The Weeping Woman
Michael Kilian’s day job consists of writing a weekly newspaper column, mostly commenting with a rather attractive, sly shallowness on the putative centers of Power and Culture in this republic, but this novel, a “Jazz Age mystery,” takes us back to an era when a Michael Arlen was doing the barbed social commentary. Bedford Green, the relatively impecunious but handsome and well-dressed protagonist, runs a Manhattan art gallery. His “very beautiful young assistant” Sloane Smith is weeping because her friend Polly Swanscott seems to have vanished, and Polly’s repellent parents reluctantly hire Bedford to find their errant daughter. Bedford and Sloane, following Polly’s trail, take ship for France, where they proceed to meet everyone who was anyone in the 1920’s artistic and ex-pat scene. At times the name-dropping reaches an awful comic majesty of its own.
In the midst of all this captious and possibly tongue-in-cheek flummery, Kilian actually has a grim, believable, and well-crafted little plot running; he is just witty and skillful enough as a writer to keep the reader reading, and in the end the novel’s narrative attains a sort of horrible authenticity – though Bedford Green is a pretty inept hero, with all the sex drive of a gelded codfish, and there is not much jazz – or music of any kind – in this alleged Jazz Age mystery. Good plot, high-mediocre ambiance, and the most convincing character – Polly herself – never appears.
