In the Garden of the Fugitives

Starred review from May 1, 2018
A South African expatriate now living in Australia and her much-older American benefactor wrestle with obsession and guilt while reconstructing the stories that brought them together many years earlier in Dovey's (Only the Animals, 2015) psychological excavation.Seventeen years after their last contact, Vita, now approaching 40, receives an email from Royce, kicking off a predatory dance of what she calls "mutual confession." What follows is less correspondence--the missives soon ditch the formal trappings of "letters"--than parallel narratives, similarly haunted by loss and by shame. Raised by political activists between apartheid South Africa and Australia, Vita spends her college years at an unnamed-but-hallowed Boston institution making documentary films without any people in them, unable or unwilling to place herself in her own country's history. "In order to confess," college-aged Vita thinks, but does not say, "one must have sinned--but I am unsure which of that country's multiple sins are to be placed directly at my feet." It is the question that will shape her life. And it is Royce who will fund it: In her senior year, Vita receives a Lushington fellowship--an extraordinarily generous grant for "extraordinary women," courtesy of Royce's fortune. He, too, is wracked by guilt for his past, albeit on a somewhat more personal scale: As a student at their shared alma mater, he was in love with the then-aspiring archaeologist for whom the fellowship is named, spending years as her platonic companion and research assistant, following her to Pompeii, where she devoted herself to excavating the gardens and where she will fall victim to an untimely death. In a novel unabashedly about ideas, Dovey does not shy away from bluntly confronting big questions head-on, and yet--a testament to her skill--the book, while trembling with meaning, is neither obvious nor cumbersome but unsettlingly alive.Sweeping both geographically and intellectually; a literary page-turner.

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Starred review from May 15, 2018
Excavation both archaeological and psychological figures prominently in Dovey's gracefully constructed second novel, in which an epistolary dialogue between a stalled South African filmmaker and her former benefactor unearths issues of privilege, shame, and loss. As a university student, Vita endured Royce's flattery and the strings attached to the scholarship fund he administers. Now, 17 years later, Royce is dying and seeks absolution, while Vita is stuck, aiming her camera only at silent landscapes and forlorn objects. With their mutual need to unburden outweighing any lingering antagonism, they reveal their secrets. Royce painstakingly describes a lifetime of unrequited love borne of decades-old heartbreak amidst the ruins of Pompeii. But it is Vita's smoldering melancholy about her apartheid-era origins that gradually gives way to total personal and creative collapse, allowing Dovey to express her ambivalence about creating art in an inequitable, exploitative world. Once you can inspect your own history like an artifact, you're a step closer to liberating yourself from it, Vita's psychotherapist reminds her. But can stories told by the privileged ever escape complicity? Might the body-shaped hollows in the Vesuvian ash somehow tell their own stories, or must they forever be receptacles for our own narrative desires?(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

December 1, 2017

Dovey's debut novel, Blood Kin, was short-listed for the Dylan Thomas Award and won her the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 status; her story collection, Only the Animals, was a knockout. So smart readers will be looking for this new novel, framed as an exchange of letters between Vita, a South African woman now living in Australia, and Royce, an older man who once helped her secure a fellowship to study in the United States.

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