Historical fiction from a Norfolk novelist

By Wiley Wood

Courtney Maum has a new book coming out: a novel, “Costalegre,” set in Mexico during the mid-1930s, told in the voice of a 15-year-old girl. In the foreground are the girl’s wealthy, spoiled American mother and the boatload of ego-driven artists she has brought with her—rescued—from the collapsing cultures of Europe. They all live together but at loggerheads in a remote seaside villa, provided with a swimming pool and house servants, under the daughter’s all-seeing eye.

This is a departure for Maum, whose territory in two previous novels has been the modern marriage and its moral and technological stressors. The characters in “Costalegre,” Maum explained in a recent interview, are loosely based on the heiress Peggy Guggenheim and her entourage of writers, artists and family members, including the Surrealist painter Max Ernst, whom Guggenheim married and brought to New York from Germany in the early years of World War II, and her daughter, Pegeen, who would go on to live a troubled life as an artist in the shadow of her flamboyant mother.

“I felt that I was channeling them,” said Maum, who described a year of intense research, initially for another project that never came to fruition, then a brief but equally intense period of writing. “I sat down and wrote the book in like a month,” said Maum, adding that she felt the book was a sort of homage to what the Dada and Surrealist artists were creating, partly in response to the war.

But the emotional heart of the book belongs to the daughter, Lara, who watches the antics and upheavals of her mother’s motley bohemians with a mixture of awe and contempt. No one has time for her—certainly not her own mother, who is too absorbed in her own amorous and artistic passions to give Lara more than her passing attention—except Jack, a Brancusi-like sculptor, who has managed to retain his moral compass in the midst of the general chaos.

“It’s about a young girl yearning for her mother’s attention, which is a universal feeling,” said Maum.

The book also charts the daughter’s efforts to find herself as an artist. “It’s something that I feel is genuinely sad,” said Maum, “the yearning to have a gift when you might only have a talent.” Maum notes that Pegeen Guggenheim died of a drug overdose at age 42, after a long struggle with depression.

The story is presented as the entries to Lara’s diaries, which allows Maum to use a wide range of materials—diaristic narration, but also letters, drawings and passages from books—in free-form juxtaposition to relate Lara’s travails and gradual self-discovery.

Maum will give a talk at the Norfolk Library on July 12 at 10:30 a.m. on the art of fictionalizing historical characters. This is something of a kick-off for “Costalegre,” whose official publication date is July 16. But it is just the start of Maum’s campaign to bring the book to American readers, a campaign that will take her to over two dozen locations—including Austin, Minneapolis, Brattleboro and Chattanooga—between now and November.

Maum, who lives in Norfolk with her husband and school-age daughter, continues to work as a corporate namer in the cosmetics field, to freelance for a wide range of publications and to run The Cabins, a Norfolk-based learning collaborative. Another book, a hands-on writer’s guide called “Before and After the Book Deal,” is primed and ready for publication in 2020.