‘Tigers in Red Weather’ burns brightly
"If there's one thing you can be sure about in this life, it's that you won't always be kissing the right person."
That's the crucial lesson "wild and beautiful and hideous" Nick Derringer imparts to her 12-year-old daughter, Daisy, in Liza Klaussmann's atmospheric first novel, Tigers in Red Weather.
Nick should know: 14 years after her handsome husband, attorney Hughes Derringer, returned from World War II distant and "untouchable," haunted by a wartime romance, she's become adept at filling the void with cocktails and men. These include the trumpet player she's just been cavorting with down by the boat house during the Derringers' annual summer lawn party at Tiger House, the family's tony Martha's Vineyard estate.
After the war, both Nick and the cousin she grew up with at Tiger House quickly learn that the housewife's life of domesticity and social ornamentation is painfully empty, even with children. Helena, widowed early in the war, heads out west to marry Avery Lewis, a not-so-smooth operator and would-be filmmaker with designs on his new wife's assets — including her Vineyard cottage. She fills her yawning hours with scotch and the prescription pills Avery plies her with to keep her submissive.
Affluent, controlling Nick and poor, passive Helena reunite with their children for summers at Tiger House, where the martinis flow as freely as the bad feelings. Daisy competes at tennis and falls hard for a local swain who's more interested in her mother. Silver-eyed, impassive Ed Lewis, one of the creepiest adolescents this side of A Clockwork Orange, sneaks around spying on people, calling his efforts to see "what's inside them" research. He gets an eyeful after following a man who's been carrying on with his family's Portuguese maid behind the tennis courts.
With echoes of Nancy Drew murder mysteries and The Great Gatsby that extend well beyond the names Nick and Daisy — plus allusions to Wallace Stevens, to which it owes its abstruse title — Tigers in Red Weather is a deftly constructed, suspenseful family melodrama that exposes the dark innards of privilege.
Spanning 25 years and skillfully told from five characters' divergent points of view, this satisfying saga by a great-great-great granddaughter of Herman Melville is about loneliness, the end of innocence, and people so closed off that they fantasize about cracking each other open, "like a nut or a crab, to find out what was going on inside."
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Heller McAlpin writes the Reading in Common column for The Barnes & Noble Review.