Winter

Starred review from October 19, 2015
Thomas Hardy fans will be engrossed by Nicholson’s fictional account of the true story of Hardy’s infatuation, at age 84, with a married 18-year-old amateur actress, Gertie Bugler, playing Tess in the local Corn Exchange production of Tess of the D’Urbervilles. This disconcerting tale is told from three alternating standpoints: Hardy’s, Gertie’s, and that of Hardy’s second wife, Florence. Although the women’s narratives are credible and entertaining, Hardy’s perspective dominates and captivates through its slow rhythms, antiquated vocabulary, and above all its third-person style featuring natural imagery, meandering syntax, and melancholy observations. In classic Hardy fashion, the novel begins with a rural landscape, zeroes in on the silhouette of an old man walking with his dog, and then reveals that the dog is named Wessex and the old man is the great novelist. Even before Florence has her say, the strains on their marriage are evident, what with Hardy preoccupied by work, memories, and increasingly by Gertie. Hardy invites Gertie to tea when Florence is away, watches Gertie’s performance from backstage, keeps a lock of her hair, and imagines eloping. Gertie, meanwhile, imagines a London stage career, while Florence imagines widowhood. As in his two previous novels, Nicholson (The Elephant Keeper) presents an impossible, inappropriate passion. This effort proves most remarkable for its deliciously archaic prose and portrait of the artist as an old man falling in love partly with a girl, partly with the disappearing countryside and lost youth she represents, and mostly with his own creation.

Starred review from October 1, 2015
Thomas Hardy's last love. In the winter of 1924, Hardy, 84, is living with his 45-year-old wife, Florence, and beloved dog, Wessex, in Dorchester. Their house has no electricity, and only with great difficulty has Florence managed to convince her husband to install a telephone. He feared, he said, that operators could listen in on their conversations. He refuses to have a car, although Florence offered to learn to drive. "He doesn't like anything new," Florence complains; "he would like the world to be as it was in eighteen fifty!" He is content to be isolated, in fact prefers it: Florence answers all his mail, declining interviews and invitations, while he retires to his chilly study and writes poetry. With tenderness and sympathy, Nicholson (The Elephant Keeper, 2009, etc.) imagines the writer's reclusive final years and the brief glimmer of passion that enlivened them. A local acting troupe, mounting a play based on Hardy's novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles, has cast the lovely young Gertie Bugler in the title role. Hardy, who has long been following her career, is irresistibly attracted. Each man, he believes, has "an ideal though unattainable female spirit" that "moves freely from one woman to another"; that spirit, for him, resides in Gertie. When Florence sees poems apparently celebrating this new love, she falls apart. Like his deceased first wife, Hardy observes, Florence "read a poem as if it was a scientific tract" to be interpreted literally; he, though, recognizes that the woman he addresses is a "shape veiled by shadow or mist": like his fictional heroines, she is a figment of his imagination]but, nonetheless, a powerful inspiration. Florence's jealousy and despair propel the plot, but this fine novel reveals more than marital tensions: Hardy's story becomes a meditation on love, regret, and an elusive yearning for happiness. Elegant, lyrical, and absorbing.

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November 15, 2015
Nicholson channels the spirit of Thomas Hardy here, portraying the British novelist and poet as a despairing, bitter old man, living in a dark house in Dorset in the 1920s. This kind of portrait can be either a very good or a very bad thing, depending on how much the reader likes Hardy. In the story, Hardy's gloom is pierced by the prospect of having a gorgeous local actress, with whom he is infatuated, play Tess in a local production of Hardy's novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles. But Hardy fears this infatuation may be his undoingand so does his second wife, Florence, younger but every bit as bitter as Hardy himself. Hardy's growing passion for the local actress is the focus of the booka situation reminiscent of Dickens' affair with actress Ellen Ternan, except that Hardy's age and vacillation take away the suspense. The story is told from the points of view of Hardy, Florence, and the actress. Nicholson succeeds in sounding very much like Hardy, with brilliantly realized landscape and settings. The plot, however, lacks the intensity of Hardy's novels. Still, this will prove fascinating for the writer's devotees.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)