Book Review: The Book of Lost and Found

The Book of Lost and Found by Lucy Foley

I read this book based on the recommendation of someone I greatly admire, who, it seems, has vastly different tastes in literature than I do. Don’t let the name “Lucy Foley” fool you: this is not a dark and tense thriller. It’s so different from the kind of books I usually read that I was thrown off when I was a few hours into it and no one had been murdered yet.

The story follows Kate Darling, a young woman who recently lost her mother. Her mother had been an orphan that became a very well-known and talented ballerina. Kate comes by a drawing of a woman who very much resembles her mother. Kate thinks if she can track down the drawing’s artist and subject, she might find some information about her mother’s birth family.

In a sense, this is a love story about Tom and Alice, who meet in England as children and then reunite at several points in each others’ lives. Tom and Alice, you are soon to understand, had a great undying love for one another. Kate travels to Corsica to meet Tom, who is a famous artist and the selfsame one who drew the picture. Tom tells her stories of his past, and of Kate’s grandmother, as Kate luxuriates in the island heat of Corsica and falls for Tom’s adopted grandson Oliver, who’s pretty hot on his own.

The prose drips with description. If you love travel books, you’ll enjoy the sensory details of the various exotic locales: Corsica, Paris, New York, and some quaint seaside English town I don’t remember the name of. They have meals on the terrazzo and in secluded grottos, and in fine restaurants, and there is always, always wine. Everything they do seems luxurious and beautiful and above all else, artistic.

The descriptions of the art and artistry kinda bugged me, actually. Everyone takes it as a given that artistic talent is a rare and unique gift untethered from training or practice. June Darling, Kate’s mother, is a ballet dancer of grace and beauty, and you can hear the sighs of longing and passion as they describe the world’s loss when she died. But how much of a career could she have had, really? A decade? Maybe two if you realllly stretched it? It’s a fantastical interpretation of the art world. Foley can take an entire paragraph describing the exact expression in the eyes of a subject of a painting. Kate carries around a camera and you can almost feel her wring her hands with the fear that she doesn’t have the true spark of “any good.” I guess I’ve painted too much, danced too much, written too much, to put any stock in the “oh, but if you are only ‘good enough’ you can become a GREAT AHTIST instead of being positively wasted as a lawyer.” Okay, so maybe it worked that way in the 1930s, if you were a well-spoken man with good connections, but in my experience “good/genius” and “famous/commercially successful” are two sets that have only a sliver of intersect.

Kate didn’t have tons of personality, as she is merely the story-collector from Tom and Alice. It really is the story of Tom and Alice and the things that contrived to keep these two lovebirds apart their whole lives. Some of it’s inevitable, like war, but a lot of it has to do with people straight-up lying to other people. “I couldn’t tell him the truth, you see, because it would have ruined his life.” It’s hard to sympathize with liars. And these are characters (I don’t know if it’s being English or what) where asking a personal question is practically taboo. Like, straight up asking “how are you related to that person?” makes people splutter with apoplexy. It gave me Downton Abbey vibes; everyone is graceful and beautiful and restrained, but there’s manipulative rottenness just under the surface.

So I can’t say I liked this novel. The characters just seemed so mushy and tepid. They have problems, yes, but their problems are mostly because people don’t communicate. Tom could have found her earlier, but it would have required some effort and maybe an uncomfortable conversation. Alice could have tracked him down instead of just been a creepy stalker, but it just wouldn’t have been proper. Or some shit. Their words say each other were their greatest love, but their actions say other things were more important. How much of a tragedy is it, when you’re losing something that wasn’t that important to you? The book left me unsatisfied, but not really forlorn at their sad ending, because I just didn’t care that much about them.




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