Ari Levine's Reviews > The Flight Portfolio

A novelist's reimagination of the experiences of Varian Fry, an American journalist who worked to smuggle over a thousand leftist, anti-Nazi, and Jewish politicians, artists, and writers out of Vichy France in 1940. Fry saved Marc Chagall, Hannah Arendt, André Breton, and Max Ernst, and many other famous figures from the Gestapo, and Orringer revels (with a bit too much knowingness) in describing these crossed paths. But she also adds fictional characters to the mix, including the doomed artist Lev Zilberman and especially Fry's former lover from Harvard, the secretive Elliott Grant (Spoiler: Fry's being closeted is comparable to Grant's passing for white).

There are many pleasures here in this long, luxurious read, especially beautiful and evocative descriptions of the Provencal landscapes and Marseille streetscapes. Orringer is careful to portray Fry as a complicated and flawed human being rather than as a marble saint. But this works better as a E.M. Forster-esque or Henry James-y tragic and doomed love story of sensitive aesthetes
than as an Alan Furst-style thriller, because the major nonfictional characters never seem to be truly in serious peril. Orringer's evident affection for the decadent sophistication of a series of dinners and dinner parties and the stuffy superiority and noblesse oblige of Ivy League WASPs ends up muffling the underlying brutality and savagery of the historical setting.