Villa America: Decadence and repression in a jazz age American marriage

Picture this. A party in a clifftop villa on the French Riviera. The sun has set over the sea. The garden is lit by hurricane lamps painted – by the host – in shades of blue and silver. The hostess wears a white, backless, draped linen dress, shot through with silver thread, a long string of pearls spilling down her spine. There is champagne. Lots of it. The guests are arriving. They include Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, the Picassos, John Dos Passos and Archibald MacLeish: the cream of the 1920s arts world.

If the scene seems oddly familiar, it's probably because we've seen so many sumptuous jazz age movies over the years. This particular party, however, takes place in Liza Klaussmann's new novel, Villa America. The book re-imagines the marriage of Sara Wiborg and Gerald Murphy, the rich – and real – couple whose sumptuous home was to become famous as the setting for Fitzgerald's masterpiece Tender Is the Night.

Many novelists would be wary of subject matter that sails so close to an American classic, but Klaussmann is made of sterner stuff. Not only is she the great-great-great-granddaughter of Herman Melville, creator of another American classic, Moby-Dick, but for years she worked as a financial journalist at the New York Times and International Herald Tribune. Not intimidated by high stakes, then?

"No. I knew I wasn't writing Tender Is the Night," she says, her rapid-fire New York delivery undimmed by years of living in London. "I love stuff that is about real life. For example, I love true crime. The Murphys also have a perfect arc in their story, so it begs to be used for a novel, I think. The glory and the tragedy."

Extensive research

As a former journalist, research for the book came easily to Klaussmann. She read the many available biographies of the Murphys and visited the Beinecke Library at Yale University, which holds their clothing, diaries and letters. “I became convinced that there was something going on there that you can’t see. Writers love secrets, you know. And that’s what makes a good story. People keeping secrets and not keeping them too well.”

Gerald Murphy, who was a fine painter in the cubist style, often referred to what he called his "defect". Like several biographers before her, Klaussmann decided this phrase had distinct overtones of sexual ambiguity, and so, in Villa America, she introduces a love interest in the shape of a character called Owen Chambers. He is the only completely fictional character in the novel.

He was inspired by a description Klaussmann came across of a typically OTT Murphy soiree that mentioned that a pilot had been hired to fly in some caviar from the Caspian Sea. “I wondered: who was this pilot? And then I thought, a pilot would be perfect. Just the kind of man I need. An earlier version of the hero in a spaghetti western, a man of few words and sure action.”

Murder mystery

A love triangle, a story of marriage and family, a dashing gay pilot: it may sound as if Villa America is sailing perilously close not to classic American literature, but to commercial bodice-rippers.

The same could be said of Klaussmann's 2013 debut, Tigers in Red Weather. Set among the glitzy summer homes in Martha's Vineyard, off Cape Cod, its striking cover – a close-up of a woman wearing a 1950s-style yellow swimsuit – might lead it to be dismissed as throwaway summer reading. It is a great read, but it's also a clever literary murder mystery told from five successive points of view.

Villa America mines some of the same territory, especially when it portrays wealthy Americans behaving badly. But Klaussmann is too smart to repeat the same structural trick twice in a row. The narrative focus in the new novel is very different.

"They both deal with the fallout of war," she says. "But Tigers had more of a feminist aspect. It was about women trying to liberate themselves in a postwar era. This one is more about masculinity: what it meant to be a man in that time period of Teddy Roosevelt and fighter pilots."

Would she agree that parenthood is a major theme of the book? Villa America opens with young Gerald being bullied with singular ferocity by his appalling father and closes with a lengthy description of an elaborate treasure hunt staged by the Murphys for their own three offspring .

“I guess for me the major theme was all the different kinds of love you can experience,” she says. “I’m obsessed with family. Clearly, I’ve got a thing going on there. I’m writing about them over and over again, and I’m fascinated by the ways in which they can fall apart or stay together.

“I don’t have children, but I was very moved at how affectionate the Murphys seemed and how they felt such visceral love for their children, which wouldn’t have been the norm in those times. I think it’s the best part of them.”

Without wanting to give too much away, the tragedy at the heart of the tale – in the novel as in real life – involves the Murphy children. The result is that a narrative that initially may seem to be all about surface glamour and booze-fuelled boisterousness develops into something considerably deeper. The catastrophe brings out the best, not just in the Murphys themselves, but also in their friends. Even Hemingway, “who I find to be beastly, in a lot of ways”, Klaussmann says.

Above all F Scott Fitzgerald, who descends into almost incoherent alcoholism as the novel progresses, redeems himself by means of a thoughtful letter to the Murphys. Klaussmann invented a number of letters as part of her narrative, but she says she couldn’t have invented this one, which ends with the words: “The golden bowl is broken indeed, but it was golden . . . ” She was delighted to get permission from the Fitzgerald estate to quote it in full.

Melville connection

What about her own family connection, to Melville? Klaussmann sighs. “As I’ve said before,” she says, pointedly, “the only way in which I can say it has affected me is that I grew up reading books and thinking that to be a writer was a great thing. That was hammered home to me from an early age.

"I feel uncomfortable a lot of the time talking about it. It's hard to strike the right note without sounding disingenuously outraged by it – and I just don't have much to say on the subject. Although I think I might include something about Moby-Dick in the next book."

Seriously? She laughs. “Well, I’ve tried to ignore it, and that doesn’t work. At a certain point you’re like, ‘Oh, just embrace it. Go full out with it. Really give them something to talk about’.” And really give her fans something to look forward to.

• Villa America is published by Picador

FICTIONAL FITZGERALD: ‘HE SEEMS SO NEEDY’

One of the many joys of reading Villa America is spotting the way it ducks and dives between the reality and the fiction of the two couples at the novel's centre: Gerald and, below, Sara Murphy and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

The Murphys loathed Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night and were furious at his claim that they were the inspiration for its central characters, Dick and Nicole Diver. Why? "He made the Divers less serious than the Murphys actually were as people," says Villa America author Liza Klaussmann. She has been told that her fictional version of F Scott Fitzgerald is very annoying. "I'm surprised he came off as annoying, because I sympathised with him," she says. "He seems so needy. There's never enough in the world for him, and I know what that feels like. Or rather, you feel sorry for somebody like that because it is about a hole you can't ever fill. I think that's sad."