Orringer got lots of press for her previous novel, The Invisible Bridge, a Holocaust novel about 2 brothers. Flight Portfolio (Knopf/Doubleday, May, 2019) is also a Holocaust story, but very different. Orringer has imagined the life of Varian Fry, a real-life rescuer of Jewish artists, writers, and philosophers and the first American citizen to be named Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem. In 1940, Varian Fry traveled to Marseille carrying three thousand dollars and a list of imperiled artists and writers he hoped to help escape within a few weeks. Instead, he stayed more than a year, working to procure false documents, amass emergency funds, and arrange journeys across Spain and Portugal, where the refugees would embark for safer ports. His many clients included Hannah Arendt, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and Marc Chagall, and the race against time to save them.
Fry, a non-Jew, was came from a wealthy family, was educated in classics at Harvard; altogether an unlikely hero in this cause. By taking on this task, of saving Jewish artists and intellectuals, he was thrust into a position of making choices, terrible choices. Everything I just said is in the historical record.
But Orringer’s not deeply concerned with the historical record about Fry’s personality–she’s writing a novel. She had to create a fully-realized character in Fry, along with the historical figures he saved and those who worked with–and against–him. Orringer’s choices make for a very interesting story that reads very much like a thriller. For one thing, she chose to pick up the hints in Fry’s life that he was a homosexual. An old lover contacts him in Marseille and that newly revived relationship becomes an important part of the plot. Was Fry truly homosexual? We don’t know for sure. She also recreated the personalities of the artists and writers Fry rescued, so it’s quite a tour de force of weaving historical and fictional characters together. It’s a tale of forbidden love, high-stakes adventure, and unimaginable courage. It gripped me immediately and I had a hard time putting it down.
The writing is beautiful–dense and lush without being heavy, evoking the dangers and beauties of southern France and stolen pleasures in wartime. In her hands, Marseille becomes a living, breathing place and the people Fry works with, who risk their lives to help in his mission, enter our hearts. And, the story deals with the moral issues, choosing which artists and writers get saved, and why them and not everybody. Fry is torn by these questions and so is the reader. Well paced, great characters, political and moral issues, compelling plot…it’s a great story.
Note: some people I know who’ve read Flight Portfolio were upset because Orringer took liberties with Fry’s life that go far beyond the historical record. If Orringer wanted to create a character based on so much speculation, so this argument goes, she shouldn’t have used real names. I disagree. The book is much more powerful for being based on Fry’s real life experiences. Does that argument mean that she would have had to create fictional characters to replace Chagall, Arendt, Duchamp, etc.? I had no trouble reading this novel as Orringer’s “take” on what might have been. Read it and decide for yourself!
A Reader's Place 