Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. There is plenty of charm and occasional poignance here even if the novel makes you long for a proper biography of the real woman who inspired it.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. And Lillian’s dialogue is sometimes too arch, too written, to be credible. While the book effectively underscores the fierce struggles of career women like Lillian in a pre-feminist time, it can also feel schematic. But the chance encounters lift her spirits, helping her come to terms with her past. The city is in decline-the Subway Vigilante is on the loose-which Lillian seems to equate with her own fall from grace. An old woman now, she roams the streets of Manhattan alone, passing landmarks public as well as private and befriending several New York characters (all too benevolent to be believed) along the way. Intercut with this narrative is the more fanciful story of Lillian’s adventures on New Year’s Eve 1984. The marriage eventually fractures, and Lillian suffers a mental breakdown. They marry, but when she becomes pregnant with their son, Johnny, she's forced to quit her job-maternity leave being a thing of the future. Though a self-styled “scoffer at love,” Lillian falls hard for Max Caputo, the head rug buyer at Macy’s.
Macy’s, where she turns out witty rhymes that promote the department store on her own, she writes light verse, eventually published in several volumes. A smart, stylish, independent young woman, she lands a job at R.H. Rooney’s Lillian Boxfish comes to Manhattan in 1926 to make her mark.
Rooney ( O, Democracy!, 2014, etc.) has written a lively, fictionalized version of Fishback’s story, drawing on real milestones but imagining her subject’s inner life.
A poet and writer of clever, innovative ad copy, Margaret Fishback was admired in her time-the pre– Mad Men era-but is mostly forgotten now.
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