Review by New York Times Review
HENRY JAMES IN his tales liked to send his much-advantaged yet inexperienced young Americans abroad, to be steeped in the superior civilization of Europe: its grand boulevards and ancient seats, its paintings, its music, its unsurpassed literary heritage. At 28, on his way to Germany in 1935, Varian Fry of New York, born to affluence and Protestant probity, was just such an impressionable young man. His Harvard degree was in classics. His father was a Wall Street eminence. His bent was intellectual and writerly. And ultimately he did in fact encounter at close quarters European civilization at its 20th-century zenith. But in 1935, in the streets of Berlin, it was not high culture that he witnessed. It was barbarism: SS thugs savagely beating and bloodying Jews. What he saw then led to his extraordinary entanglement with the most significant thinkers and artists of the time. Five years later, when the Germans had overrun France and the collaborationist Vichy regime took control of what was no longer a refuge for Nazi prey in the south, Fry went to Marseille as a volunteer for a privately organized mission, the Emergency Rescue Committee. Initially encouraged by Eleanor Roosevelt, its mandate was to facilitate escape for prominent dissidents and luminaries of the arts, many of them Jews: the makers of masterworks, the creme de la creme of European genius. This had a double intent: saving the refugees, and raising the money their fame would elicit to save them. By the close of his stubbornly daring sojourn in Marseille, bristling with peril, subterfuge, forgery, bribery and unrelenting hostility, Fry had delivered from the freight cars the lives of more than 2,000 desperate souls, both the renowned and the less so. (Among the renowned: Hannah Arendt, Franz Werfel, Jacques Lifschitz, Golo Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Arthur Koestler, Marcel Duchamp, Andre Breton, Alma Mahler, Claude LéviStrauss, Max Ophüls and countless others.) And if the young Varian Fry once resembled a type of dramatically evolving character in fiction, he has now become, in Julie Orringer's sympathetic and prodigiously ambitious novel, a fictional character himself. Orringer's scrupulous research into this turbulent period goes far beyond bookishness. Her landscapes regularly rise to a Keatsian sensuousness. Her Marseille breathes as a city breathes: architecture, gardens, streets, hotels, cafes, skies, smells, weather, food, cigarettes, the interiors of suites, offices, prisons, internment camps, the moods of authority and tyranny and spite, the cunning of confederates and criminals, the fury of betrayal by seeming allies. She evokes the crooked geography of flight - Spain, Portugal, Martinique, the trek on foot over the Pyrenees, the ships that disappoint. Many of her pivotal figures are familiar to history: Hiram Bingham, the heroic American vice consul who lavishly issued salvational visas to despairing Jews; Hugh Fullerton, the consul general who thwarted Bingham on the advice of Cordell Hull, the Roosevelt administration's compliant secretary of state; and the idiosyncratic panoply of Fry's assistants. All these, and the hapless refugees themselves, Orringer revivifies with cinematic verisimilitude. Yet it is the beating heart of Varian Fry that is the means and purpose of "The Flight Portfolio." A biography can read like a novel. Ought a novel to pose as a biography? Like an egg with two yolks, Orringer's novel has two centers: the trustworthy chronicle of the Emergency Rescue Committee, and the mind of Varian Fry. The first is at hand. The second is a door with no key. But must the verifiable past surrender to the sovereignty of imagination? Confident that it must, Orringer goes where no exacting biographer will go, and where the novelist is hotly obliged to go - into the veiled precincts of Fry's psyche: "He had always thought, given enough time, that he could crack any code, unravel any knot, unmaze any maze, master any beast, however venomous or wily. Since childhood he'd lived in an adversarial dance with his own mind, filling it with whatever seemed impossible, daring it to prove him wrong." The novelist is obliged also to the commands of plot - plot seething in contrivance, stratagem, revelation. In service to these, "The Flight Portfolio" invents a knot of intertwined characters, who together come to dominate, even to override, and finally to invade the historical Fry. In Orringer's scheme, we learn that her fictive Varian and her fictive Elliott Grant had once been lovers; at Harvard they quarreled and parted. Now, after 12 years, Grant turns up in Marseille, hoping to find and rescue Tobias Katznelson, an Einsteinlike young prodigy whom the Germans mean to seize for his value to weaponry development. Grant's interest in the boy is motivated by his sexual intimacy with Tobias's father, already safe in New York. But here in tumultuous Marseille Varian and Grant renew their old passion; plot begins to outstrip all else. Soon Varian's lover's obsession will overtake and outweigh - and then devour - whatever remains of biographical verity. And Tobias is not what he seems to be: the ruse leads to the endangerment of a celebrated (fictive) painter. The novel of chase-and-elude differs from the so-called literary novel not so much in its frantic excitements as in its influence on character. In one, story grows organically out of the elastic complexity of individuated traits. In the other, character is conditioned and flattened by contrivance. Even the glamour of the homoerotic, which fuels Orringer's engine of suspense, turns threadbare through overexposure. In scene after scene, Varian's leg slides seductively (and also schematically) along Grant's; or vice versa. For the historical Fry, beyond hunches and hints, there is no evidence of homosexuality. Orringer in her illuminating author's note reports that she "made that a part of his character," borrowing from speculations by Fry's biographer, Andy Marino. "The skills he had developed to cope with and express his 'deviance' from the norm over the years," Marino writes, "may have stood him in good stead for the illicit and secret activities he took to so naturally and performed so extraordinarily well in France." Might this be a Freudian leap too far? A leap that lands Orringer's Varian in another man's bed. The mind of the Varian Fry of "The Flight Portfolio" is Orringer's mind, and how, in the war between history and imagination, can we deny