If, like me, you go to Google Maps to find Briar and Wood streets in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington DC, you would be disappointed. For they do not exist. But it has to be said that the old neighborhood has undergone huge changes since the 1950s, when THE BRIAR CLUB is set. The biggest change is the creation of the I-66 highway which travels from Washington DC, through the Northern Virginia suburbs to Front Royal, where it connects with I-81.
I-66 starts in Foggy Bottom, snaking south from K Street, across Virginia Avenue past 25th street, G, F, E and D Streets to begin at the back of the Kennedy Center before flowing over the Teddy Roosevelt Bridge. It doesn’t take much to see that a huge amount of real estate is involved in collecting all that traffic and moving it over the Roosevelt Bridge to Virginia, real estate where old neighborhoods vanished forever when I-66 was constructed in the 1960s and 1970s.
So you can view this book as a homage to the sleepy city that Washington DC was in the 1950s, before it was connected to the rest of the country by the new highways that have sprung up in the last 70 years.
The great strength of this books is the way it is written. It starts with the murder(s) that happen on Thanksgiving Day 1954, when the inhabitants of Briarwood House (so called because it is on the corner of Briar and Wood) are about to enjoy their Thanksgiving turkey. However, Kate Quinn cleverly neglects to say who is murdered. Instead, she takes you into Pete’s head, the son of the family responsible for being the Man of the House at the age of 13, due to an absent father. We hear all about Grace March’s arrival at this downtrodden boarding house four years before from Pete’s point of view. Next is Nora, a proper young Irish woman who is appalled at her attraction for a gangster. Then there is Reka, an elderly Hungarian woman, who has fierce opinions, Fliss, a young English woman with an absent husband who is just overwhelmed with baby care, Bea, a former professional sports-woman, and Claire, a friendly con woman with light fingers. The best is saved for last when we finally get to know Grace, the mysterious yet kind woman who transforms a dreary boarding house into a venue for laughter, love and life, and her polar opposite, the rather poisonous Arlene.
All of these characters jump off the page, mainly because we are given approximately 20,000 words in their point of view which ensures that we know them well. What a clever piece of writing! If you are interested in what it was like to be a woman in McCarthy-era America, you should read this gem.
