Originally published in 3000Melbourne magazine.
Part murder mystery, part coming of age story, part portrait of the bored housewives of 1950s New England, Liza Klaussmann’s debut novel is a compelling and richly evoked story about the fracture lines that run through relationships.
The narrative of Tigers in Red Weather swings back and forth over two decades from 1944 to 1969, split into five sections, each narrated by a different member of the Derringer family. At the centre of the novel is the beautiful, impulsive Nick and her husband Hughes, who is handsome and charismatic, but distant towards her since the war. Nick’s quiet, insecure cousin Helena, always in her shadow, is married to a man who is obsessively in love with another woman, and she numbs herself with pills. Between the two couples are two children, Daisy and Ed – one a lithe, sunny tennis champion, one a strange and creepy loner intent on private “research” into human behavior – who grow up spending their summers at the family’s beloved Tiger House on Martha’s Vineyard. In 1959, the summer that they are twelve, they discover a dead body – and everything starts to unravel.
The strength of this novel is in the bright, sweltering summer atmosphere that Klaussman creates. With the sparse language and evocative phrases you might expect from her as the great-great-great-granddaughter of Herman Melville, she creates a glamorous, nostalgic picture of Martha’s Vineyard and the beautiful, damaged people who live there. The feeling is strongly conjured from the very opening scene, when we meet Nick and Helena as twenty-somethings: “They were sitting in the backyard of their house on Elm Street, wearing their slips and drinking gin neat out of old jelly jars.” The fragrance of summer is sweet and youthful, full of hope. Both girls are on the cusp of being reunited with the men they love after the war, and looking forward to glamorous, lazy summers ahead. “Houses, husbands and midnight gin parties… Nothing’s going to change.”
But although these images have a dreamy, escapist allure, this isn’t just a frothy beach read. There are dark undercurrents running all throughout the book, rippling quietly beneath the heat and the perfume and the garden parties. The heat is suffocating, leaving everything to wilt and fester. The lawn is a “fetid carpet” of drooping flowers and the pavement is covered with “flash-fried” insects. Klaussman delves deep into the tensions of post-war domesticity and the strained relationship between Nick and Hughes. Nick, so filled with yearning and a “rapacious appetite for life”, finds herself struggling to breathe, locked in a marriage she doesnt recognise. “They were supposed to be different, different from all the people who didn’t want things and didn’t do things and weren’t special,” she thinks. “They were supposed to be the kind of people who said to hell with it, who threw their wine glasses into the fireplace, who jumped off cliffs. They were not supposed to be careful people.”
The more dramatic turn the events take towards the end of the novel isn’t entirely convincing, but if you can suspend your disbelief the theatrics are quite thrilling. With its complex and vulnerable characters, vivid sense of place and deftly controlled pacing, this is a well-crafted novel that takes you right into the heart of its beautiful and messy world.