The Chaperone

April 2, 2012
Moriarty (While I’m Falling) skims the surface of 1920s life in Wichita, Kans., where homosexuality, contraception, and being just about anything other than white and Protestant is considered a moral offence. In the summer of 1922, prim, married Cora Carlisle chaperones a young Louise Brooks, the silent film star, to New York. Cora keeps mum about her own childhood journey from the New York Home for Friendless Girls to a new life with an adopted family in Kansas, because she intends to search for her birth mother once she and Louise arrive. What follows the trip for Louise is history: film stardom until the advent of sound. What follows for Cora is at first a letdown for the reader, and then highly dubious, given her naïve and conservative nature. Though what happens in New York gives Cora a new moral order, for the rest of her life she keeps it, too, a secret. The novel, which in its final stretch races to 1982, attempts to portray Cora as a heroine buffeted by the bigotry and priggishness of the Jazz Age, but glosses over events and neglects the inner lives of many of its characters. Agent: Tracy Fisher, WME Entertainment.

June 15, 2012
In Kansas-native Moriarty's fourth novel (While I'm Falling, 2009, etc.), she imagines the life of the actual Wichita matron who accompanied future silent film star Louise Brooks to New York City in 1922 as a favor to Brooks' parents. Although Louise Brooks was a larger-than-life personality whose memoir LuLu in Hollywood is held in high critical esteem, she's given short shrift by Moriarty, whose interest lies in Cora Carlisle. In 1922, 36-year-old Cora faces an empty nest as her twin sons prepare for college. Her lawyer husband, Alan, 12 years her senior, is a wonderful father and a good man, but their marriage is a sexless sham. She has grudgingly accepted and kept secret his (lifelong) homosexual love affair. So Alan is in no position to stop her when she announces that she is escorting Myra Brooks' 15-year-old daughter to New York City, where the girl has enrolled in dance school. He knows Cora's real reason for going east. She lived in a Catholic orphanage in Manhattan until she was 7, then was sent to Kansas, where she was raised by a loving farm couple. Now she yearns to learn about her parentage. Louise, precociously sexual as well as beautiful and brainy (Schopenhauer is her favorite author), is a difficult, unlikable charge, but Cora finds time in New York to seek out information. Joseph, the janitor at the orphanage, helps Cora in her research while introducing her to the passion her marriage never offered. With Louise on the road to stardom, Cora returns to Wichita with Joseph, claiming he is her brother--a charade Alan agrees to maintain. Cora seems to represent the history of women's rights in the 20th century. An early suffragette, she applauds the end of prohibition and champions birth control and racial equality. She also gives Louise good advice during a rocky period in her career. Unlike the too-infrequently-seen Louise, the fictional characters seem less alive or important than the issues they represent.

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January 1, 2012

Imagine chaperoning boldly defiant, black-bobbed actress Louise Brooks when she's age 15. That job falls to Cora Carlisle, a mid-thirties married woman. Louise will surely light up the book as she did the screen, but Moriarty's brave move is to make Cora's transformative experience the core. Especially appealing to book clubs, so the reading group guide is a plus.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2012
Moriarty elegantly dovetails the stories of two vastly different women poised on the brink of self-discovery. When an immensely talented Louise Brooksdestined to become the toast of Hollywoodis accepted into a five-week summer course at the prestigious Dennishawn School of Dance in New York City, all the prematurely worldly 15-year-old needs is a suitable chaperone. After all, in 1922 even girls as advanced as Louise need to present a veneer of propriety. The unlikely candidate turns out to be Cora Carlise, a highly regarded and extremely respectable Wichita matron. Although it initially appears that empty-nester Cora merely longs for an exciting change of scenery from her staid, middle-class life in Kansas, it soon becomes clear that she has a hidden agenda of her own. As Cora clashes with her headstrong charge, the heartrending truth about both her childhood and her marriage is revealed. Despite her irreverent and deliberately provocative attitude, Louise, too, harbors tragic secrets of her own. A book-club favorite (The Center of Everything, 2003, and The Rest of Her Life, 2007), the always engrossing Moriarty has combined real-life and fictional characters to great effect as both Cora and Louise end up defying the conventional expectations of the era with mixed results.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)