MR. SIMPSON AND OTHER SHORT STORIES

A debut volume of short stories focuses on history, glamour, and crime in America and abroad.

Maitland-Lewis’ collection opens with a fictional episode in the life of Ernest Simpson, the ex-husband of Wallis Simpson, whose divorce allowed her to marry former British King Edward VIII in 1937. Now 62 years old, Ernest is down on his luck—his tie is “tied in a strategically positioned Windsor knot to mask its frayed places,” and his Manhattan rent is in arrears. He wants a famed New York City newspaper to, among other things, pay him and help him write his memoir in exchange for providing letters that show he “changed the history of the world.” This claim piques the interest of the paper’s editors to learn what these documents offer. “Mr. Simpson” is one of many pieces of historical fiction in this collection that involve royalty, Nazis, and/or Ivy League universities. Although one story is set on a decidedly stark New Zealand sheep farm, most locations glitter, including a five-star hotel in Geneva, a Fifth Avenue co-op, and a sun-drenched California freeway (with a bright red Ferrari, no less). The writing is clean and strong, and the ages of the central characters span from college age to a certain age and nine decades or older. High-end product placement permeates the volume—for example, a dowager wears vintage Cartier diamond jewelry, a man admires his new Patek Phillipe watch, and a woman sports thigh-high Saint Laurent boots. Themes of loss (money, lovers, youth) and unrealized potential weave through the intriguing and wide-ranging stories, as do incidents of blackmail and experiences with antisemitism. But with few exceptions, women fare poorly in the tales. Female characters include a nymphomaniac, strippers, sex workers, a former porn star, a woman who fakes a pregnancy to trap a rich husband, a would-be murderer, a successful killer, and a “fat, bulbous”-lipped girlfriend who’s “a pain in the ass.” One character pretty well sums up the treatment of women in the book with this statement: “Women are like mangoes. They are either green, ripe, or rotten.”

A varied and well-written collection despite the disappointing portrayals of women.