The bigger trouble is that the graft of Fry’s love life onto his war work fails to take. Fry wrote several autobiographical books and never discussed his sexuality. Ethically, I think, this is somewhat murky. Orringer has attached an entirely imagined love story. The account of Fry’s mission is drawn closely from history, but alongside it Ms. Orringer’s passionate and thoroughgoing tribute has reminded readers that in some instances it counts for a great deal indeed. 'How much did the will of a single person count for?' Fry wonders in exhaustion near the book’s end, but by this point Ms. The hurdles of bureaucracy ought to be a lethally boring source for dramatic conflict, yet the most exciting passages of The Flight Portfolio concern Fry’s tireless and often inventive methods for helping his growing clientele. Then know, as you read on, excited and enthralled, that Orringer’s Varian is movie-tone make-believe. The Flight Portfolio is more Hitchcock than history. why should it matter that Orringer’s vertiginous unscrollings of event and intent, unfolding in the south of France in the very pit of Vichy brutality, are chiefly her own? But it does matter. The mind of the Varian Fry of The Flight Portfolio is Orringer’s mind, and how, in the war between history and imagination, can we deny her that?. In scene after scene, Varian’s leg slides seductively (and also schematically) along Grant’s or vice versa. Even the glamour of the homoerotic, which fuels Orringer’s engine of suspense, turns threadbare through overexposure. Yet Orringer makes it a part of his character, expanding on speculations by Fry’s biographer, Andy Marino. For the historical Fry, beyond hunches and hints, there is no evidence of homosexuality. Orringer revivifies with cinematic verisimilitude. Her Marseille breathes as a city breathes. Her landscapes regularly rise to a Keatsian sensuousness. Orringer’s scrupulous research into this turbulent period goes far beyond bookishness. if the young Varian Fry once resembled a type of dramatically evolving character in fiction, he has now become, in Julie Orringer’s sympathetic and prodigiously ambitious novel, a fictional character himself.

The flight portfolio book review