Andrea Lee

Andrea Lee has the leadoff story, The Children, inbthe New Yorker fiction issue; good to see her work again, as she's been on and off in the magazine for maybe 40 years - I think she debuted w a nonfiction/journalistic piece on the Soviet Union pocked up from the slush pile - almost unheard of for nonfiction. I really liked her debut novel in the 80s, Sarah Phillips (?), but she never really followed up on that nor did she follow the kind of literary course that would have made her a better-known author. Most of her life from what I know has been abroad - and this story is a piece of that, centering on an American woman who lives mostly in Italy and is spending some time w a literary friend and translator of her works in a remote Madagascar island - this seems as if it may be close to a self portrait. Lee overwhelms is at first w many characters and many, at least to me, obscure place names and topical references (just not up on the various Madagascar tribes), but the story in essence is quite simple and beautiful: the two first-world women meet a young woman on the island (her father is an Italian w addiction and other problems) and try to connect her and her bad brother w their estranged father. They fail - and it turns out the father has recently died - and the girl goes on a downward course, about which these women can do nothing. In a short section at the end, much later, the Lee-like character reflects on her own children and wonders about her responsibilities for them and reflects briefly on the social inequalities and on the privileges of class, even for those w the best of intentions.

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