Laura has always been haunted by her mother’s disappearance in 1972. She was twelve when her mother, Viola, took her and her younger sister to school and was never seen again. Thirty years later and restless with her life, Laura travels to the Italian city where she was born, Brindisi, to use the few clues she has about her mother’s life to try and solve at least a few mysteries. Mary Morris’s new novel, The Red House, tells two stories: Laura’s search for answers and the past that tormented Viola.
Viola never talked much about her life before she married Laura’s father, had her daughters, and moved to the United States. But she painted. Many of Viola’s paintings show what Viola called the Red House. She would never say why she was there or how she came to be there. It’s only a chance meeting, decades later, between Laura and an elderly man, that the truth finally starts to come out. Much to Laura’s shock, Viola is Jewish and she, along with her parents and brother, was forced to relocate to an internment camp (closely modeled on Alberobello) along with approximately 200 other Italian, Romanian, and Yugoslav Jews. The Red House was where they were kept, cold and starving and always under threat of death, for years.
The Red House moves back and forth between the early 2000s and the mid-1940s. In the 2000s, Tomasso Bassano recounts as much of Viola’s story as he knew. Tomasso was a reluctant camp guard (to avoid more dangerous duties with the Italian military) who grew enchanted with Viola. He even takes Laura to what’s left of the Red House so that she can see where Viola and her family lived. The chapters set in the 1940s are much more interesting. As troubled as Laura is, her character didn’t hold my attention nearly as much as Viola did. Viola’s life—and the turmoil she must have felt after the war—fascinated me because she is frequently forced to choose between doing what’s best for herself and sharing scant resources to help her family. It’s impossible to come away from those kinds of dilemmas unscathed.
I would’ve rated this book higher than I did but, I have to confess, I was very annoyed by some of the choices Morris made in the conclusions of these two stories. At the risk of spoiling the ending, I feel that the coda that explains what really happened to Viola the day she disappeared ruined the mystery that had surrounded her character throughout the book. Because we get her story via Laura, Tomasso, and others, we never hear Viola speak for herself. I hate to pick on a book for not being what I wanted it to be, but I think an ambiguous ending would’ve been more fitting for all that delicious unknowability.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.
