The View from Here

December 13, 2010
A Scottish woman facing a terminal cancer diagnosis reflects on her time abroad as an aimless young woman in McKinlay's mixed debut. Frances has decided to kill herself after discovering she has terminal cancer and, in an unnecessary stroke of doubly bad timing, that her husband is having an affair. Torn between confronting her husband and preserving the peace in the house for her final days, Frances retreats into nostalgic reflections on the summer of 1976 in Mexico, when, having lost the boyfriend she followed across the Atlantic, she falls in love with a rich married man vacationing there with his family. Introduced to a crowd of well-to-do American tourists, Frances is drawn into the world of the wives—ebullient Bee Bee in her third try at marriage, spiteful Patsy, and cold, regal Sally—with their continual cocktails, laissez-faire parenting, and casual chatter, even as she slips away for dalliances with Sally's husband. Unfortunately, Frances's contemporary situation comes up much weaker than her formative past, and even if the milieu Frances mingles with feels straight out of Fitzgerald (or even James) instead of the '70s, McKinlay's hand is sure around the restless rich.

Starred review from December 1, 2010

In British writer McKinlay's fiction debut, a carefully modulated morality play, a middle-aged woman who knows she is dying struggles with a basic dilemma—"whether a good deed cancels a bad one, whether evil is undone by penance."

Married for over 20 years, Frances and Phillip live in rural England, where Frances has devoted herself to raising Phillip's now-25-year-old daughter Chloe, whose birth mother abandoned her, as her own. At 45, Frances is diagnosed with a fatal tumor, and Phillip drops his life in London to stay at home and care for her. But Frances has recently discovered a letter that links him romantically with a younger woman named Josee, the London-based editor of his books on marketing. Without confronting Phillip, Frances follows him into the city and witnesses what is obviously a farewell meeting. Over the next months, as she watches Phillip's behavior, she reflects back on her own behavior as a footloose 22-year-old in Mexico and feels compelled to record in writing her involvement with a group of wealthy Americans whose selfish hedonism bring to mind The Great Gatsby: The three couples—Patsy and Richard, Bee Bee and Ned, Sally and Mason—seem interchangeable when they first meet Frances at a bar and invite her to come stay with them at the lavish estate where they are spending the summer. But soon Frankie, as they call her, begins a passionate affair with Mason. She considers Sally the villain and chooses to ignore that Mason and Patsy are also lovers, until it is too late. Guilt over her own culpability in the affair, and in its aftermath, pervades Frances' last days, during which she recognizes Phillip's loyalty and love along with his betrayal. As the novel glides fluently between Frances' reactions as an obsessively thoughtful dying married woman and Frankie's as a callow girl whose selfish desire for Mason trumped all other reactions, an uneasy sense of ethical murkiness grows.

A riveting novel in which the deceptively clear narrative voice offers no easy answers.

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February 1, 2011
Its the summer of 1976, and Frances is drifting. Living in Mexico, occasionally teaching English to survive, she meets a group of wealthy Californians. The Severance family and a few of their friends have rented a local villa, where they indulge in unlimited drinking, sunbathing, and general hedonism. They invite Frances to stay, and as the days turn to weeks, she becomes deeply involved in their lives. Twenty years later, Frances is living in rural England with her architect-husband, Phillip, and has just been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. The discovery of a mysterious love letter addressed to him from a colleague brings back a flood of memories. As Frances faces the end of her life, she begins to reflect on her younger days, her time in Mexico, and her own illicit affair that ended in tragedy. The View from Here is an unexpected character study, an examination of people caught between the wiles of youth and the wisdom of age and of one woman who learns to accept the intrinsic value of both.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)