PEARL
K.
BELL
71
dren, to recreate the stultifying upper-class world of Beacon Hill from
the time of the First World War to a few years before the start of the
Second.
Folly
is the coming-of-age story of Lilian Eliot, the very young and
pretty and woefully naive daughter of stuffy Boston parents. She has
never dreamt of questioning their intransigent assumption that a "good"
marriage, to someone of exactly her own class and background, is her
sole purpose in life.
When we first meet Lilian, at the age of eighteen, her well-bred as–
sent to the hidebound givens of her class and time has been shaken by the
appearance at Beacon Hill tea parties of Walter Vail, a handsome and
dashing soldier from New York, the foreign world these Bostonians in–
stinctively distrust. At once excited and disconcerted by Walter's flirta–
tious attention, Lilian asks him home for dinner, only to have her father
insist she withdraw the invitation. "I don't like the look of him," Mr.
Eliot scowls, and Lilian, "a good clear Boston girl," does as she's told.
Though it never seriously occurs to her to rebel, she does meet Walter
surreptitiously, and thinks herself deeply in love after some furtive hand–
holding and a chaste kiss or two. Lilian's sexual ignorance is absolute,
but her confused longing is pungently clear.
Mter Walter goes off to fight in France, none of Lilian's cautiously
ardent letters to him are answered, and she hides her bitter disappoint–
ment behind the acceptable gestures of stoic resignation. "How could
she have expected to hold and to understand someone like Walter Vail?"
she wonders. Since Lilian is not entirely devoid of spunky pride, she also
adds, "Of course he could never have understood her either." But she
wouldn't think of saying this to anyone but herself Inevitably, Lilian
ful–
fills her parents' agenda of respectability by marrying the right wrong
man - the dull and upright (though actually eccentric) scion of an im–
peccable Boston family, having several children, and shedding her youth–
ful
illusions about the compatibility of passion and duty. This illusion, as
Minot's title implies, is folly, though she may also be suggesting the op–
posite - that it is folly to discard such illusions.
"Resignation" would be an equally appropriate, ifless resonant, title.
For Minot's deeper purpose in this novel, beyond recapturing the dic–
tion and habits of an earlier day, is the quiet but unstinting illumination
of an unremarkable woman's progress toward self- awareness, as she forces
herself to accept the loss of unrealizable dreams. What Minot is writing
about in
Folly
is the untraumatic but inexorable death of happiness.
Although the tone of the novel is in the main too wistful and diffident,
Minot allows her stylistic virtuosity freer rein in a few brilliant set pieces.
One calm day at the shore, Lilian, innocent to the core, observes a cou-
