The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress

July 11, 2011
In Bainbridge's (1932â2010) final, unfinished novel, she transports readers to the spring of 1968. In this era of high-profile assassinations Rose, a damaged young Englishwoman, arrives in Baltimore to begin a cross-country odyssey in search of Dr. Wheeler, a member of Robert Kennedy's entourage. Rose met Wheeler in the U.K. and fell somewhat in love, as he provided much needed solace from her unhappy life: warring parents, a child taken away and given up for adoption. Accompanying Rose on her trip is Washington Harold, a friend of a friend, who also seeks Wheeler, but his motives are more sinister: Washington Harold's wife committed suicide after having an affair with Wheeler, and he wants revenge. The story reaches its apogee in L.A. at the Ambassador Hotel, where the private fates of these two people collide with RFK's very public one. Assembled by Bainbridge's editor from her manuscript after her death, this is a novel that the author longed to complete; the pacing isn't always right and the characters could be more sharply defined. Still, for lovers of Bainbridge's oeuvre, this is the book that places the period at the end of her life's work and shouldn't be missed.

August 15, 2011
The last novel from English author Bainbridge, who died in July 2010.

Against the chaotic backdrop of 1968 America, a young British woman, Rose, and an angry widower pursue an elusive figure, admired and mythologized by her and murderously despised by him, from East Coast to West, a pursuit that culminates (though it doesn't quite end) at the Ambassador Hotel in L.A. on the June night when Robert Kennedy was assassinated. Rose has come to the U.S. in search of Dr. Wheeler, who seems (all exposition in this book comes through a glass, darkly) to have been her protector during an awful adolescence. She is met in Baltimore and accompanied on her search—it's a "kind of" accompaniment that "resembles hostage-holding—by someone" she knows only as Washington Harold, an ill-tempered, secretive man whose wife had an affair with Wheeler and then committed suicide. Harold is, as the sometimes "savvy" and sometimes childishly self-absorbed Rose seems to intuit, using her; he intends to take revenge. Everywhere they go along the way they encounter mayhem and threat—a botched bank robbery in which a gun is held to  Rose's head, killings, near-riots, racial animus. Bainbridge died before she could finish her 17th novel, and toward the end, especially, this odd, angular picaresque feels chaotic and choppy. Still, it shows off the author's gifts for compression and dark, deadpan wit. Behind "it all rest the" sinister and violent undertones that discomfit the reader from first page to last.

Unfinished, but a fitting and worthy coda to a storied career.

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August 1, 2011

In this posthumous novel, British author Bainbridge paints a hypothetical picture of what might have been happening in 1968 America amid the turmoil of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. Through young English Rose and her unlikely companion, known to her as Washington Harold, the reader is taken on a cross-country trip in search of the elusive Dr. Wheeler, an acquaintance of both. Along the way, the pair always seem one step behind their mysterious quarry and meet a host of interesting characters who all have a link to this man. Rose wants to find Dr. Wheeler because he is the one stable and bright spot from her troubled childhood. Washington's reasons for finding Dr. Wheeler do not become clear until a surprise ending. All aspects of this novel come together in an exciting and curious encounter with presidential candidate Robert Kennedy. VERDICT Both vivid and dark, this page-turner is sure to be sought after by both historical fiction and mystery lovers. Highly recommended.--Leann Restaino, Girard, OH

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2011
Bainbridge's latest novel skews history in a wholly original way. Harold Grasse and Rose, the English girl of the title, are on a quest to find a Dr. Wheeler. Their cross-country trip in a camper van begins in a Washington, D.C., rocked by race riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and ends at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles at the precise moment Robert Kennedy is shot (a mysterious girl in a polka dot dress is in fact part of the conspiracy theories surrounding RFK's death). Who is Dr. Wheeler? Rose is looking for him because she sees in him a savior, while Harold blames Wheeler for Kennedy's death. Incidents and a motley mix of characters encountered during their journey are all ingredients in a brew of politics, history, and religion in an America that erupts too easily into violence. On a more intimate scale, the dynamic between Harold and Rose teeters between irritation, disgust, and need. Never revealing too much, Bainbridge is a master of the telling, small detail.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)