Better for the stage than the page

Although it’s a common opinion in bookish circles that enticing readers by starting a novel with a murder or a bedroom scene is somehow a transparent form of cheating, “The White Rose” begins with a believable but chatty love scene in an Upper East Side apartment -- and a willing suspension of disbelief that a young man cross-dressing could actually be taken for a beautiful woman at close range. The same circumstances that launch this romantic comedy also set in motion Richard Strauss’ “Der Rosenkavalier.”

Using only a thread of the opera, Jean Hanff Korelitz (“A Jury of Her Peers”; “The Sabbathday River”) spins a twisted yarn on the wealthy New York of the Upper East Side, of upstate landed gentry and of arrivistes. We are carried rollicking along to a replay of that lovemaking scene about 50 pages later, with some humorous variation given that the male partner is still in drag.

The lovers’ temporarily happy and heedless affair is doomed. Marian, 48, contentedly married, a wildly successful biographer and scholar, is vaguely aware of that uncomfortable fact. Oliver, a 26-year-old high-end florist in the Village, the rosenkavalier committed to propagating a magnificent white rose -- and, incidentally, Marian’s best friend’s son -- petulantly fights to save the affair.

What has happened between the lovemaking and its reprise is the untimely entrance of Marian’s social-climbing country cousin, Barton, the lackluster bachelor long thought to be asexual, enraptured only by his connection to the famed Warburg family. He announces that he is soon to be married into the billionaire Klein family, courtesy of the notably unexcited bride-to-be, Sophie, who will endure the marriage stoically for the sake of her dying father, whom she loves.

The playful but thoughtless act that catapults Marian and Oliver into a ruse occurs when Oliver, hiding naked in her bedroom, finds a wig left over from Marian’s chemotherapy 12 years earlier and steps into the living room wearing her clothes. His good legs in black tights heat up Barton’s surprising lust -- not for his intended, the heiress Sophie, whom we haven’t met yet, but for Oliver, er, Olivia, posing as Marian’s graduate assistant.

The love-at-first-sight that propels each relationship and the absurdist cross-dressing as a solution to love’s entanglements might move the plot forward but they don’t make me care for the two principals, Marian and Oliver, as deeply as I’d like to. However, they are not entirely unreal; they speak familiar passages that we’ve heard ourselves say: “You deserve better,” meaning “You deserve me.”

Just at the point one wishes for some substance, some reality check that there are other sorts of people in the world, something other than relentless self-interest, one gets it in the package of an 11-year-old African American girl who lives with her invalid grandmother because her mother is in prison. Marian is charmed by the girl’s fan mail and arranges to meet her at a restaurant. Heavy-handed? No more than love at first sight. It humanizes Marian, and our interest in her goes up a notch.

The separation of personal happiness from outward good fortune is an admirable theme to explore, which Korelitz does through the subject of Marian’s bestselling book, Charlotte Wilcox, an expatriate American. Wilcox, like a flexible feline, always seems to land on her feet. Perhaps that’s because, in a way incomprehensible to Marian, Charlotte never linked happiness with material fortune.

The story, quickly paced and intricately plotted, is told with a voice of authority from one who knows Manhattan and the upper echelons of New York society inside out. In between scenes of crisp dialogue, the narrator intrudes to give clever opinions such as one priceless aspect of love consisting of knowing what not to say, or to provide heavy back story, which we wonder whether we will be called upon to remember. The narrator is an omniscient character attempting to be an omnipotent one too, making the characters fall in love conveniently for the plot, inconveniently for the lovers as the relationships get more and more deliciously interlaced.

What tangled webs people weave when they can’t see far in front of them. To what lengths they go to right themselves. What plays well, and according to convention on the opera stage, may be insufficient for contemporary readers looking for psychological complexity, not just plot complexity. Nevertheless, “The White Rose” is an enjoyable story about reaching satisfaction, even if it’s not the satisfaction one had planned. For the characters, and for us, it must suffice. One hopes that Marian’s post-affair focus will prove good for her, and the one surviving love affair (of three, or was it four?) will prove lasting and fundamentally sound. To this couple, we say, mazel tov. *