Moriarty notes that Wichita had to abandon its gardening club. Even as the world is changed by the Depression and World War II, “The Chaperone” stays genteel. (She becomes an outspoken advocate for birth control.) Then it speeds up enormously, letting decades and generations pass by quickly. While most of “The Chaperone” is about the single summer during which Louise and Cora were New York roommates, the peculiarly paced novel returns to Wichita, where Cora re-emerges with a potentially shocking new design for living and some new convictions. But I don’t know that he deserves a book.” Louise’s own reading taste runs to Schopenhauer, whose audacious worldview horrifies Cora at first. “He’s an idiot,” says the girl who never suffered fools gladly. Moriarty has Cora reading “The Age of Innocence,” and contemplating the cowardice of Newland Archer in the face of New York societal pressures, while Louise harshly condemns him. Much of the justification for her New York makeover can be found in the 19-year-old newspaper announcement of Cora’s marriage to Alan Carlisle, a prosperous lawyer who was many years her senior and had previously been one of Wichita’s most eligible bachelors. Yet the novel depends on contrivance to let Cora’s story unfold so neatly. In a book that involves a number of teenage mothers and unwanted children, she finds ample opportunity to repay the kindnesses done to her in those Cora X days. Moriarty lets Cora grow some backbone, talk straight and reach out for what she really wants.
“Cora had been told she had a kind, pleasant face, and that she was lucky to have good teeth,” Ms. By contrast, her chaperon, here named Cora Carlisle, is a fusty matron with no capacity for turning heads. At 15, she already had the patent-leather bangs and mischievous abandon that would make her the epitome of 1920s screen glamour. So why does Laura Moriarty make a fictionalized version of Louise’s chaperon the main character in her novel about their New York trip? Louise would seem to warrant top billing. Mills’s provincialism because she shared my love of the theater.” She did sniff that she had “tolerated Mrs.
In her memoir “Lulu in Hollywood,” Louise barely remembered her traveling companion. It was the summer of 1922, and she was accompanied by Alice Mills, who Louise would later describe as “a stocky, bespectacled housewife of 36.” When Louise Brooks, the queen of silent-movie flappers, was a wicked little minx of 15, she traveled from Wichita, Kan., to New York City to study modern dance.