The White Rose

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “I’m sorry, Sophie.”

  “Oliver.” And she gets off the chair and sits down, beside him, on the floor. She takes his head in her hands and makes him look at her, though it’s too dark to really look. “I love you,” she tells him. “I want this. I want you.”

  Oliver, like something switched off, stops crying. “Really?”

  “We don’t know what will happen. We don’t even know if there’s a problem.”

  He nods, terrified.

  “I’m a brave woman,” she reminds him. “You said so.”

  “I did,” Oliver agrees. “You are.”

  “What you told me, what you’re afraid of,” says Sophie, “that’s not where we end. It’s where we begin.” She smiles. “You see?”

  “Yes,” he says, because he does. And that’s a gift, of course, like anything of real value, even if he will never know precisely whom to thank. He holds her and holds her, and laughs out loud, and says, “Then let’s begin.”

  Acknowledgments

  I must, by all means, express my most heartfelt thanks to Richard Strauss and Hugo Von Hofmannsthal for the gift of Der Rosenkavalier. That a work so intuitive about women’s experience was created entirely by men is an ongoing source of wonder to me. If I wore a hat, I would tip it.

  I thank Michael Davis of Elan Flowers in Manhattan and Stephen Scanniello, eminent rosarian, for teaching me more about flowers in general and roses in particular than I had any right to pretend I knew. Penelope Coker Hall told me all about life in Millbrook and Corinne Linardic, MD, helped me with medical research. Charlotte Wilcox’s epitaph was ruthlessly stolen from Epitaphs to Remember: Remarkable Inscriptions from New England Gravestones by Janet Greene. The chapter about Bedford Hills owes much to Jean Harris’s book They Always Call Us Ladies, and even more to the incomparable Hettie Jones, who helped me get it right, or at least right-ish. I am, as ever, grateful to Deborah Michel, goddess of plot, for her incisive reading and great friendship. I thank Pam Bernstein for the purloining of her Hamptons home (and so much more), Joan Hamburg for the benefit of her experiences, and the Bread Loaf School of English for serving as my virtual artists’ colony, these past years.

  Thank you, thank you, Suzanne Gluck, for all of the enthusiasm and support you brought to this novel, and thank you, Jonathan Burnham, for giving it such a good home.

  PRAISE FOR THE WHITE ROSE

  “Jean Hanff Korelitz's incisive and urbane new novel, THE WHITE ROSE, harks back to the gender confusions of Shakespeare's comedies while adding some surprising contemporary twists…THE WHITE ROSE, a retelling of Richard Strauss's Rosenkavalier, is really a roman a clef, a sendup of gossip columnists and Manhattan strivers and a paean to professional fulfillment. Korelitz's characters—charming, idealistic and contradictory—are what that make this novel so appealing…This novel represents a significant step forward.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “THE WHITE ROSE is a delight. A novel of manners and love, it is droll, sexy, and very clever.”

  —Scott Turow

  “This is a great love story—tender, sophisticated, perverse, drenched in feeling. Jean Hanff Korelitz has a sharp eye for the social workings of modern Manhattan and the backgrounds are utterly convincing. But she also knows how to talk about love in all its unexpected varieties with verve and sympathy. She joins sensuality to worldliness, frivolity to deep seriousness—and she manages to talk about all the gripping topics of our day, including race, wealth, aging and our historical legacy. This is a book that will appeal to every reader.”

  —Edmund White

  “THE WHITE ROSE is such a deeply satisfying read, the kind we have missed and longed for: a real story peopled by intriguing characters behaving badly in the most gratifying and acutely witty ways. Every sentence sparkles and every dilemma entertains.”

  —Elinor Lipman

  “Korelitz is a strong writer…capable of descriptions that are hers alone.”

  —Washington Post

  “Korelitz is alert both to New York’s social geometry and to the melancholy that underlies the glittering surface of her novel.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Juicy Fun.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “A modern-day Rosenkavalier, as atmospherically situated among Manhattan’s affluent Jewish elite as the Strauss opera was among Vienna’s aristocrats…Elegant and melancholy yet surprisingly optimistic, warmed by full-bodied characterizations and expert delineation of complex emotions.”

