Novelists with strong connections to the movie business are expected to turn out slam-bang potboilers or thinly disguised autobiographical accounts of addiction and marital dysfunction—think Elmore Leonard, William Goldman, Jackie Collins, Carrie Fisher, etc. Amy Ephron, a producer and screenwriter (and sister to writer/director Nora Ephron), did just that in her early novels, Bruised Fruit and Biodegradable Soap. But in 1997, Ephron apparently decided the world did not need another airport book, and went literary: first with A Cup of Tea, an elaboration of the classic Katherine Mansfield short story of the same name, followed by White Rose, a spare epic set during the Cuban war for independence from Spain. Her latest, One Sunday Morning (William Morrow, 213 pp., $21.95), is an earnest homage to another female literary great, Edith Wharton.
The book hauls Wharton's stock of fin de siecle New York characters—venomous socialites, sensitive and doomed young souls, suave cads—forward a couple of decades into the roaring '20s. Ephron has largely replaced Wharton's drawing rooms and grand dinner parties with cabarets and gin-soaked bashes in rented rooms, but the social conventions that governed old New York are still in force, and some indiscretions remain unforgivable. A group of idle, privileged 20-somethings cannot resist punishing one of their cohort after she is seen leaving a hotel in the company of another woman's fiancé. Their spiteful gossip kicks off a chain of events that leads to heartache and loss all around. "Mary wondered if she would ever return to New York. She realized she was being dramatic and she would, of course. But then she thought about Lizzie Carswell and wondered whether Lizzie would ever return. Had her father really sent her to be a nanny in Switzerland? What happened to girls who worked as au pairs? She wondered whether Lizzie Carswell's father had even waited on the dock long enough to say goodbye."
The liberated women of Ephron's novel are as cruel to their sisters as Wharton's grand ladies ever were, but their modern self-consciousness also puts them in conflict with the social code that governs their lives. They are adrift in a time of cultural transformation, and Ephron renders their angst in an economical, detached style that evokes their sense of isolation. Amy Ephron will read and sign One Sunday Morning at David-Kidd Booksellers, 6 p.m. May 9.
—Maria Browning
