“Simone in Pieces,” University of Wisconsin Press, November 2025, 256pp.
In Simone in Pieces, by Janet Burroway readers first meet Simone Lerrante, a Belgian war orphan, as a child refugee in Sussex, England, her memory damaged by trauma. This novel offers a kaleidoscopic vision of her fractured life and piecemeal understanding of self across multiple points of view. Following her from Cambridge to New York City and across the United States—through a disastrous marriage, thwarted desire, and the purgatory of academic backwaters—the novel charts Simone’s unexpected reconnection with her past, which provides both autonomy and inspiration for her future. Janet Burroway slowly reveals a multifaceted, fascinating protagonist, who observes her own life without always allowing herself to be immersed in it. Spanning seven decades, this story is both epic and contained, rewarding readers at every turn.
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Those were tender days. Anika was a fiercely protective mother, overtired by her attentive love for the demanding baby. When Leo saw mother and child, cheek to cheek on the edge of sleep, he felt a love for Anika that came from beyond his own capacity, from some ancient, shared well of such feeling. In Binghamtn he tried to balance his work with fatherly duties, which was in some ways a poor fit for a Hungarian—his own father had played an indifferent role—but also seemed to arise out of the American atmosphere. As did the assumption that they would buy a house.
Which they did; a clapboard cracker box that was so much more colorful and well-equipped than the tenements they had come from in Budapest that for a few weeks they walked from one room to another touching the walls. But a two-bedroom was all they could afford, and it was no more than a year before Leo began to feel he had no corner where he could spread out his work. He spent more time in his office, and then to make up for it took Lizbett out to give Anika her space too.
He was never anxious for his daughter. Anika might rage at him, as in her exhaustion she often did, but she would turn patient toward their sturdy offspring. It was Leo who, at the beginning of his second year as a teacher, feared his mood. Was he already, at twenty-seven, tiring of marriage, fatherhood, academia, even the cognitive powers of goldfish.
Martin and Simone arrived late for his first term in Binghamton, the Dodge crammed with books, a nine-month-old Irish red setter, a few plates and pans. Because landlords were suspicious of pets, the only furnished apartment they could find was one floor of a shingle-sided house on Greencroft Street a short walk from the shabby little Binghamton zoo. In the basement lived a Mr. Hershon, who grew tomatoes and gave them away to anybody who would take them. On the ground floor was an Italian family who dealt with many of Mr. Hershon’s tomatoes, and earthy smells of garlic, oregano, and basil escaped upstairs through the vents. Martin and Simone had the top floor—“Cloud nine,” Martin said. She said, “Cloud six, anyway.” The rooms were small but there were three of them, not counting a kitchen big enough to eat in and a screened porch with outside stairs down to the driveway—an ideal situation for Che Guevara.
Che was good-natured, beautiful—that glossy setter red—and very stupid. He could not learn to come when called, and evenings when he had run away Martin would beat him with a tightly rolled New York Times—which Martin claimed did not hurt—while the dog howled, and Simone had occasion to reflect on the disaster she had made of her life.
No, not yet. This was the period in which she aligned the mugs on the shelves and scrubbed the floor on her hands and knees—a practice, Anika Aczél told her, that clearly branded her a European. In the kitchen, on the wall of the closet that held the water heater, was written in laundry marker:
Why does Michael always
Simone knew nothing of the former tenants. The words hung there like some outcry of Bluebeard’s wives. Why does Michael always…lash out at, shut me up when, think he has to…? She felt sorry for this unknown woman—sorry and a shiver of distaste. But then on some bad day with Martin she would find that she had opened the closet for no purpose, feeling both guilty and comforted, guessing at sisterhood. Or another day, when she had wine too early, she felt the woman still moving in the kitchen or descending the outside stairs. She remembered the doppelganger she had fantasized in England, a proto-Simone carrying on her life in Liege in parallel to her own.
Still, not yet. This was the period in which she walked in the little zoo while Martin beat the dog, breathing carefully over the dark weather in her stomach, and thought tenderly about Martin’s childhood, how vulnerable he was, and how loving in his frequent days of self-doubt. The truth was that he needed her.
The zoo was no more than a couple of blocks long, with graveled paths and one peanut machine periodically on the blink. It had three or four species of monkey, and a molting camel; but most of the animals were common, if feral: deer, snakes in a terrarium, a family of ferrets. Red squirrels ran over the paths and busied themselves up the branches, in which a few drab birds also set about to withstand winter. It was impossible not to notice the contiguity of the free and caged. Simone walked crunching the gravel, rehearsing the poignant paradox of Martin’s character, carrying that inner chaos gingerly.
Leo would push Lizbett around the Binghamton zoo on Saturdays, and on weekdays when his office hours ended mid-afternoon, because it got them out of the house while Anika was in the kitchen, and because parenting is boring. It seemed to Leo part of the biological imperative that toddlers should be terminally cute, or the repetition would drive parents to infanticide.