  —Kirkus

  “The belief that love always involves sacrifice and is worth the sacrifice it demands drives this warm, worldly novel. Even when their own comfort is at stake, Korelitz's characters succumb to generous impulses, making this a satisfying, emotionally rich read.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Korelitz persuasively conveys the depth of her paramours’ emotions and perceptively gauges their motivations in an insightful, sensitive, and poignant romance.”

  —Booklist

  “A heady bloom, ripe with unlikely yet rewarding elements of romance.”

  —Library Journal

  “You don’t have to be an opera buff to appreciate Jean Hanff Korelitz’s dramatic novel.”

  —New York Post

  “THE WHITE ROSE resonates with a bittersweet sense of time passing and happiness that cannot last. Its gently melancholy mood and deliberate pacing make it quite different from Korelitz’s previously published fiction.”

  —Newsday

  ALSO BY JEAN HANFF KORELITZ

  You Should Have Known

  Admission

  The Sabbathday River

  A Jury of Her Peers

  Reading Group Guide

  Introduction

  “We’re taking a position that celebrates the transience of the flower. Not that we don’t prolong the bloom as long as we can, but we recognize that a flower’s impermanence is part of its beauty.”

  A sweeping tale of love and deception, wealth and beauty, obligation and desire, The White Rose is as seductive a story as the flower for which it’s named.

  Marian Kahn, a forty-eight-year-old professor of history at Columbia University, is in the midst of an affair with a man twenty-two years her junior. Although Oliver’s wish for commitment is genuine, Marian knows the day will come when they must part ways. She will never leave her marriage, no matter how passionately she feels for Oliver, and she doubts his own devotion can last.

  Then Oliver commits a spontaneous and seemingly harmless act, setting in motion a series of unforeseeable events that lead him to Sophie Klein.

  A graduate student in history and an idiosyncratic heiress, Sophie is engaged to Marian’s pompous cousin, Bart. Oliver’s deception eventually builds to a startling confrontation, bringing harsh truths to light and forcing Marian, Oliver, and Sophie to each evaluate what they’re seeking from life—and to learn that love, like even the most beautiful of blooms, is often transient.

  With The White Rose, which was inspired by Richard Strauss’s opera Der Rosenkavalier, Jean Hanff Korelitz has crafted both a thought-provoking treatise on social mores and a compelling page-turner.

  A Conversation with Jean Hanff Korelitz

  Q: When did you first see the opera Der Rosenkavalier? What was it about the story that inspired you to put a new twist on it for The White Rose? Are you an opera devotee?

  A: Despite having been dragged to many operas over the years, I have never been a devotee of the art form (much to the disappointment of my mother, who adores opera and did the dragging), but when I first saw Der Rosenkavalier in London in 1983, I had an extraordinarily powerful reaction to it. Perhaps that had something to do with the fact that I’d just been dropped by a man I was in love with in favor of a woman twice my age, or perhaps, even then, I identified strongly with the character of the Marschallin, who knows her young lover will one day leave her for a woman his own age. In the twenty years that followed my first viewing of the opera,
as I myself progressed from ingénue to woman-of-a-certain-age, those impressions grew even more powerful. I admired the goodness and decency of the three major characters, and honored their efforts to do the right thing, even as they struggled with their own, very human flaws.

  Q: What appealed to you about setting the book in contemporary Manhattan versus another time and place?

  A: I think much writing (and, I suppose, much other art) can begin with a what if question. What if Der Rosenkavalier were happening not in 18th century Vienna, among aristocrats, but in late 20th century Manhattan, in the upper middle class Jewish setting I myself grew up in? I have a great deal of personal nostalgia embedded in this novel, and feel much tenderness for these characters, even as I occasionally poke fun at them.

