Indelicate Deception
A perceptive novel built on stark contrasts, Indelicate Deception is about the complications of parental love.
A yearning girl investigates her parents’ broken relationship in V. S. Kemanis’s emotive novel Indelicate Deception.
Roy, a disabled Black Virginian with “a natural talent for lifting” fellow veterans “out of despondency,” meets Lenore, a gifted UC Berkeley law student from a wealthy white family who “knows what she wants and isn’t afraid to claim it,” in 1972. Their attraction is immediate. In 1973, they fall in love among the beauty of redwoods, somewhat insulated from outside judgments by their city’s rarefied liberalism. Despite Lenore’s maternal misgivings and her family’s disapproval, they have a daughter, Delicate Soul.
But as Roy’s dreams of owning a restaurant are challenged by his lack of funds, and as Lenore is pulled between her career aspirations and the needs of her young family, the couple’s connection fractures. Delicate, soon known as Caty, grows up in a single-parent household headed by her adoring, supportive father. Though she’s told gilded stories about Lenore, she feels an acute hole at her center. As she approaches her twenties, she begins to search for Lenore in earnest, though recognizing that inevitable disappointments await her.
The book’s characterizations are deep and built on stark contrasts: Roy is haunted, loving, and forgiving, and Lenore is temperamental, demanding, and embarrassed by the contradictions between her values and lived actions. They have radically different reactions to the challenges they face, including racism from state officials, automotive breakdowns, and pregnancy. They ignore their differences early on, forming the fissures that stand to break them: Roy reasons that “he doesn’t want to inject political fury into his relationship with Len. The love is too good. The happiness and fun too sweet.”
Caty embodies both parents’ best qualities well, informing her growth. Though he’s heartbroken when Lenore leaves, Roy maintains his innate virtue and raises Caty to see goodness in others—and in her missing mother. Still, Caty recognizes the gulf between Roy’s rosy view of the world and hard realities early on: “Some structures are built on ill-fitting parts,” including her parents’ relationship. To come into her own, she has to know the truth.
Progressing via perceptive shifts between Caty’s present and the couple’s past, the novel is engrossing throughout. Its prose is marked by sometimes lofty, intriguing philosophical flourishes and keen details. Though the demise of Lenore and Roy’s relationship is established as inevitable in the first chapter, hope is generated that they’ll persevere. Beautiful images of the California coast, observations of fading hippie culture, and period markers, including references to earthquakes, fires, and to Roe v. Wade, complement the couple’s strains and triumphs. Some nuance is sacrificed toward the book’s end, though, when complicated Lenore’s contradictions are flattened and Caty’s worst suspicions are confirmed.
Nonetheless, Indelicate Deception is an affecting historical novel about paternal ideals, imperfect motherhood, and the best and worst of what families have to offer to their youngest generations.
Reviewed by
Michelle Anne Schingler
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
