems a little much.

A remarkably enjoyable visit with the annoying one percent, as close to crazy rich WASPs as WASPs can get.

EMPTY THEATRE

Jemc, Jac MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (464 pp.) $28.00 | Feb. 21, 2023 978-0-374-27792-5

Two royal cousins—Ludwig II of Bavaria and the Empress Elisabeth of Austria—chafe against the constraints of power even as the world around them seeks to strip that power away.

Elisabeth (or Sisi, as she is known) is born in 1837 with a double dose of royal blood, but she’s raised outside the intrigues and expectations of the Bavarian court. Her father, Duke Max—a minor member of the Wittelsbach dynasty—plays the zither and loves nothing more than the circus, while her mother, Princess Ludovika of Bavaria, Max’s first cousin, picks fleas from her lapdog at the tea table. Raised in Possenhofen, a summer palace 6 miles from the seat of power in Munich, Sisi has an idyllic childhood that prepares her for a life of willful privilege, a prophecy that seems fulfilled when she catches the eye of her cousin Emperor Franz Joseph, to whom she is promised when she is only 15. It soon becomes clear to Sisi, however, that life in the rigidly formal court of the Hapsburgs represents the exact opposite of the freedom she enjoyed as a child. She chafes wildly against the expectations of her new husband and his formidable mother, the Archduchess Sophie, that she be an ornament of the crown whose only real duty is to behave well and produce an heir. Meanwhile, in Nymphenburg castle in Munich, Sisi’s cousin Ludwig, heir to the Bavarian throne, eschews the more practical side of his royal education in favor of the heady distractions—art, theater,

ballet, human beauty—he sees as his birthright. Obsessed with the exquisite, Ludwig becomes a fervent patron of the arts, a builder of pleasure palaces, a custodian of refined theatrical passion, and an utter failure at managing the pressing needs of a kingdom threatened by German unification under Bismarck. As the cousins’ lives intertwine, Jemc masterfully weaves the political intrigues of the time (replete with anarchist uprisings, protodemocracies, and the death throes of the Hapsburg dynasty that would eventually lead to cataclysmic war) without losing track of the essential humanity of Ludwig and Sisi in their fey quest to remake the world into the version of beauty they believe is its ideal. Sensual, intricate, and filled with the verve of its own opulent language, Jemc’s retelling of these apocryphal lives delivers all the urgency of their time into our own without losing any of the fidelity it owes to their real legacies.

This novel is a triumph.

RED LONDON

Katsu, Alma Putnam (352 pp.) $27.00 | March 14, 2023 978-0-593-42195-6

On a post-Putin mission to gather intel on a powerfully connected Russian oligarch in London, CIA agent Lyndsey Duncan guiltily befriends the man’s lonely, woefully mistreated British wife. In this sequel to Red Widow (2021), Duncan is sent by her American bosses to check on a troublesome asset/Russian war criminal. But no sooner does she arrive in the U.K. than she is summoned by her old MI6 flame, Davis Ranford. In spite of the trouble their fling got them into the last time they worked together, he urgently asks her to team up with him again. Her assignment is to infiltrate the world of billionaire oligarch Mikhail Rotenberg and uncover his hidden ties (financial and other) to the new Russian leader, Viktor Kosygin. Though Rotenberg poured millions into Putin’s reckless campaign in Ukraine, he was instrumental in overthrowing him and installing Kosygin as Russian president following the costly war. Duncan has no problem cozying up to Rotenberg’s wife, Emily, who sadly has bought into a miserable, abusive marriage she can’t escape for fear of having her husband claim their two children. Lyndsey’s increasing sympathy for Emily, for whom a betrayal by her new best friend likely would be a traumatic last straw, becomes a problem—especially when it appears that Lyndsey is making herself available to the loathsome oligarch. Katsu, a former intelligence officer, shows us how intelligencegathering works, how spies relate to each other, how intelligence agencies uneasily coexist. What sets the novel apart even more is the smoothness with which the author builds her tense narrative and characters—Lyndsey is unflashy but sensitive and principled and good at what she does, while Emily is one of the most sympathetically drawn victims in recent spy fiction.

A strong second installment in a series we hope continues.

UNNATURAL HISTORY

Kellerman, Jonathan Ballantine (320 pp.) $28.99 | Feb. 7, 2023 9780525618614

Once again, best friends Alex Delaware and Milo Sturgis tackle a strange murder together. A woman discovers her boyfriend, billionaire’s son Donny Klement, lying in bed with three bullet holes in his chest. Det. Milo Sturgis asks psychologist Alex Delaware to work with him for the psychological insights he can bring to this oddball murder. The vic was about to give a one-man show of his photography, a project he’d called the Wishers: He dressed up homeless people as the successes they wished they were, photographed them, paid them $500 each, and let them go back to their lives on the street. Donny had felt that homelessness created unnatural histories, and he wanted to show what his subjects’ lives might have been like if they’d been luckier. But how did the homeless people react to the whole experience? Did someone return to whack him? “The Wishers project itself—bringing strangers with troubled histories into his home—seemed potentially explosive,” Delaware muses. And the vic’s family is strange: Rich dad Viktor’s M.O. in life is to marry a beautiful woman, impregnate her, then leave her. He’s done it six times, creating a batch of loosely connected half siblings: “technically a family, but really a collection of strangers.” (Donny isn’t a nickname for Donald, by the way, but for Adonis.) More murders follow in this complicated and unusual plot, and the characters and clever lines make the story fun. Milo is a smart cop who believes that “stupidity is the fertile soil [he] farm[s],” and the big guy sure loves to eat. A woman backs away from him, “as if there was only so much space to go around and he’d just taken a second helping.” And Delaware doesn’t think much of his friend’s taste in ringtones: “As we waited, Milo’s phone played something that could have been extracted from Chopin’s nightmare.”

Kellerman’s legion of fans will eat this up like his detective eats bear claws.