Fairy-Tale Romance With a Timely Gloss

Bradford writes fairy tales disguised as contemporary novels. The details vary, but the plot is usually the same: There’s a princess, fair and good, who must break the spell that keeps her from inheriting a kingdom of love, professional success and oodles of nice things.

Family secrets must be exhumed, old wrongs confronted, and she needs a prince to kiss her. But the man she thought was her prince has either died or shown froggy tendencies (in Bradford’s last novel, “A Sudden Change of Heart,” he turned out to be gay), and she isn’t sure she can love again.

The heroine of “Where You Belong,” New York-born photojournalist Val Denning, loses her English colleague and lover, Tony Hampton, in a firefight in Kosovo. Val herself is wounded, as is their sidekick, Jake Newberg. At a memorial service for Tony, she discovers that he wasn’t divorced, as he had claimed. For all his “potent sexuality, that women find most appealing, even overwhelming, and certainly irresistible,” he was a cad.

Val suffers acutely, although it must be said that she suffers in style. Her physical and psychic scars heal in the context of fine food and wine, museums and cathedrals, apartments in Paris and villas in the south of France, devoted housekeepers and solicitous maitre d’s.

In fact, it’s illuminating to compare Bradford’s descriptions of war with her descriptions of, say, cookery or chairs. She seems to feel that if she can spell “Kalashnikov” and mention the “smell of cordite,” she has given the Kosovo conflict its due. But get her started on “poulet grandmere, using a clay pot called a Roemertopf,” or a “French bergire covered in oyster satin, positioned near a Louis XV sofa in striped oyster-and-burgundy silk,” and we can see where her true interests lie.

*

But then, Val’s war photography isn’t meant to be important in itself. In Bradford’s universe, matters of the heart have primacy. Her heroines, so that we can admire them, need glamorous, high-pressure jobs, but the jobs are interchangeable. Val goes to Kosovo for the same reason she was attracted to a risk-taker like Tony: The adrenaline rush keeps her from brooding on her unhappy childhood.

“Where You Belong” resolves its romantic problem surprisingly quickly. It takes Val less than half the novel to figure out what we guessed in Chapter 1: that kind, steady Jake (a “Kevin Costner look-alike” and a Rhodes scholar, no less) is the man she should have loved in the first place.

Val needs to keep Jake from returning to Kosovo and getting killed, and she needs to fight off her attraction to the next Tony type who comes along. But basically things are settled. What’s left is for Val to work things out with Tony’s widow; help a French friend escape an abusive husband; and go back to New York to face the “ice queen,” Val’s mother, who never gave her a scrap of affection but now wants her to take over a billion-dollar cosmetics company.

Can the princess break the spell? Need we ask? For a hip, 31-year-old Manhattanite, Val talks suspiciously like a middle-aged Englishwoman: A druggist is a “chemist,” she’s offended by her kid brother’s “crudeness and vulgarity,” and sex with Jake is a soft-focus interface of “his hardness” with “the center of my womanhood.” But nobody can accuse her, or any other Bradford heroine, of lacking spunk.