Nico and Scarlett

This is a literary novel about an affair, but its real subject is not adultery so much as hunger: hunger for love, for witness, for artistic credit, for freedom, for stability, for another life. The story follows Nico Brazil, a forty-eight-year-old editor newly arrived in Los Angeles; Scarlett Henry, the beautiful wife of Nico’s lover; Bo Henry, the man between them; and Dinah Bell, Nico’s elderly half-sister, whose buried literary past slowly becomes the novel’s second centre.

At the beginning, Nico is in Palm Springs, sleeping outside in the desert because she likes places her body “couldn’t quite take.” She is alone among coupled people, hiding texts from Bo Henry, a married lawyer with whom she has been having a secret affair. Nico tells herself she will end it the next time he visits, as she has told herself before. But when Bo arrives at her Laurel Canyon cottage, they immediately fall back into the sensual ease of their “extravaganza,” the word Nico prefers to “affair.” Bo wants more. He asks her to go to Seattle with him, to spend a whole weekend together openly enough to sleep and wake beside each other. Nico resists because that would turn their enclosed pleasure into something “heavy.” She understands that part of what keeps the affair alive is the incompleteness of it.

Nico is also moving to Ladera Heights to take over care of Dinah Bell, her much older half-sister. Dinah once had a relationship with Dexter Buffalo, a celebrated Black novelist, and Nico believes Dinah secretly wrote Buffalo’s great book A Story of Eve. “Because he didn’t write it,” Nico tells Bo. “Dinah did.” Nico wants Dinah to write her own memoir and reclaim her voice. Dinah, however, is hostile, theatrical, proud, and aging badly. She lives in a decaying triplex, surrounded by books, trinkets, locked rooms, old music, and memories she refuses to organise for anyone else. When Nico arrives, Dinah tells her, “Get out,” then demands soup and exactly three Saltines. Nico notices a padlocked pantry, a symbol of all Dinah keeps shut away.