THE WHITE ROSE
By Jean Hanff Korelitz. Miramax. 405 pp. $24.95
Since the 1970s, the big trend in the performing arts has been the update: Shakespeare in outer space, "Swan Lake" in swinging London, "La Traviata" in New York's Needle Park. Plopping classics into a future tense, it is hoped, will convince the audience of their relevance. Recently, in fiction, we've seen a variation on this theme: Take a revered work of the past and "nod" to it, or swing on its structure or simply retool it for your own time. The formal echo of the old work gives the new-minted work instant depth and, at the same time, attests to the writer's cultural seriousness. Virginia Woolf, Proust, Henry James and wonderful, endlessly referenced -- maybe robbed is the better word -- Jane Austen have provided coattails for a number of award-winning and bestselling books. In this mode, with a twist, Jean Hanff Korelitz has written The White Rose.
Korelitz doesn't take off from a classic novel but from a beloved opera, Richard Strauss's "Der Rosenkavalier," which premiered in 1911. Transferring the opera's sturdily structured roundelay to millennial Manhattan, The White Rose begins: "In a bed at the center of the universe, a man is inside a woman he loves and they are moving, the bed is moving, the apartment is moving, the island of Manhattan is moving." Marian -- 48, married, a celebrity historian -- is trysting with 26-year-old Oliver, the son of her best friend and the ardent owner of a flower shop, the White Rose. Oliver will deliver roses to Sophie, the young fiancée of Marian's social-climbing cousin Barton, and in that meeting, over those roses, a fascination catches, kindles. Complications ensue. "Der Rosenkavalier" is full of doublings and masquerades (the comic strategies of the stage), and Korelitz incorporates them all, along with the opera's themes of time passing and love lost.
Novelists often talk about how characters take on a will of their own, pulling the plot sideways or backward in ways that cannot be foreseen. This is part of the mystery of writing, the way the imagination suddenly takes off, surprising everyone. A preordained plot can seriously curb creativity. Korelitz's invocation of Strauss's opera, as inventive as it is, becomes one of the book's problems. The White Rose can feel more stage-managed than written. It doesn't help that the characters seem assembled of likes and dislikes, addresses, alma maters and advanced degrees -- Who's Who meets C.V.
In fact, about halfway through the book, Korelitz begins to write in a tonality that sounds like a documentary voice-over: "Even so, Sophie's mind is elsewhere on the Friday of Barton's visit, and the shortened October afternoon finds her -- of course, in Butler, of course, in a flannel shirt -- immersed in the first White Rose leaflet, analyzing its use of Goethe's The Awakening of Epimenides. . ." etc. The author is too much in the room, invisibly overbearing. And all the doublings Korelitz has worked in! Marian and Sophie, both wealthy and Jewish, are both historians at Columbia. Sophie and Oliver are both obsessed with an idealized White Rose. Oliver and Marian have both faced the same life-altering crisis. By the end -- and what an end, French farce in a country inn -- it was too much for me. For readers who warm to such symmetry, it may be just right.
Korelitz is a strong writer, not particularly lyrical but capable of descriptions that are hers alone -- Marian "billowy on sangria," or a woman's "glasslike laugh," or Sophie without clothes: "There is a wholeness about her you don't appreciate unless she is naked. . . . Then, when she dresses, her beauty somehow abandons her." Such effortless moments stand out in writing that often has the reportorial bite and brand names of a Tom Wolfe set piece. This is fine, if a bit showy, for riffs on the eternal youth of Park Avenue's lacquered ladies or the "watery, planetary light" on Long Island, but when Sophie, cooking a chicken, "turns on two of the Wolf ovens and hauls open the Sub Zero," the product placement is brassy and distracting.
If only an editor had made Korelitz pare down, get rid of those brittle fillers -- "alas" and "of course" and "actually" and the arch repetitions and the too-knowing asides and the name dropping. Let go of the operatic structure, which seems increasingly forced, and concentrate instead on the truth of these characters. Would a passionate young historian like Sophie really consent to a loveless marriage with a middle-aged buffoon? I don't believe she would, not even to please her ailing father. Would the intense Oliver never see, even for a second, Marian's selfishness?
Korelitz doesn't return to the one narrative thread that speaks directly to the title. Oliver is trying to create a new species of rose, a white rose, and has taken us through the seductive process of pollen-collecting, fertilization, seeds. The book ends before we know if the rose will grow, and by then we understand that for Oliver this unrealized rose symbolizes an unknown in his future. It's a metaphor, too, for a novel that never quite blossoms. •
Laura Jacobs writes for Vanity Fair and is the author of "Women About Town."
