Montauk

by Nicola Harrison

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Montauk, Long Island, 1938.

For three months, this humble fishing village will serve as the playground for New York City’s wealthy elite. Beatrice Bordeaux was looking forward to a summer of reigniting the passion between her and her husband, Harry. Instead, tasked with furthering his investment interest in Montauk as a resort destination, she learns she’ll be spending twelve weeks sequestered with the high society wives at The Montauk Manor—a two-hundred room seaside hotel—while Harry pursues other interests in the city.

College educated, but raised a modest country girl in Pennsylvania, Bea has never felt fully comfortable among these privileged women, whose days are devoted not to their children but to leisure activities and charities that seemingly benefit no one but themselves. She longs to be a mother herself, as well as a loving wife, but after five years of marriage she remains childless while Harry is increasingly remote and distracted. Despite lavish parties at the Manor and the Yacht Club, Bea is lost and lonely and befriends the manor’s laundress whose work ethic and family life stir memories of who she once was.

As she drifts further from the society women and their preoccupations and closer toward Montauk’s natural beauty and community spirit, Bea finds herself drawn to a man nothing like her husband –stoic, plain spoken and enigmatic. Inspiring a strength and courage she had almost forgotten, his presence forces her to face a haunting tragedy of her past and question her future.

Desperate to embrace moments of happiness, no matter how fleeting, she soon discovers that such moments may be all she has, when fates conspire to tear her world apart…

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

As we drove up the tight and winding road, tree branches reached overhead toward each other like lovers’ hands desperate to connect…

I’d felt paranoid that everyone already knew about Harry’s philandering. How could they not? Women talked and Harry, apparently, was about as discreet with his affairs as a pack of rats going through a dumpster.

Sometimes I yearned for that forever feeling—those hours that stretched into days and days into a week, without a thought for tomorrow. It was simple then. We wore swimsuits all day long and we slept long and deeply at night, eager for it all to start again the next day, never thinking for a second that another day wouldn’t come.

“What’s important in situations like these is that you find a way to relax and nature will most certainly take its course.” … He jotted these thoughts down on a prescription pad, tore off the page and handed it to me. “Take this seriously,” he said. “It’s your duty to your husband and to America.”

As a kid anything seemed possible; in the real world, though, nothing was. Youth gave us an inflated sense of possibility, that you could achieve anything if you really went for it, but it felt as if you’d have to fight your whole life to get there, and most of us just got married and had children.

My Review:

This beautifully written story was taut with tension and kept me on edge while I was mesmerized by the lushly descriptive and enticing writing style. The storylines were wincingly well crafted and easily believable. This emotive tale upended me, I was quickly sucked into a confining and misogynistic 1938 vortex, something I would typically avoid – but not this time – I couldn’t put it down. I am totally in awe; this debut author has major skills and a bright future ahead.

Lies, deceit, rampant infidelities, and the petty dramas of social climbing women marked the days and nights of the betrayed and deeply disappointed Beatrice, and in many ways, she was just as tarnished and culpable as the rest, although she saw the hypocrisy and at least felt some guilt about it. Apparently the entitled wealthy and social elite still existed and lived quite well throughout the Depression. These compelling characters were rather vile yet kept me holding my breath and gripping my kindle from the very beginning to the crescendo finish that nearly broke me and left me in definite need of a spa day.

About the Author

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Born in England, Nicola Harrison moved to CA where she received a BA in Literature at UCLA before moving to NYC and earning an MFA in creative writing at Stony Brook. She is a member of The Writers Room, has short stories published in The Southampton Review and Glimmer Train and articles in Los Angeles Magazine and Orange Coast Magazine. She was the fashion and style staff writer for Forbes, had a weekly column at Lucky Magazine and is the founder of a personal styling business, Harrison Style. Montauk is Harrison’s debut novel.