  Q: In the Acknowledgements sections you state in regard to Der Rosenkavalier: “That a work so intuitive about women’s experience was created entirely by men is an ongoing source of wonder to me.” What does The White Rose say about women’s experience?

  A: It seems to be part of our received wisdom that only women can truly illuminate what it means to be female. (This derives, in part, from the feminist literary criticism that was part of my own education.) I’m as much in thrall to that notion as anyone else, so much so that I’m always surprised when I come across a Madame Bovary, a Portia, or a Marschallin. I must give credit where it’s due. Every time I see Der Rosenkavalier or reread the libretto, I understand that Richard Strauss and his librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, did not just portray the Marschallin’s circumstances, they truly understood what she was enduring. Almost exactly one hundred years after the fact, I salute their great accomplishment.

  Q: Both Marian and Sophie have devoted themselves to studying history. Is history something that interests you? Do you enjoy the research aspect of writing?

  A: I always want to know what happened, how we got here, and whether we’ve learned anything along the way. Even so, I despise the research, itself. (If I didn’t, I’d be locked up in an ivory tower by now, studying some obscure thing or other.) When I wrote my first novel, A Fury of Her Peers, I used to write up to the very sentence in which I needed a question answered, then figure out the answer to the question, and I’ve pretty much stuck by that strategy ever since. For this novel, I had to learn about 18th century England, rose breeding, foster care in New York City, cancer drugs from the 1980s and how flower dealers secure their inventory. Some of that was fun, and some was drudgery. I’m grateful to people who knew far more than I did about so many things, and were willing to talk to me.

  Q: The White Rose is essentially a story within a story. Why did you choose to share in detail the story of Charlotte Wilcox’s life rather than merely allude to her? What does it add to the narrative?

  A: I think Charlotte is a woman for all times because the thing she has learned—how to snatch personal happiness from the jaws of misfortune—is something we all need to learn, no matter when or where we are living, no matter how outwardly fortunate and unfortunate we may be. Marian understands that she has been no less a beneficiary of Charlotte’s example than Charlotte’s legion of fans, and that learning from her subject has enabled her to make peace with her own choices.

  Q: Is Charlotte Wilcox an actual historical figure? If not, did you base her on anyone in particular?

  A: Charlotte is fictional, but she is very (and I mean very) loosely inspired by Charlotte Lennox, (c.1727–1804), who was born in the American colonies and spent her adult life in Britain. The author of several novels, most notably The Female Quixote (1752), and once celebrated by Samuel Johnson as a superior woman of letters, she nonetheless died in poverty and obscurity.

  Q: Do you have a favorite scene in the book?

  A: I do have a favorite scene. Twice during the course of the novel, we get to experience a long day in Oliver’s life, a day full of distressing experiences for him. At the end of each of these two days, he will encounter Sophie, and both times she will handily deprive him of whatever equilibrium he retains. Which of these is my favorite scene? Guess.

  Q: Your two previous novels, The Sabbathday River and A Fury of Her Peers, are both thrillers. Why did you depart from that style of writing to pen The White Rose? Although this book is not a “thriller,” in what ways is it suspenseful?

  A: I have a strong capacity for self-delusion, and to this day I maintain that A Fury of Her Peers was a Greek tragedy masquerading as a courtroom thriller and that The Sabbathday River was a literary novel in which Nathaniel Hawthorne ran amok through a bizarre true-life Irish case of infanticide. After two such flights of fancy, it was something of a relief to write a novel whose genre the critics and I could agree on. I always took great care with my writing, whether describing a courtroom scene or a moment of intense self-discovery a character was experiencing. By the same token, it was always necessary for me that my novels had a strong story. (I have personally flung aside any number of beautifully written books in which nothing happened.) The books I love to read are beautifully written, and never stop surprising me. I have always tried to write books like that, and I will continue to try.

  Q: How did the process of writing this book differ from that of The Sabbathday River and A Fury of Her Peers?

