At the high end, the genre was called “romantic suspense,” and at the low end-drugstore paperbacks on whose covers distressed women in nightgowns cowered before big, spooky houses-the novels were “gothics.”
In the pages of these books, you could find handsome men who were also (sometimes) wicked, and marriages that did not amount to happily ever after. Although these books seemed to be read mostly by middle-aged ladies who used needlepoint bookmarks, for a certain generation of girl readers they provided a palatable introduction to “grownup” fiction in the same way that science fiction did for many of their male counterparts. Whitney, Dorothy Eden, or some other now forgotten best-selling author-that a bored thirteen-year-old might find on the shelves of a sleepy suburban branch library, bound in the waxy-feeling buckram of special library editions and with the title stamped on the spine in white Gothic Bold type. “Tangerine” is no “Rebecca,” but, for a certain type of reader, it recollects the host of novels that “Rebecca” inspired, the sort of book-written, perhaps, by Phyllis A. But the prevailing influence is Daphne du Maurier, who translated the motifs of “Jane Eyre” into a set of twentieth-century-ready tropes with her masterpiece, “ Rebecca,” a novel that, like the woman who wrote it, has been critically underrated and popularly adored since its publication, in 1938. The novel employs devices borrowed from Patricia Highsmith’s books, those ruthless tales of unstable, swappable identity. Shirley Jackson, whose husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, taught at Bennington, is referred to during a campus flashback. Lucy grills the glad-handing John about the Brontë sisters at the bar to which he drags the two women on the day she arrives in Tangier. “Tangerine” is full of allusions to other books and writers. Also unannounced is Lucy’s plan to pry Alice out of her marriage and carry her off for a series of globe-trotting escapades like the ones the two of them imagined together back in their clapboard house in Vermont. Alice Shipley, psychologically fragile since the deaths of her parents in a house fire when she was an adolescent, is married to John, who does something vaguely secretive for “the government.” Lucy Mason, a scholarship girl who bonded with Alice as a fellow-orphan during their freshman year at Bennington College, has ditched her job typing manuscripts for a publisher in New York and appeared without advance notice on Alice’s Moroccan doorstep. This is the craving satisfied by Christine Mangan’s début, “ Tangerine” (Ecco), the story of two women, former college roommates, who are reunited in Tangier in 1956.
The pleasure of reading novels comes in assorted flavors, and one of them, certainly, is nostalgia.
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