'Becoming George Sand'

BECOMING GEORGE SAND, by Rosalind Brackenbury. Mariner, 295 pp., $14.95 paper.

Fictionalized biographies of writers' lives -- also called biographical novels -- are tricky to pull off. Contemporary fiction has appeared based on the lives of literary figures such as Henry James, Sylvia Plath and, most recently, Charlotte Brontë. This genre is a strange hybrid, not fully one thing or the other, at once confessional and false. David Lodge (who in one novel appropriated the life of James) has described such works as "a positive and ingenious way of coping with the 'anxiety of influence.' "

The latest addition is "Becoming George Sand," by British-born author Rosalind Brackenbury. Her plot is simple: middle-aged Scottish academic Maria Jameson -- a happily married mother of two teenagers -- stumbles into an affair with a younger man named Sean (himself a married father of four), whom she meets in an Edinburgh bookshop. While researching a book about Sand -- the 19th century cross-dressing, bisexual French author -- Maria hopes to find enlightenment regarding her sudden marital crisis. She tells herself that "having more than one man in your life is no sin," and that marriage is fine "as long as you can also have a lover in your life." (Sand was born Aurore Dupin; her nom de plume came from the surname of one of her lovers, writer Jules Sandeau.)

The story alternates between Maria's dramas -- the dizzying early days of her affair, the demolition of her marriage and the attempts at repair -- and an imagined retelling of Sand's romantic exploits, as she navigates, among other things, motherhood and a relationship with Frédéric Chopin. The flashback sections in Sand's time offer vivid glimpses into the writer's life. She was a fascinating woman, as Maria notes, who was "revered, detested, feared, accused, admired." Still, these interludes are not quite as compelling as the main narrative.

"Becoming George Sand" captures -- precisely, painfully -- the vicissitudes of modern marriage, the toll of buried secrets and the ache and disorientation of desire. Maria's husband, Edward, is described as "blotting paper, unreflective, soaking her up." With her lover, though, Maria feels "raw, porous"; she experiences a "longing to touch and taste, even consume" that is wholly absent from her predictable domestic life. That such longing cannot be sustained is both intoxicating and bittersweet.

Brackenbury's prose is lyrical throughout: "Out on the cobbled street, the yellow light and the roar from the bar, and black water licking at the quay." Thanks to the elegant quality of her writing, the author manages to transcend the familiar (and somewhat predictable) material. In the end, Maria does "become" Sand, in a manner of speaking: she learns to live an authentic life, however imperfect or marked by loss.