  A: It was not so different. As with The Sabbathday River, I had a template (in the case of that novel it was Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter), and the challenge was to let the unfolding story escape that template. Characters arise from and depart from their prototypes, and new characters and situations impose themselves where no precedents exist in the source material. It’s fascinating for me to see how the end result is true to its initial inspiration, and how it departs. Certainly, fans of Der Rosenkavalier can amuse themselves by finding the parallels between the opera and The White Rose (Valerie Annis, for one less obvious example, is a conflation of the two scandalmongers, Valzacchi and Annina), but there are characters in the novel that would probably have made Strauss reach for his smelling salts. (What, for example, would he have made of Jan, Oliver’s helpful guide in the world of cross-dressing?)

  Q: There are references in The White Rose to Jane Austen and Anne Frank. What writers do you admire? What books have been memorable ones for you?

  A: I have loved so many novels, by so many novelists, but like any other writer I carry with me at all times my personal pantheon of books. Here are a few that come readily to mind. They are—be warned—an eclectic bunch: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; Chaim Potok’s My Name Is Asher Lev, Marilyn Robinson’s Housekeeping, Frederick Forsythe’s The Odessa File (I warned you. But if you love a breath-taking, thought providing thriller, read it and see why.), and the Irish novelist Molly Keane’s brilliant late novels, Good Behavior and Time After Time. Oh, and one more: What a Carve Up, a comic tour de force by the young British novelist Jonathan Coe. (It was published in the US as The Winshaw Legacy, I can’t think why.)

  Questions for Discussion

  Early on, when Marian and Oliver have a discussion about the difference in their ages, Marian is upset by Oliver’s disregard for her being older: “She has never, she thinks wildly, understood the phrase ‘arrogance of youth’ until this moment.” What does she mean when she uses that phrase? Why is it so upsetting to her in the moment?

  “…it does baffle him that in a world so bereft of pleasure people fail to see that flowers are a part of the solution, that the unlearned lesson of their loveliness bears on the great disconnect between people and other people, between people and the earth, between people and the eternal.” Oliver has a powerful connection to flowers. How has his passion shaped him, and how has it affected others’ perceptions of him?

  Marian describes a special time of day she’s always looked for: “There is a time in each day that is neither afternoon nor evening but something breathless in suspension between them, when every particle of the air is briefly infused with fierce, fierce color, one instant so utterly there, then gone.” Have you ever noticed the time she describes? Do you have any
similar perceptions or moments that have special significance to you?

  “Oliver is aware that he belongs to a distinct occupational segment of his demographic group, set well apart from the officially sanctioned career designations—law, business, medicine—that account for an overwhelming majority of his peers…the far smaller yet equally prestigious calling of ‘artist’ in its various forms is acknowledged…between these extremes, however, there is little in the way of viable career territory.” How has Oliver’s position in a well-to-do family affected the choices he’s made in his life? How do class and social levels influence the decisions he’s made concerning Marian?

  Marian muses over how historians are never asked where they get their ideas, yet they tell stories in the same way that novelists do. How do you think she would characterize the differences and similarities between fiction and nonfiction writers? What do you think about stories that come from facts versus stories that come purely from the imagination?

  “What she wants, what she has always wanted, is for Marshall not to find out, so that when it is over with Oliver—as of course it will have to be sometime, soon—Marshall will be there, his future with her unaltered. It is certainly unfair, but she can’t help that.” Is Marian being unreasonable with her expectations of what will happen with both Oliver and Marshall? How would you view the situation in her place? In Oliver’s? In Marshall’s?

  At dinner with her son, Caroline describes how her true age doesn’t match with the age that feels “correct” in her head: “It’s like a rule: your sense of self lags behind your actual age by a certain factor.” Do you think this is true? Have you experienced a disconnect between your age and your concept of your age? Why do you think this happens?

  During dinner with Caroline, Marian sends a “discreet intramarital cue” to Marshall to remind him about Caroline’s husband Henry. What does this phrase represent in terms of the relationship between married couples, and for Marian and Marshall’s marriage in particular?