VILLA E

A Modernist architectural masterpiece on the coast of southern France is at the center of a clash between two designers of genius—one widely celebrated, the other not so much.

Modeled on historical fact, Alison’s new novel is a twin bio-fiction tracing the connections and conflicts between 20th-century icon Le Corbusier—here named Le Grand—and Irish architect Eileen Gray, referred to only as Eileen. In 1925, when she was 40 and living in Paris, where she had a shop selling furniture she designed, Eileen traveled south and fell in love with a piece of coastal land. There, encouraged by her lover, Bado, she built the structure she’d been yearning to design, “a house that was intimate and modern but not a machine.” (Le Grand famously asserted, “A house is a machine to live in.”) Not a French citizen, Eileen couldn’t purchase the land herself, instead buying it in Bado’s name, which would be her downfall. The “slim white house, moored like a yacht, modern in the ancient sun,” is a triumph, but Bado makes it his own, eventually forcing Eileen to move on and design a second home in the hills. Le Grand becomes a frequent visitor to the coastal house, acknowledging its genius but seeing his influence in it: “That genius and his own primary genius here mingled to make this villa. Masculine spirit meeting feminine form.” Breaching the villa’s purity, he paints sexual murals on its white interior walls, which, because of his reputation, cannot be expunged. The novel explores the characters and lifelong achievements of both figures: he protean, domineering, and unrepentant; she sensual, committed, enduring. Looping, impressionistic, and atmospheric, narrated in retrospect from both characters’ points of view, the book offers more psychology than plot, but does so persuasively.

A remarkable gender parable filtered through a sophisticated imagination.