Somewhere in France

Perhaps better known as a short story writer than a novelist (In the Heart of the Whole World), Gardiner uses a disarmingly plain style with which to tell a strange and complex story. Major William Lloyd is an Army doctor in WWI, doing his best to cope with the flood of injured at his base hospital in France, many of them also affected by the mysterious new viruses carried by battlefield lice. Jeanne Prie is his invaluable French-born, German-speaking assistant, who in her earlier work with leading medical scientists of the day has come to understand better than he the way fevers work in the blood, and how to create serums to combat them. (She is also not averse to being thought of as a kind of Jeanne d'Arc.) Together they forge a relationship that Lloyd's mother, Helen, and his wife, Emma, reading his letters back home in Long Island, see as obsessive. The family also has its own obsessions: volatile Emma is struggling with dictatorial Helen; they must cope with a devious chauffeur, and decide whether or not to light an oddly symbolic annual Fourth of July bonfire. Lloyd's pacifist son is drafted, arrested in France for his antiwar sentiments and nearly dies, only to be saved by Jeanne's ministrations. Lloyd can never again settle down at home after the war, when his family begins to quarrel over the estate. Heading back to France, he begins a long and sometimes dangerous pilgrimage that eventually returns him to Jeanne's side; but in an epilogue she appears as mysterious and difficult to characterize as ever. It is a bizarre tale of seemingly plain people driven by extraordinary passions, but the artless style seems at odds with the drama of the events, so that, despite some occasionally vivid scenes, they never quite come into focus. (Sept.)