Saturn’s Return to New York
Sara Gran is one of those rare authors capable of being funny and poignant without falling back on familiar cues of melodrama. Saturn’s Return to New York came out from SoHo Press in the gloomy year 2001. It tells the story of Mary Forrest, a young woman whose life of quiet desperation is the byproduct of childhood trauma. Her father died when she was a girl; her mother, Evelyn, is a star of the New York literary world, a relentless fabricator of alternate histories coming undone before the advance of a devastating disease. Evelyn’s ability to confound Mary with bombshells of family history provide the story’s major moments of confrontation, moments that dissolve into resentful confusion for Mary, dismissive claims of veracity from Evelyn.
This is not a New York story, but a Greenwich Village one, framed by an astrologer’s warning to Mary that her twenty ninth year coincides with Saturn’s return to its position at Mary’s birth. It’s a make or break sort of year, it won’t occur again for twenty nine years. Mary is back in the Village, despite the fact she lives in Inwood, following Evelyn’s bizarre trail of mental disarray. Lots of landmarks have vanished over the years: Balducci’s, Jefferson Market, The Peacock Cafe, and, if you know the neighborhood, you can appreciate all the blank spaces first hand through Evelyn.
I love stories where astrologers quote Raymond Chandler and people go to Italian restaurants on MacDougal Street for guidance as much as food. Since this novel has both I was hooked.