Everyone loves Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic novel, Rebecca.  “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,” the novel begins. I first read that sentence when a friend returned from a miserably hot summer at an archaeological dig and said it had kept her sane at night while her roommates played Mah Jong.

If you love Jane Eyre, you will love Rebecca.  There is a mad wife in the attic in Jane Eyre;  in Rebecca, it’s a contemptuous, unfaithful wife who taunts her husband and is killed.  When The New Yorker published an essay about Rebecca, I realized that the feminist canon had expanded to include women’s novels formerly dismissed as pop fiction.

Rebecca may be du Maurier’s best book, but I prefer The Parasites (1949), a novel about three step-siblings who grow up in the theater.  They have no fixed abode:  they accompany Pappy, a famous singer, and Mama, a famous dancer, all over Europe and the U.S.  And they  don’t seem marred by the experience: on the contrary, they thrive on it.

Daphne du Maurier, the daughter of Sir Gerald du Maurier, a famous actor and manager, certainly knew the theater.  And I am addicted to theater novels:  I also recommend J. B. Priestley’s Lost Empires, Ferdia Lennon’s Dangerous Exploits, and Doris Langley Moore’s A Game of Snakes and Ladders.  In The Parasites, two of the children, Maria and Niall, grow up to have careers in theater and music.  Maria becomes a famous actress, Nial a popular songwriter, and  poor Celia, who loves to draw, is stuck as the caregiver of their alcoholic Pappy. (Mama died in a tragic accident.)

But it’s not just the complicated relationships – and Maria’s and Niall’s is the most complex, being quasi-incestuous – but the narcissism, the selfishness, and the histrionics. 

Take the opening of the novel, written in the first person plural. Du Maurier uses the first person plural at the beginning of several segments, ant then switches to the third person.

It was Charles who called us the parasites.  The way he said it was surprising, and sudden; he was one of those quiet reserved sort of men, not given to talking much or stating his opinion, unless upon the most ordinary facts of day by day, so that his outburst…had the force of an explosion. 

Are “we” indeed parasites? Much of this novel is comical – it is not a soap opera – but Charles doesn’t believe acting and song-writing are real work. Mind you, Maria is always acting, so one sees why he tires of it.  In fact, she married  Charles so she could be called the”Honorable”:  she loves being an “Hon.” And Niall is a popular songwriter, whose career was boosted by his parents’ eccentric friend, Freada. At a posh school, the music teacher had said he had no talent. Running away from school (several times) turned out to be a wise decision.

Perhaps there is most hope for Celia, who, after years of looking after Pappy and being at Maria’s beck and call, achieves her own creative goal – and it is completely free of the theater.

A brilliant, flamboyant book.  One of my best rereads this spring.

Maria Semple’s new novel, Go Gentle, is charming, funny, and a bit over-the-top.  The heroine, Adora Hazzard, is the author of a best-selling book about stoicism, and is leading the good life with her daughter and dog in a chic New York apartment. She has organized a whimsical “Coven” of single and divorced women who live on her floor of the apartment building:  they save money by sharing a dog-walker, splitting packages of vegetables, and even save on ballet and theater tickets

But even if you quote Marcus Aurelius as you walk down the street, you will run into trouble eventually. She loves her work as a philosophy tutor to the sons of a wealthy philanthropist-art collector, but is haunted by an episode of sexual harassment that happened during her stint as a comedy writer in L.A.

At first I didn’t understand how this long episode fit in with the rest of the book. It almost seems like a self-contained novella. Around the turn of the century, Adora’s fellow TV comedy writers, all male, made a bet about how far one of them could sexually maul her during a meeting.  The humiliation ends in her being fired, because the network didn’t want gossip or trouble, and she is given a huge sum of money in exchange for signing an NDA.  And so she went back to school and got her Ph.D. in philosophy.

Of course it makes sense that stoicism can help you cope with past tragedies. And when Adora, who believes a woman of her age is unlikely to meet a man, meets a charming, handsome guy, we think we’re in for a romance. (Well, not quite yet!)

And then Semple plugs in the dark side, which involves Adora’s becoming an amateur detective when she begins to suspect art theft and art forgery.

So the book is a great read, if slightly baggy. Semple is a  great comic writer, and this is by far her most complex novel.