The Ross Park Zoo had a sour-tempered camel, a toucan in an aviary , and a monkey house that included two genuine bonobos. Leo found himself searching the animals’ eyes for signs of suspicion or disdain, and knew he was committing the sin of anthropomorphism. He remembered being taken by horse cart from Csillag to Budapest before the war, to the zoo on the Állatkerti körút, where the grandeur of the elephant and the giraffes had awed him. The zoo was destroyed in the war, and when it reopened was dilapidated, smelly and sad. In Budapest he had cursed the officialdom that let it continue in such disrepair, whereas now he nursed his boredom, wondering what had happened to all that fervor for improvement…
The zoo was free—to them, though obviously not to the toucan or the bonobos—with a slack chain that even after hours did not impede a stroller. But there was hardly anyone else there: a desultory attendant scattering hay, on Saturdays a few school kids. So it was a surprise that he kept running into Simone Puig, wife of Martin Puig who taught basic neuro in his department; an ambitious blowhard who was forever finding an excuse to cite his publications. The Puigs had no kids. They had a dog, but she didn’t bring him to the zoo. She claimed to need fresh air, but she just looked cold. She always had a Polaroid camera hung around her neck, with which she took closeups of a leaf or a puddle with oil-rainbows on it. If she aimed it at an animal it was likely to be at a single hoof, a nostril.
“I wanted a Speedex,” she apologized, or complained, and then of photography, “I keep thinking I’ll give it up. Who needs all these snap-shots?” She gave a diffident grin. “It must be a compulsion.”
He thought her pretty and peculiar, with her faraway eyes and her dun-colored scarf shrouding a Modigliani neck. He thought she must be Canadian, her accent barely tinged with BBC. He knew she taught night classes in Continuing Ed.—not regular faculty because of the anti-nepotism laws—and that she and Anika had hit it off at a party “for wives and female faculty.”
“This must be a giraffe,” she said to Lizbett.
A shriek of derisive laughter. “No, a goat!”
More than once they watched the nostril appear magically on the square of Polaroid paper. Leo pushed the chair, content to be on the periphery.
Anika had, Leo knew, a harder time in the uprising than he did. She was working as a junior reporter at the morning Szabad Nep when the soldiers came, not a good place to be. She hid in the storeroom behind a trashcan for three hours listening to the shots, the clatter of shell casings on the linoleum. Her mother had died just a few months before, and when she finally ran, jumped over the bodies and out into the street and got caught up in the exodus, she felt from the first moment on that she had deserted her father. She was dark and small, with quick movements that seemed like hyper-vigilance even when they weren’t. She was prey to sudden terrors and suspicions. When she and Leo met he wanted above all things to protect her. Her vulnerability moved him and turned him on.
She had different successive diagnoses: schizophrenia and adjustment disorder in Albuquerque, gross stress reaction in Binghamton, eventually it would be PTSD in Boston, which was more useful because there was less blame attached. Anika herself did not change much from their early years together, but Leo’s expectations did. Or rather, there was an afternoon early in their Binghamton days—they were in Dr. Bahara’s office and the good doctor was patiently explaining the treatment for stress reaction while Leo was looking at a clock behind the doctor’s head, a gingerbread contraption with the air of a family antique. He was wondering how a medical man with his patently East Indian background had come by such a thing; and as the big hand clicked forward from thirty-six to thirty-seven, Leo understood (aha!) that everything had already happened. Anika was not going to “get better.” This was what better was. Whoever she had been before she hid in that storage cupboard listening to the slaughter of her editors and her friends at Szabad Nep, this is who she was now. She was at that moment in Dr. B’s office docile, her brow wrinkled in the desire to understand what magic he held out to her. But whatever he offered, later tonight or tomorrow a noise would startle her or a domestic injustice would assail her, and there would be a murder of dinner plates or a violence of spaghetti, followed by a torrent of mea culpas. He got it. They were these people now, she someone who was at the mercy of her own behavior, he a slightly disappointed academic who escaped his lab to pick up his daughter and escaped the house to go back to his goldfish maze and escaped on Saturdays and weekday afternoons to watch the Toucan who also, perhaps, had rebelled in his time and expected more of his brightly colored life.
Little by little over the autumn Leo said some of this to Simone Puig in the Binghamton Zoo, sotto voce when Lizbett was absorbed with the animals. Not much of it, but enough to let her know that Anika had been through a lot, so he was glad the two of them had hit it off and he would be—did he say gratified?—if Simone visited her.
Simone said, “Martin kicks the dog.”
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Janet Burroway is the author of Simone in Pieces. She is also the author of Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, and has written eight previous novels, as well as a memoir, plays, short fiction, children’s books, and more. Recipient of the Florida Humanities Council’s Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing, she is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita at Florida State University at Tallahassee. She lives in Chicago.
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