★★★★☆ A New York Shangri-La

Here in Avalon

Tara Isabella Burton

As a high school student I read the classic novel Lost Horizon, by James Hilton, only because it appeared on some list of classic novels I came across. It's a brief story and a thing of beauty. It became one of my favorite novels. In it the successful former soldier and diplomat Hugh Conway stumbles across a hidden paradise, the lost valley of Shangri-La.

Tara Isabella Burton's Here in Avalon feels to me like a modern New York City version of Lost Horizon. None of the details are similar, and if I were to guess, I would guess that Burton very likely has never read Lost Horizon. But it is one of those stories that gets told again and again -- our hero finds a hidden paradise, and there are wrenching choices to be made.

Like Lost Horizon, Here in Avalon is brief, and a thing of beauty. I loved it.

But something about it bothered me. After some effort, I put my finger on it. It's the snobbishness. Burton appears to hold several of her characters, Caleb, Grant, and Lydia, in contempt, and makes them contemptible to her readers. (Indeed, they deserve contempt, but making the "sensible" people contemptible is a choice.) And this is important. Indeed, the entire plot of Here in Avalon is about our hero Rose's struggle not to become such a person.

Some artists believe that they are special solely because they are artists. Credo: artist snobbery is no more benign than the belief that you're special because you're wealthy, or politically powerful, or have royal ancestors, or highly educated. An artist is not better, solely by virtue of being an artist, than a businessperson or a software engineer.

If you disagree with the belief I just expressed -- that is, if you believe that artists are special people, then you may not be bothered by the thing that bothered me in Here in Avalon.

Here in Avalon is a beautiful but flawed story, which I enjoyed a lot.

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