Diana Lively Is Falling Down – Sheila Curran
Once a trained architect, Diana Lively is now stays at home, and builds dollhouses. Unfulfilled, insecure, and previously widowed in a tragic accident, she puts up with her jerk of a second husband who is an Arthurian scholar at Oxford. Her world is shaken up when Wally Gold, a self-made American millionaire comes to England to endow a chair at the University and take back to Arizona a consultant for his King Arthur Theme Park. You see, he’s suffering under the delusion that his wife, who died recently, loved theme parks.
So Wally meets Diana, is besotted, and hires Ted her husband as his consultant. Off they go, kicking and screaming, to the cultural wasteland that is America.
Ted immediately discovers the lure of gentlemen’s clubs, Diana starts to draw again, Wally’s daughter continues to be embroiled in environmental affairs, Wally starts to realize that his previous marriage wasn’t all he thought it was. The plot skips along–like a battered, scratched CD.
Diana Lively Is Falling Down was tiresome. Diana needed to be smacked. Ted was a caricature. Wally was a bumbling American given to signs and portents. There are other characters and other tired devices, but I won’t bother listing them.
The shame of it is that the book started out so well; it was literate and well-written with some keen observations. But it devolved quickly, meandered all over the place, and ended improbably. Not that I mind improbable endings. Quite the contrary. But the books starts as one kind of book and ends another. One has the sense that Curran just didn’t know what to do with it.