In late spring 1928 librarians in the rare book collections at the Huntington Library in Southern California noticed that something was feasting on the volumes in their care. Rail and utilities titan Henry E. Huntington had established the library in 1920, spending a small fortune to gobble up a number of the largest and finest rare book collections in a relatively short time, and creating a truly priceless set of artifacts. Though Huntington died in 1927, he intended his collection to live on long after him, but as the librarians discovered, the volumes were literally too full of life. The problem with assembling a massive collection of books is that you necessarily collect the very organisms that feed on books.
At the heart of history’s most successful eradication campaign is a mystery. The smallpox vaccine—now also being deployed against monkeypox—contains a live virus that confers immunity against multiple poxviruses. But it is not smallpox or a weakened version thereof. Nor is it monkeypox. Nor is it cowpox, as suggested by the vaccine’s famous origin story involving pus taken from an infected milkmaid to immunize an 8-year-old boy.
It is something else entirely: a unique poxvirus whose origins have been lost, or perhaps never known at all. Scientists call it vaccinia, and it is pretty much found only in the vaccines. No one knows where vaccinia came from in nature. No one has ever found its animal reservoir. No one knows quite what vaccinia is—even as it has been used to inoculate billions of people and saved hundreds of millions of lives. It is a ghost of a virus that has survived by being turned into a vaccine.
I am a baker of pies and a believer in pleasures, but also the kind of killjoy who can’t take a rom-com in the spirit it’s intended. Hence my fraught relationship with Heartburn by Nora Ephron. I remember—from 1983, the year the book was published—it being marketed as a “hilarious” comedy about a woman cooking her way out of a broken heart at the end of a marriage. Heartburn was a cultural sensation in the suburbs of my youth, such that I recall my mother cackling over the film adaptation and criticizing Meryl Streep’s looks—not pretty enough! The story was said to be inspired by Ephron’s divorce from Carl Bernstein and has always been considered a delicious revenge plot by a spurned woman upon a cheating man.
"The House of Fortune," Jessie Burton's fourth novel for adults, is that rare, double-headed beast. It is a sequel to the author's first book, "The Miniaturist" (2014), an acclaimed work of historical fiction which enchanted legions of readers. But it is also a standalone novel that can be enjoyed by those who have not yet immersed themselves in the unique world of that exquisite debut. Burton returns to her main setting and brings back several characters, but the most welcome recurring feature is her skilled storytelling.
The first and last stories extend the book's concerns beyond the Chinese diaspora. The first story (also the title story) takes place entirely within China and offers no evidence that the characters have ever left. In it, a young Shanghai-based doctor looks forward to finishing an unwelcome assignment with small-town officials, with whom he thinks he has nothing in common. In the collection's final story, "The Nanny," Chai experiments with science fiction and imagines an older woman creating a new sense of family in a Chinese colony on Mars.
These two stories bookend this moving, well crafted collection perfectly, as they explore ways in which the human capacities for resilience and imagination, so obviously on display in immigrants' lives, shape our lives more broadly — and how essential they will be in determining forms of life in the future.