Maribelle's Shadow by Susannah Marren
What's It About?
The only thing that spreads faster than gossip in Palm Beach is news of a mysterious death.Once again from the excess and folly of Palm Beach society, the novelist Susannah Marren has woven an intricate tapestry of secrets and foreboding.
The third volume in her trilogy about the Florida haunt for the wealthy and famous, Maribelle’s Shadow comes to life with biting dialogue and the inner monologues of three sisters who are at cross-purposes with each other and their elegant, imperialistic mother. The Barrows women just can’t shake their personas and the place they came from.
“While arriving in Palm Beach with an amorphous past was common,” Marren writes, “the revelation of a backwater story was not.” It is there, in that backwater story, that the truth about the Barrows begins. Their Florida Panhandle existence — ordinary lives launched into the stratosphere by a wildly successful chain of coffee shops — had been transformed Cinderella-like two decades earlier.
Mysterious Death Shakes Family Secrets Loose
Sisters Maribelle, Caroline, and Raleigh would like to keep that story hidden. With their mother Lucinda, once a modest schoolteacher and now a showpiece, they have a lot on the line.
Outside their doors lies the Intracoastal Waterway with its docks, boats, and tropical gardens. Inside their homes, “vast decorated spaces,” the 30-ish sisters argue with their husbands, host parties, and cultivate their children. This is learned behavior that could be passed on for generations: “always rushing toward what’s next and better,” as Marren describes it.
Yet within the first 14 pages of Maribelle’s Shadow, the family’s veneer is ripped off. Back home from yoga, Mirabelle learns that Samuel, her philandering husband, is dead. Two hours earlier he had insisted on driving his speedboat to work. The sunny day suddenly turned stormy and somehow the expert pilot lost control.
As the Chief Financial Officer of the Barrows Corporation, Samuel had grown the company’s bottom line through business expansion and retail innovation. Working alongside his longtime friend and business partner, Caroline’s husband Travis, Samuel seemed devoted to Barrows. He even tolerated his intrusive mother-in-law.
However, much to the anger and puzzlement of Lucinda and the three sisters, it appears that Samuel absconded with several million of the company’s profits. In disbelief, Maribelle wishes that Samuel were alive to explain what happened even though she loathes him more each day he is gone. Meanwhile, Lucinda hires a forensic accountant to plumb the books.
Reflexively, Maribelle returns to her prestigious job, managing editor of PB Confidential, a glossy magazine that is her baby. Here she can lose herself working with the staff writers and Holly, the publisher, as they continually tinker with content and design.
But during lunch at the Breakers with Holly, Maribelle is shocked to learn that a decision has been made to move the magazine entirely online. That is not all. Holly confides an important fact about PB Confidential. Suffice it to say that this revelation creates in Maribelle a sensation “somewhere between shortness of breath and someone stomping on her heart,” Marren writes.
Well-Plotted With a Keen Eye for Detail
Among the joys of Susannah Marren’s novels is her eye for detail. “Cantaloupe leather bar stools and cognac wood accents” and “the ice grey rooms that led into one another” immediately transport the reader to the homogenous interiors inhabited by—what can one say? —the insincere socialites she portrays so well.
Marren captures equally well the world outside those rooms: the blues and greys of the ocean and sky, the churning waves and rustling banyan trees; everything dependent on quicksilver weather. This affinity with Palm Beach is akin to Joan Didion’s romance with California, her evocation of the Santa Ana winds and the arrival of rain in “a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.”
Maribelle’s Shadow is a beautiful, unforgettable book.
Interview with Susannah Marren
When you set forth to write A Palm Beach Wife, did you plan more novels about Palm Beach? What inspired you to create a trilogy?
Yes, the idea was that there would be a trilogy of Palm Beach novels. The setting is almost a character in these stories and I was interested in three storylines in an environment of great beauty and privilege. How this could also be a place where women are in turmoil and despair. Women of all ages with secrets and regrets, posturing as Palm Beach ladies, as the finest families.
Tell us about how you came to the story of Maribelle’s Shadow. I understand that you had been kicking around the plot and characters for quite a few years before you began to write the book.
It is true that Maribelle’s Shadow has been a story I began years ago. I wrote the first version of this novel when I was earning my master’s degree in creative writing. I was not able to let the story go, it was always there for me … The “journey” for Lucinda, Maribelle, Caroline and Raleigh speaks to how women navigate a path and why. What is survival for each of us, wherever we are from, whatever we have achieved or have lost.
Many of your lines have stuck with me, including this one: “In her next life, Caroline decided, she would be fully conscious, guided by her own instincts and morals. She wouldn’t have Travis as her husband or Lucinda as her mother.” What a perfect expression of women’s unspoken feelings. How is your aim so true?
Women’s unsaid sentiments are significant, yet they keep quiet, worried they’ll be misunderstood and not taken seriously. I realized this when I interviewed a diverse group of women for my nonfiction titles. These topics include how women feel as mothers, daughters, wives, single women, sisters, mentors, friends, rivals. We are raised a certain way, we raise our daughters a certain way, as if none of us can truly reveal ourselves — our hopes, fears, talents and ambitions. What about our disappointment and anger — where does it go?
Has your research on women’s behavior influenced your fiction? For example, the recurrent themes in your Palm Beach novels: betrayal, secrets, facades.
I have been able to incorporate my research into my fiction and what I have learned definitely impacts my character’s experiences and yearning … In Maribelle’s Shadow, we are looking at a mother and her three adult daughters who finesse a path that will serve them best. And the stakes are quite high for each of them, thus the betrayals, lies and subterfuge.
You know New York City as well as Palm Beach and the Jersey shore. Would you ever consider setting a novel in Manhattan?
Over time I have considered this as a setting and it might be in the future. A New York City novel is appealing to me — it is fascinating to consider the lives women lead there.
About Susannah Marren:
Susannah Marren is the pen name of Susan Shapiro Barash, who has written over a dozen nonfiction books, including Tripping the Prom Queen, You’re Grounded Forever, But First Let’s Go Shopping and A Passion for More: Affairs that Make or Break Us. For more than 20 years, she taught gender studies in the Writing Department at Marymount Manhattan College and has guest-taught creative nonfiction at the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College. Her fiction titles, under the name Susannah Marren, are Between the Tides, A Palm Beach Wife, A Palm Beach Scandal and Maribelle’s Shadow.
