Debut novel a compelling, complex ‘Tale’
“The Thirteenth Tale”
by Diane Setterfield (Atria, 416 pages, $26)
Vida Winter is “England’s best-loved writer … fifty-six books published in fifty-six years … translated into forty-nine languages … nineteen feature films have been based on her novels.”
She is also “as famous for her secrets as for her stories.” For it seems that “for every new book that came out, she summoned a number of journalists to a hotel in Harrogate, where she met them one by one and gave them, separately, what she termed her life story. There must have been dozens of these stories in existence, perhaps hundreds.”
But now she has written to Margaret Lea, a young woman who lives in an apartment above her father’s bookshop. She says in her letter that she wants Margaret to come visit. She says she feels the need, finally, to tell the truth about her life.
Margaret goes down to a tiny room in the back of her father’s shop and takes back to her apartment “a small hardback, about four inches by six” – “Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation,” Vida Winter’s first book.
She finds herself “snared” from the start: “The stories were brutal and sharp and heartbreaking. I loved them.”
But, upon finishing the 12th tale, she turns the page and discovers … a blank page. There is no 13th tale.
By which time the reader is thoroughly engrossed in Diane Setterfield’s debut novel.
Fictional narrators tend to be ghostly figures, and Margaret is ghostlier than most, but that may be because Winter remains so incandescently alive, even though she is old and her life is drawing to its close.
What she reveals to Margaret is a chronicle of violence and cruelty, madness and incest, heartless abandonment and heartfelt love. Naturally, it enables Margaret to come to know herself better than she ever could have hoped.
Reportedly, this book received a $1 million advance in the United States and an even larger one in Britain – which doubtless explains why Setterfield no longer teaches French.
Whether her book will earn back those advances is anybody’s guess. But one thing is certain: Those who buy and read this complex, compelling and, in the end, deeply moving novel are unlikely to feel they’ve been shortchanged.