her that? Literature is everywhere rife with parallel precedents. Shakespeare's Henry V is Shakespeare's mind. Tolstoy's Napoleon is Tolstoy's mind. Then why should it matter that Orringer's vertiginous unscrollings of event and intent, unfolding in the south of France in the very pit of Vichy brutality, are chiefly her own? But it does matter. Today we have no stake in the Battle of Agincourt. We have no stake in the Napoleonic wars. But we do have a stake in whatever touches on the historical integrity of the Holocaust, now increasingly denied, diminished, demoted, misapplied, perverted, derided; or else utterly erased. And what of the re-creation of a historical figure crucial to the necessary truth of a half-forgotten reality? Yet "The Flight Portfolio" will, to a degree, educate. It exposes America's dogged reluctance, at the very summit of its political will, to take in refugee Jews. It uncovers a moral flaw inherent in the primary aim of the Emergency Rescue Committee, premised on the principle of Orwell's Animal Farm. World-famous Chagall - yes. A pious 15-year-old in an obscure town in the remote Carpathians, who will one day be known as Elie Wiesel - no. Still, it was the real-life Varian Fry, writing in The New Republic in 1942, who recorded not the fate of Europe's superstars, but as his title had it, "The Massacre of the Jews." A thriller is above all meant to excite and enthrall. "The Flight Portfolio" is more Hitchcock than history. Then know, as you read on, excited and enthralled, that Orringer's Varian is movie-tone make-believe. Do not mistake him for Varian Fry. Cynthia oziCK is the author, most recently, of "Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 12, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Orringer's (The Invisible Bridge, 2010) gripping second novel centers on Varian Fry, the American editor who undertook great risk to rescue endangered European artists and intellectuals from the Holocaust. Overseeing the Emergency Rescue Committee's work in 1940 Marseille, Varian and his fellow activists use delicate personal connections to ensure high-profile refugees' escape from Vichy France through legal and illegal means, amid limited finances and a less-than-supportive State Department. Into this high-pressure atmosphere arrives Elliott Grant, Varian's (imaginary) former lover, requesting a complicated favor. Through their revived affair, the story explores issues of identity and living one's authentic self. Grant is a convincing creation, but readers may be uneasy that considerable emotional weight and suspense hinge on a historical character's fictional relationship and its repercussions. Still, Orringer is a beautiful prose stylist who captures depth of meaning about complex human issues, and she addresses head-on the moral dilemma of making value judgments on individual lives. Ultimately Orringer crafts a vivid portrait of wartime Marseille, its innate sophistication darkened by Nazi oppression, and of Fry's heroic real-life accomplishments.--Sarah Johnson Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Orringer's magnificent novel is centered around American journalist Varian Fry's work helping imperiled refugees out of Nazi-occupied France. In 1940, Fry leaves his wife and job behind in New York and travels to Marseille for the Emergency Rescue Committee, formed to get prominent intellectuals and creative artists safely to America. Faced with meager resources, an enormous task, and suspicion from both the Vichy and U.S. governments, Fry makes anguished decisions about which "clients" to help and which to leave in danger. Then he is contacted by his one-time Harvard classmate Elliott Schiffman Grant, with whom he shared an intense mutual attraction. "Skiff," who vanished from Fry's life without explanation 12 years before, wants helps getting his German-born Jewish lover, Gregor Katznelson, and Katznelson's son out of Europe. Fry falls in love with Grant again as he makes increasingly high-stakes decisions about who, and what, to save. As in 2010's superb The Invisible Bridge, Orringer seamlessly combines compelling inventions with complex fact: figures including Marc Chagall and Andre Breton make vivid appearances, while Skiff and his relationship with Fry are unforgettable fictional creations. Brilliantly conceived, impeccably crafted, and showcasing Orringer's extraordinary gifts, this is destined to become a classic. Agent: Kimberly Witherspoon, InkWell Management. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An elegant, meditative novelistic reconstruction of critical years in the life of Varian Fry, the American classicist who is honored at Yad Vashem as "righteous among the nations" for his work rescuing victims of the Holocaust.Focusing on the era that informed her first novel, The Invisible Bridge (2010), Orringer opens with an encounter in which Marc Chagall, one of the most beloved of modern artists, figures. He is living in Vichy France, convinced that because it is France he will be kept safe from the Nazis"These things happened in Germany." he says. "They won't happen here. Not to us." His interlocutor is Varian Fry, who, under the auspices of the Emergency Rescue Committee, is combing the country for a couple of hundred "artists, writers, and intellectuals," most of them Jewish or politically suspect, who similarly imagined themselves to be safe in France even as the Holocaust begins to unfold and the Gestapo arrest lists lengthen. Fry has allowed himself a month to get those 200 sure victims to safety, and in doing so, as his old friendand moreElliott Grant, a shadowy figure of many connections, warns him, he is proving "inconvenient to the American diplomatic mission in France." The cloak-and-dagger element of Orringer's story is effective, though it runs somewhat long. Woven into the action is the slow reconciliation between Fry and Grant, whose friendship is deep but at first tentative, finally heating. Orringer nicely captures two worlds, the fraught one of refugee rescue and the more genteel but still complicated one of intellectuals in orbit, with the likes of Peggy Guggenheim, Max Ernst, and Victor Serge among the cast of characters. The central point of intrigue, providing a fine plot twist, is also expertly handled, evidence of an accomplished storyteller at work.Altogether satisfying. Mix Alan Furst and Andr Aciman, and you'll have a feel for the territory in which this well-plotted book falls. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
