Frances and Bernard
*Starred Review* Bauer follows her memoir about growing up evangelical, Not That Kind of Girl (2009), with a debut novel of stunning subtlety, grace, and depth. After meeting at a writers’ colony in 1957, Frances, a Catholic working-class Irish gal from Philadelphia, and Bernard, a Massachusetts Puritan blue blood who has converted to Catholicism, embark on a life-altering correspondence. Bauer’s use of the epistolary form is masterful as she forges a passionately spiritual, creative, and romantic dialogue between characters based on two literary giants famous for their brilliant letters, Flannery O’Connor and Robert Lowell. Though she changes the particulars of O’Connor’s life, Bauer retains the great writer’s rigor, humor, faith, penetrating insights, and wisdom. In Bernard, she embraces Lowell’s protean powers, tempestuousness, and manic depression. They begin as friends sharing their thoughts and feelings about the church and writing and gradually, cautiously on Frances’ part, venture into love. Frances can be lacerating; Bernard is extravagant. And Bauer is phenomenally fluent in the voices and sensibilities she so intently emulates, composing dueling letters of breathtaking wit, seduction, and heartbreak. Spanning a stormy decade, Bauer’s piercing novel is dynamic in structure, dramatic in emotion and event, and fierce in its inquiry into religion, love, and art. --Donna Seaman--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.