The Theoretical Foot

February 15, 2016
The legendary and incantatory powers of description that earned Fisher (The Gastronomical Me) her fame as one of the 20th century's best prose writers are fully at work in this intricate novel, the discovery of which is almost as romantic a story as the couple at its center (the book was never published in her lifetime and was found in her late agent's effects in 2012). In late August 1938, an unmarried American couple, Tim Garton and Sara Porter, welcome to their lovely Swiss estate of La Prairie a number of expatriates. Their troubles, heartbreaks, worries, and triumphs coalesce around a party that, like the gathering war in the background, acquires undercurrents of tragedy. While points of view alternate among Sara's brother, Dan, and sister, Honor; Tim's literary sister, Nan, and her companion, Lucy; and the young lovers Joe and Susanâall of whom are trying to escape some spell of loveâthe contrapuntal vignettes of an anonymous man suffering agonies from an amputated leg make the wistful longings of the other characters seem dreamy by comparison. Tim and Sara are the steady, sphinx-like, yet essential pair, loosely based on Fisher and the "one true love" of her own life, who hold the others in orbit about them. Readers longing for the clever banter of Hemingway's characters or the indolent gloss of a Fitzgerald story will adore the book's modernist style, in which the action focuses on each passing thought, each turn of emotion, each detail of drink or cigarette with an extraordinary attention that makes the ordinary seem simultaneously bewildering, mysterious, and absurd. This is a worthy addition to the Fisher canon.