Andrea Lee’s superb fiction often describes the collisions between people who hail from different cultures. She returns to this fertile ground in a new novel but widens her scope, suggesting some historical wounds are too deep to heal, and even a woman who believes she has stepped beyond her own tribal identity can never free herself totally.
The protagonist of “Red Island House” is — like Lee herself — an African American woman married to an Italian and living in Italy. The fictional Shay vacations several times a year with her husband, Senna, in a flamboyant house he had built on a beach in Madagascar. There, she observes and interacts with a large cast of characters, some European, many others African.
Her assigned role as the “chatelaine of a neocolonial pleasure palace” discomforts her, because it smacks of presiding over a plantation in the antebellum South. An academic by training, Shay attempts to maintain an anthropologist’s distance from the strange society she’s periodically immersed in. Nonetheless, over a span of two decades, she’s enchanted and eventually repelled by the beautiful, disturbing environment of this remote corner of Africa.
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“Red Island House” resembles a collection of short stories, each of the 10 chapters detailing a searing episode, most often a clash of personalities playing out in what to Western eyes looks like a tropical paradise. An important through-line is Shay’s increasing awareness of the “pulse of dark magic concealed just under the skin of events” in Madagascar.
In the opening chapter, she discovers that the new house Senna constructed has not been properly baptized by local ritual, and thus is under an evil spell. The strained relationships between family and staff testifies to this, as does the disintegration of the marital rapport between Shay and her husband whenever they stay there.
To restore household harmony, Shay eventually turns to Bertine la Grande, a servant who becomes her close friend and who introduces her to a shaman capable of dispelling the bad juju. Lee isn’t writing magical realism per se — she is conjuring up a locale where the power of superstition still holds sway.
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Shay realizes her “loose-jointed stance” and “eager, unshielded gaze” immediately set her apart from the locals she otherwise resembles. She comes to see that too many outsiders arrive in Madagascar looking to exploit its people and its natural resources, and her own compassion and imagination is often insufficient to successfully intervene in the plights of a number of Malagasy she gets to know.
Leaving Madagascar to return to Italy, Shay always feels “as if a door shuts on a different dimension.” Teaching African American literature in a Milan university, she understands the rules and relies on the fixed parameters of professional responsibilities. How is it that among White faces she is at ease, but when in her African vacation home she struggles to understand the people of color surrounding her?
In one of the best chapters, Shay must preside over a family meal that’s a distorted version of the venerable 1967 film “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” Rather than a mixed-raced American couple being the subject of both fascination and fear, on this occasion it’s a fat middle-aged Frenchman, Gilles, and the young Malagasy prostitute he has taken up with for his month-long stay in a suite he rents from Senna in one wing of the house. Should Shay refuse to share a table with this young woman? Can she turn a blind eye to the reality of sex tourism in the country she regularly visits?
While she manages to navigate that evening, Shay ruminates more and more about the multitudinous sins in which she believes she’s complicit by continuing to sojourn in Madagascar. Eventually, she can only return in her dreams. But as he ages, her husband prefers living there, enjoying the power his wealth affords him. This particular cultural divide proves a difficult one for the couple to bridge.
Lee’s prodigious talent for physical description causes her to overindulge at points, and a few passages of “Red Island House” sound like copy lifted from a high-end travel magazine. Heading along a Malagasy road Shay observes: “Falling away from each side of a high ridge are green declivities that cup dense groves, crowned with flambeaux of red blossom and hung with giant lianas bearing seedpods the length of a man’s arm.” Also, because the story is told in stand-alone stories, “Red Island House” has less propulsive power than Lee’s stirring 2006 novel, “Lost Hearts in Italy.”
But these are niggling criticisms of a gorgeous narrative that perhaps only Lee could have constructed — an ambitious attempt to use fiction to explore the reality of a world fractured by race and class, and divided between the haves and the have-hardly-anything-at-alls.
Clare McHughis the author of the novel “A Most English Princess.”
Red Island House
By Andrea Lee
Scribner. 288 pp. $27
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