Tatiana and Alexander
(Introductory Note: I love the jacket photograph, which is printed on a foily paper that apparently shows up all my grubby fingerprints. Astonishingly, the photo is credited (and dated) nowhere in the book or on the jacket.)
It has taken a few days away from the outsized characters at the center of Them to consider sitting down to write about the book that frames them. Tatiana Yakovleva Du Plessix Liberman and her third husband, Alexander Liberman, never settle down; they never achieve the stability, as characters, that judging them would require. Now gracious, now heartless, now loving, now indifferent, they seem more like weather patterns than people. That this irresolution is never confusing or annoying signifies, to me, that their creator, Francine du Plessix Gray, has managed to bottle her own ambivalence. She loves them, and she forgives them, but she has drawn portraits that the subjects of her book would probably not care to read.
As you may infer from all those names, Francine was Alexander's stepdaughter. Her father, Bertrand du Plessix, was shot down in 1940 on a flight from Africa to join De Gaulle in London. This is almost certainly the death he would have wished for; his life seems to have been an unsatisfying accommodation of the quotidien. A plausible aristocrat - no one else in his family had used the title "vicomte" very recently - he seems to have been rather like one of Alan Furst's French heroes - sad about war but also brought to life by it. But to posterity, the most remarkable thing about Bertrand is likely to be the fact that his widow concealed news of his death from their daughter for over a year.
Continue reading about Them at Portico.
