"The Pleasing Hour"

After my ambivalent review on 7/23/10 of "The English Teacher," by Lily King, you may be surprised that I then read the same author's "The Pleasing Hour" (Grove, 1999). Despite my ambivalence, I was impressed enough with King's writing, as well as with good reviews and a listing as "A New York Times Notable Book of the Year," to read her earlier novel, "The Pleasing Hour." I enjoyed the book, and was reminded of King's talent at creating intriguing, if usually somewhat damaged, characters. She is also very good at showing very viscerally the deep, inescapable influence, whether acknowledged or not, that one's family of origin has on one's life. Relatedly, King's characters often have lost a family member, frequently a mother, young. In this novel, a young American woman, Rosie, who has gotten pregnant in order to give her infertile sister a child, then in sorrow needs to get far away from her sister and the child. She goes to Paris as a nanny, and becomes entangled in the life of the family she works for. The mother in that family, Nicole, is beautiful and seemingly impossible to know much about, but it turns out she has her own sad tale of childhood loss. Gradually their two stories come together. Although the two main characters, as well as the father of the family, Marc, are sometimes less than admirable and sometimes less than likable, King makes us understand and feel empathy for all of them as creatures of their upbringings and circumstances. The stories of the three very individual children of the family, Rosie's charges, are also compelling.