Stafford is able to both observe Sonie and enter her; she’s speaking from the remove of adulthood but remembers the quicksilver state of the young mind:

At night, bound by the narrow walls of our kitchen, I was not always absorbed in my book about girls at boarding school whose clever mothers had sewed for months before their departure, making silk dresses and dark wool jumpers, warm wrappers, innumerable muslin guimpes, had crocheted fascinators and bought blue merino stockings. Although I envied the fortunate creatures, my own life, which I plotted in a variety of patterns, was richer. My hair became blond; my name was Antoinette de la Mar.

Proust demanded and rewarded Stafford’s attention; a tough act to follow. Sometimes her Proustian digressions come off as labored, but occasionally there’s a glimmer of genius. These days, Stafford’s submergence into psyche is so démodé as to feel refreshing, a contrast to what often seems the default obliqueness of the contemporary novel.

The novel’s first section grows stranger and more fevered than its opening pages suggest; Shura is not histrionic but truly mad (manic, she breaks into the Barstow, shuttered for the winter, to clean the sand out of its woven chairs—one of the best scenes in the book). I won’t spoil what befalls Sonie’s little brother, and you probably wouldn’t believe me even if I did.

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Sonie is transported from Chichester to Boston—to Miss Pride’s Pinckney Street mansion, the very place she’s long dreamed of—as we know she must be, since it’s the explicit promise of the novel from its first page. It’s impressive plotting by Stafford, confident enough to know that readers will mostly go wherever she leads them.

Stafford’s talents align with her ambitions more tidily in the latter half of the novel, where she moves on to channeling James. She does him one better, I think; rather than wry or ironic or suggestive, Stafford can come out with it and be funny.

Sonie observes: “I had noticed, from the beginning, that Miss Pride was extremely frugal of her laughter.” Sonie overhears party chatter: “She has two spurious Watteaus which are so charming one doesn’t mind their being frauds.” Sonie reports and we decide. Here’s Miss Pride again:

When I was your age, I deplored race prejudice. To my dear, single-minded Papa’s chagrin, I used to seek out your Israels and Rachels, the bigger the nose the better. But at last I admitted to myself that I was just like everyone else. I didn’t get on with them . . . their aggressiveness distressed me in public and their money mania at last got the better of my idealism. Now, while I say “live and let live” I must confess I sympathize with that particular of Hitler’s program.

Stafford is unafraid to make light of the truly horrific. She’s willing to look at Lucy Pride directly.