The Strays
Lily is eight in 1930s Australia when she is befriended by Eva Trentham. The Trenthams (avant-garde artist and father Evan, mother Helena, older sister Bea, younger sister Heloise, and best friend Eva) own a large rambling house where modernist artists gather, work, pose nude, debate, drink and live. Helena affectionately calls them her strays. Lily is awestruck by the Bohemian lifestyle of the adults, and excited/unsettled by the way the children are allowed to run free. As teenagers, the girls imitate the adults: smoking, drinking and thinking themselves more mature than they are. Evan believes he and Helena have created an artists’ paradise, but their world is imperfect. Artists disagree, sisters fight, friends hide secrets, and then…
Reminiscent of the The Great Gatsby‘s Nick Carraway, Lily is the outsider-narrator, yearning to belong to this family she is always a part of and yet always apart from. The prologue and other bits of narration are told from the present day, when a middle-aged Lily has not spoken to Eva in decades because of some unnamed catastrophe. Lily shares the memories of her childhood, “like showing the slides from a life-changing journey.”
The artists in The Strays are fictional. At one point, Lily explains that the people near famous artists are not treated with full respect by history, used only “as an interpretive lens through which to analyze [their] work.” Here, Bitto reverses the lens, showing the effect of the artist on others’ lives. Bitto’s prose is poetry, and she paints her characters in bold, colorful strokes. You want to meet and be included in their lives, and yet at the same time, you are grateful it is only a story and you are allowed your distance. The Strays is sweet-nostalgia and bitter-tragedy. Highly recommended.
